Lubetkin’s Modernist classic, the penguin pool at London Zoo (1934), looking very Hockneyesque in today’s glorious spring sunshine 🌞 🐧

Etymology of the day is ‘bumf’: a shortening of ‘bumfodder’, 19th-century slang for toilet paper. It was later applied to any throwaway material or paperwork.

River view, they said.

Little did I know my pied-à-terre would be sunk into the claggy grey mud of the foreshore itself, my neighbours all these decaying fragments of the city’s past. Dead batteries, pig iron and wiring; the smooth old bones of monstrous fish.

An early-morning birthday visit to the Thames foreshore produced this crude lead token with a single initial ‘W’, probably dating to the 17th or 18th century. It’s immensely pleasurable to hold.

I wonder who (or what) ‘W’ was; and whose hands it passed through in its use-life?

‘Through walking … landscapes are woven into life, and lives are woven into the landscape, in a process that is continuous and never-ending.’
Tim Ingold 💚

Enderby’s Wharf, Greenwich.

Headquarters of Samuel Enderby & Sons whaling & sealing operation 1830-54 🐋

Latterly the site where submarine cables were developed for the transatlantic telegraph system.

w/ Lucy Slater

I cannot recommend this immersive film experience highly enough. Inspirational. On till October Lightroom 🌖

My old mate Nick Nick Murray tells me that it’s his SEVENTH year working on experimental games festival Now Play This

What a programme. Where gaming meets psychogeography, clay sculpting, arcade culture & so much more!

6-14 April, Somerset House

🎟️ nowplaythis.net

On this day in 2012 we published Adventures in Form. Still one of our bestselling books, it introduced a multitude of new & unusual poetic forms – from tweet to time-splice, from skinny villanelle to breakbeat sonnet 📚

Copies are available from us 👉 pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2012…

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! And the Easter football has been retrieved from the tree! ⚽️ 🐣

photos by my friend Tom Chivers who crawled along the Thames foreshore with me a few days ago, interviewing me for his phd research. a deeply engaging and wide-ranging conversation. about looking slant, finding patterns, seeing systems, and imperialism. #mudlarking

A William III (1694-1702) bent silver sixpence found on the Thames foreshore.

The distinctive shape marks it out as a love token, given by one person to another as a sign of affection 💕

As yet unidentified. Could it be a tiny Roman minim?

If so it would be my first (definite) Roman coin after almost four years of searching the Thames foreshore 🪙

How on EARTH did I not know this?! The Half Moon was my local growing up.