Hidden Spaces

I had time to spare after my session in London today. Time, in fact, to get lost.

Whilst i knew my general direction of travel, i went out of my way to find cul-de-sacs, courtyards, and dead ends. Ways to go nowhere (which was oddly satisfying as my work today had been all about ‘change’ and how that, too, often goes nowhere).

And what resided in these edge-land spaces?

Quite the mix of things: rubbish bins, restaurants, web agencies, the back door of a theatre, a vintage bus, more restaurants, and a rather pretty garden with an inexplicably large wooden elephant in it.

These things were not on the way anywhere: they were the where. You would only find them if lost or idle (and i was happily both).

It reminded me of the work on Cultural Graffiti, Edge-land Spaces, Boundaries and Trespass, in that all of these things require us to be in motion and, to an extent, to shift focus and direction. Or seek to be lost.

I cannot claim to have found enlightenment, or insight, but what i did find was layers of culture that were normally hidden from me – not deliberately, but simply as they lie off the beaten path. Indeed, i did wonder how some of those restaurants survived, or if they are simply a feature of our hyper connected reality, where real estate location is less important than social media presence and the odd free meal for an influencer.

In some sense i feel that i know this part of London better for having taken the indirect route: it’s connected up some things that were previously separated, and given me a different image of this part of town.

Perhaps the same will be true if we seek to get lost within our own Organisations: that we may find new ways of knowing the familiar, and less certainty about exactly where we stand.