Topic
Reading the Road (and Rivers and Railways): Infrastructure, heritage and collective reading practices in southwest London
What insights emerge when we read works of literature together in place? How might doing so make us see, and feel differently about, familiar urban locales? How can reading in situ (re)animate literary material? These questions motivated a series of public events that I organised in locations across southwest London in 2025 and 2026. This paper reflects on how the collective and situated readings that define these events comprise an appropriate, and inclusive, heritage practice for engaging with infrastructure and places shaped by it.
The series of events included walking, reading and mapping workshops in the neighbourhood of Hook, which is dominated by major roads, including the Kingston bypass. My guided walks focused on how these very roads have produced distinct cultural forms; reading together literary material inspired by the ‘roadhouse’ that once stood in Hook, for instance, enabled reflection on a local heritage shaped by automobility. Other literary texts, including by resident authors Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies, resonated with participants’ sense of both the permanence and the contingency of their local environment, and helped some to delineate an infrastructural poetics. The dialogue between the shared readings and the individual stories of place they inspired was rendered in visual form by a commissioned artwork produced by Helen Cann.
This spring I will conduct reading and writing workshops along the Chessington branch line which will once again precipitate creative, though this time literary, responses. The focus will be on how this suburban railway traverses a complex ecological terrain, from its spanning the Hogsmill River at one end, to Chessington Zoo at its terminus. I will reflect on how such artworks can provide bases for further engagement with resident communities, heritage organisations with mandates to diversify their participation bases, and local authorities seeking sustainable ways to enrich neglected public spaces.
Martin Dines (Kingston University London)
Martin Dines is an associate professor at Kingston School Art, Kingston University London, where he lectures in English literature and creative writing. His most recent monograph is The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spatial Complexity in Metropolitan America (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); other recent publications focus on domestic space in the post-war English ‘homosexual novel’, infrastructure and gentrification and in 1970s British literary fiction, and suburban diasporas and mental health in recent life writing. In 2025 he co-organised ‘Reading the Road’, a public event which was part of the UK-wide Being Human Festival that facilitated a series of walks and collective readings to produce a new map-based artwork of Hook in southwest London. In 2026 he was appointed artist-in-residence for the Chessington branch line. He is chair of Kingston University’s Race/Gender Matters research group, and is a past president of the Literary London Society.