Tim Wright’s ‘Harrison Fraud’, the tale of a practical joke gone too far, was a highlight for me of last year’s The Story. Now he has worked with another favourite project of mine, Bookleteer, to make ‘The Second Book of Urizen‘, a walk around London in the footsteps of William Blake.
It’s a booklet, not a book, and it leads the walker on a perambulation around Lambeth, accompanied, through QR codes, by Audioboo clips of Blake’s work read aloud there.
Why blog this?
First because I find this stuff fascinating. I believe a story is extra powerful in the place where it actually happened. This sense of story literally beneath our feet motivates a lot of the stuff I do with history in Leeds.
Secondly because the year of this Blakewalk is 1794, one significant for many other reasons that I tried to capture in my own fragmentary ‘1794: a Small Story‘. I used Blake’s ‘Europe, A Prophecy’ to set the scene for the terrible events that befell some of my real-life characters.
Now thanks to Tim I can fill in some gaps in my knowledge, and discover the works Joseph Haydn composed while staying in London that same year.
Tim describes ‘The Second Book of Urizen’ as a work in progress. I can’t wait to see where William Blake takes him next.
Matt Edgar writes here 
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