Bowieland: Walking in the Footsteps of David

Following open heart surgery, poet and writer Peter Carpenter was given one instruction – ‘Walk, if you want to stay on this planet’. And so when his hero and inspiration David Bowie died in 2016, he knew what he had to do. The man who was to so many a companion and guide had left no shrine, no focal point of understanding. To reconnect with Bowie, he would take a walk into the past, to the streets, towns and places where David Jones became something more.

Walking to recover, to stay alive, Peter realised he was also recovering his lost hero. Leaving behind Heddon Street and Brixton, well-known Bowie shrines, he moved out through South London edgelands and suburbia to remoter Bowie haunts: Croydon, Aylesbury, Pett Level, Southend-on-Sea. Finding the windows Bowie had stared out from in Clareville Grove; the streets in Beckenham where he’d scurried by. He sifted through debris on a patch of waste ground in Tunbridge Wells where Bowie’s parents first met. He turned the handle and entered Shirley Parish Hall to find the same stage where a young Davy Jones and the Kon-Rads set up to play back in 1962; and travelled to Berlin, to emerge from the S-Bahn to gape at the ruined portico of the Anhalter Bahnhof and asked ‘What is this?’

In Bowieland, Carpenter’s peripatetic trampings seem to echo Bowie’s own wandering creative spirit, the walks often uncovering hidden layers, and making fresh connections to key Bowie stories, revealing influences conscious and subconscious. Through walking, an understanding is reached of where Bowie sits in the culture, his place among the poets, painters, artists and musicians who came before him, who inhabited the same spaces and in doing so passed on their wisdom to Bowie.

Through Carpenter’s travels these suburban lands became a new, very real place, that anyone can visit if they take the time… Welcome to ‘Bowieland’