travel writing

Book review – London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City

6-minute read
keywords: archeology, earth sciences, geography

We walk on layered history. The ground beneath our feet is shot through with traces of our past, some in plain sight, many buried and badly eroded. Writer and artist Tom Chivers will concur that nowhere is this more true than in cities. London Clay is the result of a decade of exploration on foot, tracing vanished rivers, lost islands, and geological strata hiding under the concrete bedlam of modern London. The city’s untidy edges, its brownfields and derelict buildings, the very lay of the land—in Chivers’s hands all of these become cracks through which the past oozes back in. An unlikely chimaera of nature writing and urban exploration, this lyrical book offers a fresh way of looking at the built environment.

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Book review – Journeys in the Wild: The Secret Life of a Cameraman

In recent years, wildlife documentaries have started featuring short “making-of” sections at the end of each episode, showing the camera crew in action as they try to film animals in the wild. The reason for this, as Sir David Attenborough explains in his foreword, is actually very mundane. But they have proven wildly popular with audiences and I always find them incredibly interesting. They show the effort, hardship, and patience required for capturing that perfect shot. Journeys in the Wild, then, is like a giant collection of such segments from cameraman Gavin Thurston. For the last 30 years, he has travelled the globe to film footage for some of the best-known wildlife documentaries, racking up more hilarious, unnerving, and wondrous adventures than most people would know what to do with.

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