Signal Failure: London to Birmingham, HS2 on Foot - Couverture souple

Jeffreys, Tom

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1910312142 ISBN 13 : 9781910312148

Editeur : Influx Press, 2017

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

One November morning, Tom Jeffreys set off from Euston Station with a gnarled old walking stick in his hand and an overloaded rucksack. His aim was to walk the 119 miles from London to Birmingham along the proposed route of HS2. Needless to say, he failed.

Over the course of ten days of walking, Jeffreys meets conservationists and museum directors, fiery farmers and suicidal retirees. From a rapidly changing London, through interminable suburbia, and out into the English countryside, Jeffreys goes wild camping in Perivale, flees murderous horses in Oxfordshire, and gets lost in a landfill site in Buckinghamshire. Signal Failure weaves together poetry and politics, history, philosophy and personal observation to form an extended exploration of people and place, nature, society, and the future.

In part, Signal Failure is the story of the author's multiple shortcomings - his inability to understand the city he lives in, to forge a meaningful relationship with his home-county hometown, to emulate those great nature writers he admires so much, to put up a tent or read a map.

It is also a wide-ranging critique of humanity's most urgent failures: of capitalism, of community, of the city and the suburbs, of architecture and agriculture, of bureaucratic democracy, and, in the end, of our age-old failure to find our place in the world we live in.

Revue de presse

&quotThe abiding mystery evoked in Tom Jeffreys' walk along the proposed route of the HS2 is whose idea was it anyway? Jeffreys' journey takes him past boarded-up hospitals, abandoned railway lines, pubs which claim to sell food but don t, and over the hedge chats with a sad and often angry population adrift in a world lacking any trustworthy political compass points. Tom Jeffreys is a worthy member of J.B.Priestley s good companions, and Signal Failure an engaging and affectionate update on that earlier writer s seminal English Journey." --Ken Worpole, author of The New English Landscape

&quotI have no idea where booksellers will place Signal Failure it s political, reportage, travelogue, delving deeply into nature and the environment, part memoir and laced throughout with extempore musings. I hope it doesn t fall between the cracks. It s very, very special." --Minor Literature(s)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Influx Press
• Date d'édition: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1910312142
• ISBN 13: 9781910312148
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 416