Gibberish perhaps, but these lyrics evoke memories of singing round the campfire when I was in the Brownies. It is also a popular song among Boy Scouts and was written by Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement more than one hundred years ago. Last month, it was reported that a record number of young people in the UK are involved with Scouts, and also that 10,000 of those teenagers (aged 14-18) have become Scout leaders through the Scout Association’s Young Leaders’ Scheme (2002).
The Scout movement, followed later by the Girl Guide movement, was established to enhance the physical, mental and spiritual development of young people, and to encourage youngsters to play constructive roles in society. With similar aims, National Citizen Service was established by the UK government in 2010 as a programme to encourage teenagers to develop skills towards responsible citizenship and to foster deeper engagement with their communities.
Sarah Mills (2012) refers to these two schemes as informal citizen training in a recent paper that explores cultural and historical geographies of youth citizenship outside of school education. Mills’ analysis draws on British scouting in the first half of the twentieth century and provides an embodied historical geography of the organisation. In her paper, Mills links scouting to concepts of citizenship and nationhood, arguing that the movement has always made reference to young people as ‘active’, ‘moral’ and ‘British’ citizens.
Thus, a range of opportunities are available for young people to engage in citizen training. While Scouting continues to attract large numbers of young people, it is worth considering who might be excluded from this movement and whether the National Citizen Service is able to address these gaps. With choice, I’d opt for scouting: the campfire, baked potatoes and gibberish songs any day:
A fortnight ago, Geography Directions reported on exploration and adventure in Geography. While exploration is often associated with ventures into the wilderness and unchartered territories, it is also very much about less physical scientific discovery and search for deeper understanding. This week, I introduce an alternative group of inquisitives: urban explorers who scale the heights and depths of abandoned or derelict buildings, landmarks and transport infrastructure as a means of rediscovering build environments.
The London Consolidation Crew is a group of urban explorers that physically explores closed or (usually) inaccessible urban spaces. The Guardian linked these often illicit and high-risk excursions to a celebration of capitalist space, while geographer David Clarke suggested that they were embodied reactions to increased control and surveillance over urban spaces. Analysis of these activities (the basis of a recent geographical PhD by urban explorer Brad Garrett), informs existing geographical research on contemporary urban exploration (Garrett, 2010) and advances theories that concern how places are experienced through the body: concepts such as affect, performance and embodiment.
Bodily experiences of climbing are described, analysed and theorised by Barratt (2012) in Area. While Barratt’s empirical research was undertaken among outdoor climbers more familiar with ascending rocks, his arguments also apply to urban explorers. Barratt argues for an understanding of climbing as a complex assemblage of body-material-environment relations i.e. that the experience can be understood through interactions between body, clothing and kit, and the place or surface where climbing is practised. Barratt’s paper offers a more-than-representational approach to this leisure activity, and thus provides a framework to reconsider urban explorers’ engagement with their environment. From this perspective, not only do urban explorers inspire new ways of discovering spaces, but they also provide a context where emerging theoretical ideas can be refined.
The Guardian: Shard explorers seek out new targets after scaling London landmark
This year the BBC World Service, the oldest and largest international broadcaster in the world, celebrates its eightieth birthday. Founded in 1932 as the Empire Service, it has become a vital fixture in global news and information, available on FM, mediumwave, shortwave, longwave, satellite, and the internet. In many respects, the World Service has shaped Britain’s international persona and culture. Like the rest of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), its editorial independence has repeatedly drawn the ire of British politicians and diplomats as well as the respect of millions of peoples, many of whom were (or remain) unable to obtain impartial news from their local services. In its storied history, both the World Service and the BBC have developed into explorative spaces for geographers, scholars, and activists. The Royal Geographical Society actively documented the roles the BBC played in geographic exploration and education.
In one of the earliest BBC/RGS collaborations, the nascent broadcaster permitted portions of explorer and aviator George Binney’s commentary on Roald Amundsen’s 1925 Arctic flight to be reprinted with analysis in The Geographical Journal. The collaboration resulted in Amundsen’s feat being broadcasted across Europe and to be simultaneously disseminated by the RGS to the British imperial scholarly community. The 1925 work catalysed a series of intersections between RGS-IBG and BBC projects, reports, and activities throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In a 1955 discussion of geographical and social descriptions of domestic landscapes, A E Smailes resourced Michael Robbins’s BBC home service talks concerning the ‘anatomy of the countryside ‘(p. 100).
The BBC also filled an important role for the geographer of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: often, it was the only relatively reliable means of communicating with explorers traversing Earth’s extremes. In 1955, Commander C J W Simpson, DSC, of the Royal Navy, recounted in detail to the RGS, HM The Queen, and The Duke of Edinburgh his 1952-1954 expedition to the northern fringes of Danish-controlled Greenland. He led some thirty scientists and specialists on a major venture involving the RGS, the Royal Society, the RAF, Royal Navy, and Army, and the Scott Polar Research Institute (p. 276). The group traversed across the vast island, from Germania Land and Britannia Sø on the eastern coast to Thule near Canada (pp. 277-79). In a harrowing 1953-1954 Arctic winter, the BBC broadcast special messages each month; a collection of well-wishes from family, friends, and admirers of the British expeditionary effort (pp. 285-86). In 1958, designated the International Geophysical Year, the RGS described the role of the BBC in transmitting national and international solar weather warnings and praised UK engineers and scientists (p. 28). The BBC’s political and scientific roles were further explored in a 1966 article recounting the experiences of Charles Swithinbank, of the Scott Polar Research Institute, who spent a year living and working with Soviet specialists at Antarctic stations (p. 469). The men, despondent for news and culture from home, listened for updates from both the BBC World Service and Radio Moscow shortwave services in a rare moment of Cold War friendship.
Charles Swithinbank, ‘A Year with the Russians in Antarctica‘, The Geographical Journal 132.4 (Dec., 1966): 463-74. Also see Dudley Stamp and Vivian Fuch’s discussion here.
The authors: Josh Lepawsky is Associate Professor and Charles Mather is Head of Department both at the Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
[N.B.: This is the first open access paper published in the journal Area, which means anyone can read it for free rather than having to pay a subscription to access it]
The Royal Geographical Society (-IBG) has a strong historical association with exploration. Famous explorers such as David Livingston, Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Edmund Hillary are part of our subject history (also see Sacks‘ post below). This year marks the centenary of the ill-fated Antarctic Terra Nova expedition (1910-13), led by Captain Scott (Lewis-Jones, 2007). The centenary will be marked through a variety of events, including RGS talks and presentations, and a commemorative exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which runs until September. While we celebrate and commemorate such adventurous feats, what does exploration mean for Geography?
Scott’s link to the RGS was established when he was selected by then President, Sir Clements Markham, to lead an expedition to Antarctic in 1901. At that time, little was known about the frozen continent, and the legacy of their southern adventures, including Terra Nova, is one of scientific discovery and understanding. In other words, exploration was valued as a desire to know and understand more about the world’s places, environments and peoples. In a similar way, professional geographers were among those invited to Buckingham Palace when the Queen hosted a reception in honour of exploration and adventure last December.
In connection with the RGS Medals and Awards ceremony, which celebrates contemporary geographical research, fieldwork and photography, Michael Palin (in Palin et al. 2011) draws attention to the symbiosis of exploration and geography and highlights links between earlier geographical exploration and its modern counterparts. He writes about a shared spirit of enquiry and a desire to keep asking and trying to answer questions to satisfy a need to know geography (and geographically). In all these feats, receptions and commemorations, the people involved appear to share a desire for scientific investigation, discovery and greater understanding.
The theme of exploration will be developed in my next post (8th May) through discussion of a group of urban explorers seeking to know and remap the city in new ways.
Dangerous, fun or pretty sweet? Attitudes towards Sat Nav use (Artist: George Sneyd)
The rapid popularisation and extensive distribution of Sat Nav technologies represents the first widespread adoption of location-aware systems for journey planning and navigation. Sat Nav technologies illustrate the advancement and accessibility of technology used for journey planning and navigation. Despite the advantages, the media tend to focus on the negativities of over-dependence on the technology, reduced spatial awareness as well as the potential hazards of Sat Nav use.
The first Sat Nav summit in London convened by the Department of Transport in March 2012 started to address the blunders associated with Sat Nav use. The key issues discussed at the summit were to identify solutions to problems of out-of-date Sat Nav technologies. The Sat Nav summit sought to address concerns that old information on Sat Nav systems is leading inappropriate vehicles down inappropriate roads.
In our paper, ‘At the next junction, turn left’, we explore geography undergraduates’ attitudes towards, and experiences of, Sat Nav use as well as its impacts on spatial awareness and cartographic literacy. In doing so, we have started to address a major gap in the geographical literature.
The navigational capacities and technological aspects of Sat Nav are regarded positively whereas its technological, safety and financial attributes are considered negatively. Distinctions are made between traditional navigational technologies such as paper-based maps and Sat Nav. Crucially, the digital spatial representations of Sat Nav are not perceived as maps but as a distinctive navigational tool. Concerns are also expressed that Sat Nav could reduce the ability to read paper-based maps and interpret spatial data.
Sat Nav use is intrinsically changing people’s wayfinding behaviour, processes and practices of navigation, and understandings of what ‘maps’ are and do. Fundamentally, Sat Nav is not viewed, or used, in the same way as more traditional technologies of navigation. We argue that geographers should engage more actively with interdisciplinary dialogues on people’s changing perspectives on wayfinding, navigation and map design.
The authors: Stephen Axon is a doctoral candidate in Geography, Dr Janet Speake is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Dr Kevin Crawford is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at the Department of Geography, Liverpool Hope University.
Eileen Healey filming in the Alps, 1950s. Courtesy The Daily Telegraph.
Benjamin Sacks
This month, as the Royal Geographical Society marks the centenary of Robert Scott’s tragic expedition to the South Pole, it is all too easy to view exploration as ‘a man’s sport’. We conjure images of Scott, Shackleton, Hillary and Norgay, and Fuchs, bravely fighting the elements in their attempts to overcome the earth’s extremes. But women’s vital roles in the history of exploration has received considerably less attention. In the most recent issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Katherine Brickell and Bradley L Garrett (Royal Holloway, University of London) sought to address this discrepancy. Their article chronicled the work of women in filming expeditions during the great age of Himalayan mountain-climbing (c.1930-c.1960). Acknowledging the important use of film in nineteenth and twentieth century exploration, Brickell and Garrett recalled the experiences of Eileen Healey, ‘a visionary British female mountaineer and amateur filmmaker’, who died on 8 September 2010 at 89 (1).
In the summer of 1959, Healey joined nine other women, led by Claude Kogan, a French swimwear designer-turned-alpine climber, on a expedition to the Himalayas. They hoped to climb – and film for all to see – Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak. The expedition, which began amid tremendous media furore, horribly ended when an avalanche killed Kogan, the Belgian Claudine van der Stratten, and two male Sherpa guides. After the disaster, she kept her 16-mm film stored in her house; according to The Guardian, it was not publicly screened until a half-century later, in 2009.
Healey’s self-deprecating, humble style belied her true cinematographic abilities. She borrowed her husband’s portable movie camera, and began the film with a plate reminding the audience that she had no prior experience. Yet her work, as Brickell and Garrett articulated, was talented, insightful, and ultimately ‘a rich resource for geographical [and cultural] research’ (2). Their focus on Healey served two key motives: (1) to remind geographers of the critical role women have played (and will continue to play) in geographic exploration, research, and documentation; (2) a general request for geographers and explorers alike to begin filming their experiences again, and not to solely rely on internet blogs or ‘sensationalist media’ (2-3).
The RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.
Posted by Wil Stobbart 
The latest issue of Area (Volume 44, Issue 2, pages 134–268, June 2012) is available on 
