Postcard from... Beelitz

Photograph: Katrin Schönig

Behind the fences the buildings stand in their beautiful decay. Plants grow between the crumbling brickwork. Trees have taken root where there once was a roof. Cyrillic signs are painted on the door in memory of former occupiers, and more recent artwork decorates windowless rooms from more recent explorers. The Beelitz Heilstätten, south of Berlin, was a sanatorium and hospital complex for less than a hundred years, from its opening in 1898 to the retreat of the Soviet military, who had occupied the site after WW2, in the mid-1990s. Now, as you walk between the buildings you get the feeling it will be visited as a ruin for far longer than it was used to cure the sick and injured.

It is because of our attraction for such abandoned places that there is a newer structure in the forest, a walkway of steel and wood that lifts the visitor high above the treetops. On a sunny weekday in October there are hundreds of people up there, turning their cameras and phones from the views across the top of the autumnal forest to the decaying buildings below and the fascinating glimpse into the rooms and hallways carpeted in rubble. Back on the ground, standing in the shadow of the walkway next to the frame of a building where women once took ‘air baths’ as a treatment against tuberculosis, it really is as if the ruins have been subsumed, very much part of the forest and somehow as natural as the trees, the bushes, and the mushrooms sticking up between falling leaves.

Read more about the Beelitz Heilstätten from our friends at Slow Travel Berlin

Elsewhere No.02 is out now - order your copy here from our online shop

Postcard from... Saint-Hubert

In the rain we walked Saint-Hubert’s gritty and gloomy streets. The water ran in streams from the awnings of cafes, hammered against the church roof. All we wanted was a portion of frites, preferably smothered in thick, warming cheese sauce. It was not to be. The chip-shop was closed. We stood outside its locked door and stared at it awhile, the rain creeping in beneath our waterproofs via our sleeves and our necks. We ran for the woods.

Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes is a hunters' town, its roundabouts and bistro walls decorated with stags and wild boar, a town named for the patron saint of hunters (alongside mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers) whose status depended on a vision whereby, at the end of it, he spared the stag. Some hunter. Under the shelter of the forest we explored a game reserve on the edge of town, spying wild boar and deer in a place of protection and celebration yet where we paid our admission in a cafe beneath a pair of antlers, a collection of old guns, and other symbols of the hunt.

We did not look at the menu. Saint Hubertus may have spared the stag, but this was still a hunters' town.

By Paul Scraton
Photo by Katrin Schönig

Postcard from... the Hackney Marshes

I thought I was prepared. I had read Gareth’s book, that strange and wonderful exploration of the Marshland, and I thought I was ready for anything. But nothing I had read could have prepared me. Not really. Not for the swarms of the hungry, the discombobulation, the excess. In the confusion, I almost bought a season ticket for West Ham. But then I found Gary, my guide out of the madness, and together we escaped Westfield, and all the while I wondered: Could the entrance to the Olympics really have been built to lead people through a shopping centre? What a stupid question.

We walked. Through the Olympic Park and beyond the warehouses and pop-up bars lining the Lea Navigation. We moved through the Wick Woodland, trying to appear unsuspicious to a pair of policewomen who appeared through the undergrowth. By the wide and epic expanse of the football fields we picked up the Old River, picking our way along an overgrown riverbank that felt miles away from urban life but of course it wasn’t, and we spied shipping containers on the other side of the bank through the trees.

All the while we talked, of walking and writing and of course of Gareth’s book. This was not the marshland of his imagination, of course it wasn’t, but it stirred the imagination nevertheless. We paused to photograph a pylon as the shouts of a goal sounded across the multitude of pitches, and then picked our way through the Middlesex Filter Beds in search of a beer. At the pub we toasted a grey heron, standing among the rubbish that had gathered where the river and navigation divide. A toast perhaps, to Whipple and Hazlehurst. A toast to a walk from the Queen Elizabeth Park to the Princess of Wales Pub. A toast to filter beds and football pitches, bramble-strewn pathways and a pile of shipping containers...

A toast to the Marshland.

By Paul Scraton

Marshland: Dreams and Nightmares on the Edge of London by Gareth E. Rees is available from Influx Press.

Postcard from... the Kickelhahn

From Ilmenau the path starts steeply and does not level out until we have reached the summit. We walk through dense woods and then open space, a path lined with flowers and berry bushes and a view back across the rooftops of the town to the lake, the hardware stores and the GDR-era housing blocks at the outskirts. We keep walking – up, ever up – along stone-strewn paths and through more gloomy pine trees and then we are there. The top. A Byzantine-inspired brick tower and a view across the Thuringian forest that could inspire even the most mediocre poet…

...and of course, the greatest.

We walk along from the summit to a small wooden house with a similar view across the peaks and the valleys of the forest. In such a house, on this very spot, did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spend the evening on the 6th September 1780 and was inspired to scrawl a poem into the wall. The hunters’ lodge burned down not long after, but the poem lived on… a Wanderer’s Nightsong for every walker of the woods:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Above all summits
it is calm.
In all the tree-tops
you feel
scarcely a breath;
The birds in the forest are silent,
just wait, soon
you will rest as well!

We stand at the top and look out across the peaks and the tree-tops. The wind blows. The buzzards soar. The sun breaks through the clouds. Just wait. Warte nur… Just wait.

Postcard from... Duino

I followed the path up from the town, rocky and shaded beneath overhanging trees. It was the second time I had been up there, following the trail until it reached the top of the cliffs and the view back down to Duino Castle on its rocky promontory above the Adriatic. The day before the path had been clogged with people, hikers and joggers and bank holiday wanderers, but now, in the early morning, I had the path to myself until I reached the first of the lookout points.

There is more than just the view that draws people to this clifftop path. In 1912 the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at the castle and this was his daily walk. It was here on the trail that the following words came to him:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders?

This would become the start of the Duino Elegies, one of his most celebrated works.

I stood at the lookout point to gaze back towards the castle, where Rilke once slept. I did not cry out, not wanting to frighten the birds, but I did ask myself the question: are we inspired by such places because of what they are, or because they once inspired someone else, whose books sit on our shelves back home? Aware of a presence behind me I turned to find an Italian man standing, looking out, over my shoulder, down the coast to the castle. He said something to me and I nodded. I like to think it was something profound and poetic. Most likely he simply said, Nice view, before walking on, down the path towards the village.

The first edition of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place is out now - order your copy here.

Postcard from... Schöneweide

From the train station where the tiles crumble to dust and the abandoned shopping trolleys wait at the bottom of fenced-off stairs, we follow the main road parallel to the tracks. This is an anonymous neighbourhood of pre-war residential blocks and offices housing job centres and training academies for bus drivers. The students and the under-employed smoke their cigarettes on the steps as we pass, a light drizzle falling from grey skies.

The streets around here all speak to a romantic past of daring air travel. Sportfliegerstraße. Landfliegerstraße. Pilotenstraße. Segelfliegerstraße. Not far from here was once the Johannisthal airfield. Once graced by the early aviation pioneers the airfield is now a nature park. To the north, where we walk, we have reached an edgeland zone of new construction sites and old red brick industrial buildings, open, grassy wastelands, and large corrugated sheds.

This is our destination. A whirring, cranking, echoing hall. In this industrial zone sandwiched between the railway lines and the main road south, we have come to look at our words and our pictures, laid out in giant sheets as the machines spin and howl around us. Inspect and nod. Press the button and go. Soon we will hold it in our hands, but for now, Elsewhere is printworks in Schöneweide.

Elsewhere No.01 was released this week - buy your copy via our online shop here

Postcard from... Noravank

By Jonathan Campion:

For my first few days in Armenia my mind was elsewhere. I was searching for signs of the two worlds that overlap in the South Caucasus, where wild Eurasian land is punctuated by the Cyrillic - and the shambles - of the post-Soviet space.

I looked for Turkey in the barren steppe, the farmsteads, the mesmerising sound of the duduk flute. In Yerevan’s opulent centre and ugly flats I thought I could feel Russia again. 

I obsessed over Armenia’s neighbours. The thought of being next to Iran made me giddy. In the town of Yeraskh I stood on the road where Armenia, Turkey and the Azerbaijani enclave of Nakhichevan nearly meet. The borders are closed, and hostile - a result of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh that has simmered for twenty years. 

At Noravank monastery it all began to make sense. Watching visitors light candles for their loved ones I realised I had felt Armenia all along. It is in the affection that people show each other, from the young men in Yerevan saying goodbye with a kiss on the cheek, to the farmers in the provinces glued to their children, to the strangers everywhere who put their lives on hold for days to show me their country. 

This warmth comes from within. Armenia isn’t a legacy of the overlapping cultures around it, but a precious place in its own right.

Pre-order Elsewhere No. 01, published 12 June 2015

Postcard from... Hvitträsk

Hvitträsk is a house near Helsinki, built by the three Finish architects Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen in the first years of the 20th century. It is always fascinating to explore the utopias people manage to create for themselves, and these architects realised their vision of a house on the hill, surrounded by landscaped gardens, forests and a lake, down to the smallest detail.

Planned as a studio for their architecture firm as well as a living space, they designed it all, including the furniture, lamps and rugs. And not only did they use the house to impress clients and entertain guests, but they worked on their personal relationships as well: while living there, Eliel divorced his wife and married Gesellius' sister, and Gesellius married Eliel's ex-wife…