Rob Cowen is the award-winning author of Common Ground, selected as a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Times and featuring in the Guardian’s Top Ten Readers’ Choice.
After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, Rob found himself on unfamiliar territory, disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for the nearest open space. So one night, he set out to find it – a pylon-slung edge-land, a tangle of wood, meadow, field and river on the outskirts of town. Despite being in the shadow of thousands of houses, it felt unclaimed, forgotten, caught between worlds, and all the more magical for it.
Show Notes
Rob Cowen is the award-winning author of Common Ground, selected as a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Times and featuring in the Guardian’s Top Ten Readers’ Choice.
After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, Rob found himself on unfamiliar territory, disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for the nearest open space. So one night, he set out to find it – a pylon-slung edge-land, a tangle of wood, meadow, field and river on the outskirts of town. Despite being in the shadow of thousands of houses, it felt unclaimed, forgotten, caught between worlds, and all the more magical for it.
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SHOW NOTES
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- Rob Cowen's website and Twitter
- Common Ground
- Edge lands - between the rural and the urban
- There are so few areas of true wilderness left, but this place has some wildness to it, as there is so much history running through it
- Kids used to play in these edgelands, but now they have been demonised and kids aren't allowed to come and play here
- People here appreciate being so well-placed for getting into natural places
- Place is a repository of memory.
- Two people can have a similar emotional response to the same landscape - it has an aura
- The collisions at the edgelands of human layers and nature. They have stories to tell.
- Richard Jeffreys - After London
- Home is a fluid thing - I had a sense of it in London as they were my dad's old haunts. I enjoyed the heath in London as it reminded me of Yorkshire.
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What is Living Adventurously?
Living Adventurously, with Alastair Humphreys, is the story of ordinary people choosing to live extraordinary lives.
Alastair interviews artists and chefs, students and pensioners, athletes and travellers. He wants to discover what living adventurously means to different people, what universal obstacles stand in the way, and how each of these people took the first step to overcome them and begin their own fascinating journeys.