BOWIE IS STILL OUT THERE…

Following open heart surgery, Peter Carpenter was given one instruction – walk if you want to stay alive. So, when his hero died in 2016, he knew what he had to do. The figure who was to so many a companion and guide had left no single focal point for homage. To reconnect with him, Carpenter would take a walk into the past, to the places where David Jones became something more: David Bowie.

Leaving behind well-known shrines to Bowie, he journeyed through South London edgelands to obscurer haunts. Carpenter’s quest, a series of happy accidents and chance meetings, took him to Bickley as well as Berlin and Brixton, to Eel Pie Island as well as Heddon Street and Beckenham.

Carpenter’s perambulations echo Bowie’s own wandering creative spirit. They reveal multiple influences, both conscious and unconscious, in Bowie’s creative development. Ultimately, Carpenter reaches a fresh understanding of where Bowie sits in the culture, not as an outlier, but as part of a tradition, informed by those artists, poets and musicians who passed on their wisdom to him. A celebration of the revelatory powers of walking, and by no means just for Bowie obsessives, BOWIELAND opens up our geography in ways rarely seen or so well understood.