Under Construction @ Keele 2018 Vol. IV (II) | Page 21

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Haunting Sites of Political Resistance in Stoke-on-Trent through Psychogeography
Stephen Seabridge
(PhD in Creative Writing, Keele University)
In 2010 over 1500 members of the English Defence League – surrounded by police officers,
photographers and onlookers – marched along Parliament Row in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent’s
city centre, towards the town hall in the neighbouring town of Stoke-upon-Trent. On the other
side of Hanley, approximately 300 demonstrators of the Unite Against Fascism group marched
against them. In 2018 it is a cool, clear January morning and Hanley is quiet save for the
passing traffic. I am leaning against the railings of the Old Hanley Bus Station, haunted by the
site of the 2010 EDL march. This paper is a piece of creative non-fiction that documents a
psychogeographic walk that took place in Hanley in January of 2018. It explores the disparity
– and the bleeding of time between – the site of Hanley in 2010 and 2018 through the
psychogeographic disruption of chronology and spatiality.
Keywords: Psychogeography, Geopoetics, Spatialities, Temporalities, Mythologies
Introducing Psychogeography
Within the context of spatial humanities psychogeography remains a prominent methodology
for practitioners to comprehend both urban and rural environments. Devised by Guy Debord
of the Situationist Internationale (hence SI) – a movement of avant-garde revolutionaries
formed in post-war Paris – psychogeography is a tool used to investigate the ‘effects of the
geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of
individuals’ 1 .It involves individuals investigating and experimenting with – through walking
observation – the environment to gauge its implicit effects on their psychology. Despite this
definition, psychogeography has been demarcated to the realms of methodological vaguery
and remains unknown to many practitioners within the Humanities. It has become a term that,
‘despite the frequency of its usage, no-one seems … able to pin down’ 2 as it is constantly
‘reshaped by its practitioners.’ 3 This confusion is amplified by psychogeography’s umbrella
term status, which encapsulates: Smith’s Mythogeography; Richardson’s Schizo-cartography;
Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Critical Geographies: A Collection
of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, trans. Ken Knabb (British Columbia:
Praxis (e)Press, 2008), 23-28.
2 Merlin Coverley. Psychogeography (Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2006), 9.
3 Coverley, Psychogeography, 10.
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