Off our Blocks - 1990s women's sport zine with a guide to running London parks

I recently came a couple of issues of  'Off our Blocks' a 'women's team sports zine' published in London in the mid 1990s, a time when women's sport had very little media recognition. This seems to have been a modest attempt to redress this in the DIY photocopied zine format more commonly used for music and politics at this time. The name of course refers to the starting blocks in running and swimming but was presumably also referencing the US feminist magazine 'Off our Backs' which was quite influential in this period. 

Anyway issue number one from 1994 includes a hand written guide to 'Running the parks of London' with tips on 'things to contemplate while training'. Runners in Holland Park are advised to 'watch out for slow moving nannies and elderly gentleman feeding the squirrels' and 'secondary kids smoking in the bushes at lunchtime', while Kensington Gardens comes with a warning to watch out for 'duck shit, picnicking tourists, rollerbladers, exploding embassies'.

As the contact address for 'Off our Blocks' was in London SE7 (Charlton) no surprise to see Blackheath featured with things to contemplate including 'lots of Georgian houses and BMW’s' and 'why Canary Wharf seems to keep changing position'. As well as 'whether or not to extend the run to nearby Greenwich Park' described as having the 'best views over London at any park. Very up-and-down, so good for endurance but bad if you’ve not done much for a while'.

25 years later these parks are still full of runners, not sure if much has changed from these descriptions. Is there still a marked out 'Peace mile' in Finsbury Park? In terms of running parklife in London the biggest change of course has been the advent of parkrun, a guide to which would take a whole book.

According to a note in Issue 2, the editors of Off Our Blocks were Cress Rolfe and Jen Strang. I came across these zines in 'Still I rise: feminisms, gender, resistance, Act 2' at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea. The exhibition closed on 27 May 2019.

Winter Solstice 2015: running in with the sun

In London the sun rose at 8:04 am this morning on the Winter Solstice, marking the turning point in the year when the days start getting longer. I marked this seasonal festival with a run at a stone circle in Hilly Fields, a South East London park I have run round hundreds of times during Hilly Fields parkrun and training sessions.

The monument, made up of 12 boulders, a central flatstone, and two standing stones forming a gate outside the circle, is not as ancient as it looks. In fact it was built in 2000, with the grantite boulders being transported to the site from Mount Struie in the Caledonian Mountains, and the other stones being quarried at Weydale, Caithness at the north east tip of Scotland.

But the relationship between stone, soil, grass, tree and sky is as real there as at any ancient megalithic monument, and people have been gathering there to mark the seasons since it opened. This morning there were a couple of drummers welcoming the sun and a handful of other sunrise watchers. I did a clockwise circuit of the park (about 3k), starting and finishing in the middle of the circle, and coming back in via the stone pillar gate which faces east towards the sunrise. If I was running in with the sun it didn't actually show its face on this cloudy morning, though the sky did brighten shortly afterwards.

It was noted that the gps map of my run generated the shape of a mushroom [insert dubious theory about Hilly Fields as cult centre of fly agaric chomping shamans!]

See previously:

2013 Christmas Run at Hilly Fields

Hilly Fields parkrun and history

Midsummer Running in Dulwich Park

'Why do they run away? this is a knavery of them to make me afeard'

(photo from Dulwich Runners)

Last Thursday 25th June, 150 of us did three circuits of South London's Dulwich Park taking part in Dulwich Runners' Midsummer 5k. Top three finishers for men and women were as follows (full results at Run Britain):

Men:

1. Alex Gibbins (Blackheath and Bromley AC) - 16:10

2. Phil Sanders (Kent AC) - 16:11

3. Warwick Norris (Run Dem Crew) - 16:21

Women:

1. Sorrel Walsh (Run Dem Crew) - 19:07

2. Julia Wedmore (Herne Hill Harriers) - 19.23

3. Melanie Edwards - 19:26

The race was preceded by a one mile children's event, which was all very cute but definitely cost me a place in the 5k later as the children stayed on to cheer their parents... I was running along quite happily when at the end of the second lap a child called out to the guy behind me 'Dad, there's a little boy beating you' (there was a junior runner ahead of us both). In no time at all, said Dad had moved up a gear, overtaken me and headed off in hot pursuit of his youthful rival. 

Midsummer running

'Over hill, over dale,

Through bush, through brier,

Over park, over pale,

Through flood, through fire,

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon's sphere'

It was a hot evening, and where better to be than in the green outdoors? At this time of year with the days at their longest and the sun at its height, people have celebrated midsummer revels for thousands of years with dancing and games. In his book on seasonal customs, The Stations of the Sun (1996), Ronald Hutton notes that it was once common in many parts of  Europe to light festive bonfires on Midsummer Eve (23 June). An  Elizabethan ballad  mentions that 'the nimble young men runne leapinge' over Midsummer fires. There was no fire leaping in Dulwich Park this year, but plenty of nimble men and women of various ages running around.

The 5k route was more or less the same as the regular Dulwich parkrun route, above

The drama of the Green World

Writing about A Midsummer Night's Dream and other Shakespearean comedies, the critic Northrop Frye famously wrote of the ‘drama of the Green World’, with the action moving away from the confines of 'the normal world'  to a woodland setting of rebirth and dreams where the social order is suspended and contradictions are resolved. If the characters generally have to return to the normal world afterwards, it is to a better place than when they left it as a result of their adventures (Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957).

 For me, running races - perhaps especially in parks, woods and fields - functions as a kind of Green World in a similar way. A time and space outside of everyday life when we can temporarily leave behind worries about work or the state of the world, when the things that divide human beings are set aside for a common experience of focusing solely on the immediacy of our physical bodies and the terrain we move over, as fast as we can. And if we cross the line hot and exhausted, we generally feel better for it afterwards.

'O, I am out of breath in this fond chase!'

(all quotes in italics from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream)

See previously: Running in Dulwich Park for a bit more about its history and running culture - in fact the park's origins have a connection with Shakespearean actor and theatre owner Edward Alleyn.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

The Art of Athletics (7): David Hockney on jogging and smoking

David Hockney's most celebrated works feature Californian swimming pools, most notably his A Bigger Splash (1967) which I saw recently at Tate Britain. 

 Runners feature in his 'The Seven Stone Weakling', one of  his Rake's Progress series of prints documenting the artist's first time in  New York in the early 1960s.  

It is the artist himself who watches blankly as two men run past, and Hockney's slightly bemused attitude to fitness continues to this day. In an article in the FT last year in defence of  smoking in the open air he wrote:

'I remember the time I used to walk up through Holland Park to Lucian Freud’s studio. Seeing the black rabbits playing on the grass I sat down to watch them, and lit a cigarette. Then some magpies joined them and I was enjoying it. Then along came three girls jogging, who on seeing me smoking gave me a no-no salute. I pondered them and noticed they had not seen the magpies or the rabbits. They thought they were very healthy, but I thought I was healthier. They were obsessed with their own bodies. When people are jogging they are thinking of body management; when you walk the mind can range over far and wide. Walking is better than running, which wears out your knees and leaves you with excruciating shin pain'.

(David Hockney, Tobacco killjoys are less healthy than the smokers they ban, FT,  17 October 2014)

Of course I don't agree with him about running - the mind can range far and wide while running even if both runners and walkers can be so wrapped up in their own thoughts that they fail to notice their surroundings. But I am sympathetic to his opposition to banning smoking in parks - something that has already happened in New York and has been proposed for London. We don't have to like everything that people do in 'The parks, the great unroofed outdoors, places where people are not crowded together like on the street' (Hockney), but I think for the most part people should be free to do what they like as long as it doesn't genuinely harm other people. Some people would ban smokers, others would ban drinking, dogs, groups of young people, music or sports. No doubt some people find hundreds of runners charging round their local park on a Saturday morning an inconvenience, but parks would be dead spaces if every activity that mildly irritated somebody else was banned.  I don't particularly like getting the occasional mouthful of smoke if I run past somebody smoking, they might not like their peaceful morning stroll being disturbed by me, but we have to get along - as they say at every parkrun briefing, remember you are not the only park users.

See also in the Art of Athletics series:

John Cale - Dreaming in Vertigo

Malevich and Matisse

Daisy de Villeneuve's Run Colour Run

Jindřich Heisler, Czech surrealist

Chris Ofili - For the Unknown Runner

Martin Creed's Work 850