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est. circa 2012
an unfunded small press
based in Bristol
Pennine Street
Claire Reddleman
210 x 210 mm
colour paperback
due 2023

for more info on Pennine Street and the author look here clairereddleman.com


Pennine Street is an art book that takes the format of the walking guide book, and applies it to an imagined route - ‘Pennine Street 2012’, a mash-up of the Pennine Way, a long-distance footpath running between the Peak District and the Scottish Borders, UK, and High Street 2012, a regeneration project carried out in London as part of the Olympic spectacle of 2012, designating the string of high streets that progress from Aldgate to Stratford in east London, UK. The project initially took the form of three organized walks along the route of High Street 2012, from Aldgate to Stratford. Readings were made while walking on each occasion, and both photographic and textual collages emerged out of the initial walks. The project engages the idea of trespass as a political action, as both potent and futile, and traces the development of modes of photographic and textual “trespass”, or transgression. Textual collage is employed to investigate the possibility of articulating Pennine Street as a “space-between” the empirical and the imagined.

In terms of plot, this is only loosely present but involves progressing in five 'days' (in the manner of a walking guide) from Aldgate to Stratford (or 'really' from St Aldgatedale to Kirk Stratford High St DLR Station), with all speakers and persons mentioned joining in an imagined march or procession toward an ambivalently revolutionary end point.

In the book, this means that authors are treated as speakers, their words quoted and cut together, to produce a strange, new composite text that could ‘guide’ the reader through this abstract territory of capital as a walking guide guides us through the physical and cultural landscape. As all good walking guides are, Pennine Street is richly illustrated, with collages that ‘quote’, as the text does, from many sources. The distinctive format combines quotations on themes of place, narration and political struggle, from J.M. Coetzee to Karl Marx, and Jeanette Winterson to The Mekons.

Claire wrote an academic article about this project look here