LCC CITY DRIFTING: Docks & Docklands of Rotherhithe | SE LONDON

Welcome back ramblers, rovers, loungers and loafers - our City Drifting series is back, this time taking on an oft-overlooked corner of inner-SE London: Rotherhithe and its old docks.

Since these walks are about discovery, I won't say much more than that. We'll meet out in front of Canada Water station on the day and let curiosity be our guide. With that in mind, Rotherhithe is packed with industrial history, from the Water in Canada Water to Greenland Dock, as well as natural history including Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill. We'll be within earshot of Millwall Stadium and the shadow of Canary Wharf, with the Isle of Dogs peninsula accessible via the ancient Greenwich Foot Tunnel under the River Thames. Be there!

A little background on our City Drifting project here:

Now just wait a minute. What the hell is a drift (dérive)? A drift is any unplanned journey through the urban landscape in which participants practice a form of radical mindfulness, collectively exploring new ways of relating mentally, ideologically and materially to the "ordinary" urban environment we all think we know so well.

First theorised publicly by Situationist thinker, artist and provocateur Guy Debord in his 1956 essay Theory of the Dérive, drifting is a sort of critique of ideology done by walking, looking, and feeling. The urban environment of London is not a neutral space: it is packed with surveillance equipment, anti-homeless architecture, consumerist Gruen transfers, crowd management systems and security perimeters, among a thousand other subtle and not-so-subtle methods of population control. Moreover, our everyday relationship to the city and its pathways is conditioned deeply by our habits of movement and our habitual perceptions: our commute to work, to school, our nips down to the shops, etc. All these routines create what Marxists call a reified relationship with the urban environment: through over-familiarity it becomes something seemingly natural, "just there", ordinary, unchangeable - boring. This boredom and familiarity kills the radical imagination, without which we're fucked.

To be able to start to imagine how society could be transformed, we also need to imagine how spaces, buildings, their use, their whole purpose (and who these serve) could themselves be transformed. A necessary step in this process, according to Debord and the Situationists, is the drift. Like the 19th-century gentleman flâneur, by wandering the city with an attitude of "fresh eyes", we can shake loose our ingrained sense of what London and its streets are like. As a collective, we will work to "estrange our senses" and see the streets, buildings and people differently, as if we were encountering them for the first time. That is to say: these aren't just random walks around London - with the right frame of mind, they will be opportunities to turn the world upside down, if only for a moment!

But don't take it from me - as Debord observed:

"In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones."

See you on the streets comrades, and remember, as Raoul Vaneigem once wrote: "All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops — the geometry".