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Anywhere
A Mythogeography of South Devon and how to walk it
Author: Phil Smith (Cecile Oak)
Imprint: Triarchy Press
Publication date:  June 2017
Extent: 366pp. Paperback
Size: 15.6 x 23.4 cm
ISBN: 978-1-911193-12-8​
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Tags: Devon, walking, drift, dérive, wrights & sites, mis-guides, phil smith, torbay, torquay, exeter, plymouth, newton abbot, teignmouth,
mythogeography,  psychogeography.

Anywhere
A mythogeography of South Devon and how to walk it
(guaranteed to inspire anyone to write their own mythogeography of anywhere)

​Phil Smith (Cecile Oak)

Mythogeographer Phil Smith has been walking, exploring, photographing, filming, talking and writing about South Devon for almost 20 years. He has absorbed it, and it him.

In Anywhere, walking and writing as Cecile Oak (a young PhD student of Symbolist art and performance who is invited to report on a Radical Walking conference in Paignton) Phil offers us an extraordinarily vivid portrait of a small part of South Devon – including Dawlish, Teignmouth, Paignton, Goodrington, Babbacombe, Dartington, Newton Abbot, Plymouth, Exeter and their surroundings.

The picture he presents is not always pretty but never short of startling and sometimes jaw-dropping detail. And it's all brought to exhilarating life in this account of a series of intense journeys that he has made on foot in these places.  
 Anywhere is an adventure, momentous and fleshy as any novel. It is also the first, detailed mythogeographical survey of a defined area. Its subject is the place, the landscape, the buildings, the history and the people. It sets in motion, around each other, its subject’s geological instabilities, deep political fissures, legends and monsters, street generosities and unexpected histories. 

This is Devon as it has never been seen before – Devon from deep within, mined and ploughed by almost a quarter century of investigation, treading its footpaths and pavements.
 
And Anywhere is also a way of looking and feeling: a lesson in how to be (and walk) in your own place, village, city, countryside, wilderness: a guidebook for anywhere.  ​
 As the author says:
"Although I have written plenty about mythogeography as an experimental approach to the site of the performance of everyday life, a space of multiple layers best understood when in motion, I have never subjected a site to a sustained exploration, analysis and description using mythogeographical principles. Fragments, yes – Queen Street in Exeter, a route through Suffolk – but these projects were limited in terms of the conclusions arrived at or of usable and reusable findings to pass on to others. 

Wanting to put the idea of mythogeography to a sterner test, and drawing on almost 20 years of wandering and performance-making across South Devon, I have set out in this book to gather insights, make analyses and write conclusions equivalent to conducting research in cultural geography and publishing it as a book-length study."

Responses from readers...

​“I was 3 chapters in to your book but my Mum has now taken it off me... She says ' it's "brilliant... lots of humour and easy to read"... you can quote her on that!"
 
“I am immersed and relishing every moment."

​“It's made me laugh out loud. I love it.”
Read all the reviews here

More:

About the author
A sample chapter
View the photos
Read reviews of the book
​Press Release
See our other books on Walking
“Walking with Phil is like having my very own Doctor Who”  
(Siobhan Mckeown, film maker)

Readership

Anywhere is a book for:
  • radical-, artist-, performance- and everyday-walkers
  • Situationists and dérivistes
  • artists and [site-specific] performers who use walking in their work
  • human, urban and cultural geographers
  • students discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking
  • tourists who want to leave the beach
  • anyone troubled by official guides to anywhere
All the photos associated with the book are here.

​Read all the reviews here