About this Site
The importance of memory is immeasurable. Ask Proust.
Up until a couple of years ago I wandered happily through life, content to hop from one place to another, with just a few photographs taken along the way as mementoes. I moved from London to Cornwall, took a Masters degree in Art History, moved from Cornwall to Glasgow to begin a PhD, then wound up spending a year trawling through the archives and libraries of Berlin.
I eventually ended up back in London, where I toiled hard to complete my thesis. In the aftermath of that effort I found myself taking stock of my situation, and realised that, to my surprise, my desire to write remained undimmed.
In search of things to write about, I started to reflect upon the places I had visited, the people I had met, and the things I had seen. Then I reread Benjamin, discovered Proust and Sebald, and realised that I already had all the inspiration I’d ever need to write; it was all there, locked away in the memories inside my head.
The texts collected here represent an ongoing project to document some of these places, memories and histories. The title of these pages, In the Jungle of Cities, comes from the Weimar-era play by Bert Brecht. Why this name? Because there’s something jungle-like about our memories; the way in which recollections crowd each other out like so many roots, leaves and branches, forcing us to negotiate winding paths through them, along which we inevitably lose our way. Moreover, most of the memories and histories written down here are inspired by the great cities of our western civilisation (with a particular bias on Berlin), cities that are in large part products of that great period of classical modernity, that Brecht so perfectly captured in his plays.
Unless otherwise stated, all text and images are the copyright of the author.
