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A Manifesto for a New Walking Game: 'dealing with the city'

‘Everything you need to build a town is here' emerged after several months of reconnaissance. Through this extensive site research, Wrights & Sites developed a constellation of 41 signs that each engage with their immediate vicinity and are dispersed across Weston-super-Mare.

Each of the signs refers to aspects of architecture in Weston-super-Mare and contains a carefully worded instruction, observation or comment, designed to encourage the reader to think again about its specific location, to conduct an action or thought experiment.

Each member of the company identified locations and references points to devise signage specific to their own areas of interest. My own research into the town was framed by the discovery of a Botanical survey that revealed locations and patronage in addition to providing a kind of ecological snapshot of plant life of the town. The interweaving of the botanical with architectural models was also used as a template for considering present built environments in consideration to future town developments. This approach chimed with a continuing strand of personal research into place as a sensorium also including consideration of the sonic, acoustic and musical cadence of architectural structures of towns and cities. These areas are further represented in a paper (Hodge et al 2013) in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (Graves-Brown et al).

Wonders of Weston was part of the Sea Change programme (2008 - 2010), managed by Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (1999 - 2011) on behalf of DCMS. Situations and Field Art Projects were a series of commissions aimed at sustainable, social and economic regeneration.

Situations is a research programme based at the University of the West of England, experienced in commissioning projects outside conventional gallery or museum contexts, and developing curatorial research, public events, seminars and publications. www.situations.org.uk