LCC CITY DRIFTING: Greenwich, Peckham, Lambeth [SOUTH LONDON]

Welcome back ramblers, rovers, loungers and loafers!

Once again, it's time to drift. We're picking up where we left off (well, a little west of there) last month to continue our long-term unguided navigation around the whole of London. We'll stay south of the river this time and keep pushing westwards into the heartland of glorious South London, starting from Greenwich and ending up, most likely, somewhere in Lambeth, via Peckham. These are some of the liveliest, most interesting parts of the metropolis so an extended exploration is a long time coming for us! Since this is a dérive, I won't say much more than that.

Meet out in front of Greenwich station, serviced by the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) as well as Thameslink (which cost the same as the Tube and run from big stations such as Farringdon and King's Cross) and Southwestern rail services.

Check planned TfL disruptions here - there are some disruptions to certain routes on the DLR for March 15th, but Greenwich station will be fine and our day should be all clear for most everybody: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/planned-track-closures.pdf

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".