There is many a slip twixt cup and lip

The three of us behind walk · listen · create are volunteers, and by next year, we will have been working together for five years! "A labour of love" you might call walk · listen · create. And, of course, we are not the only ones who have put in lots of unpaid effort to keep "the show on the road". This last week, I picked up an uncompleted task from 2021, when a student volunteer wasn't able to commit to as much time as we and they had hoped. That task was to edit the videos of Cafés from 'Walking as a Question', the encounter in Prespes organised by my colleague Geert Vermeire and Yannis Ziogas. These edited videos are available through our Youtube channel to any walk · listen · create registered user (of which there are more than 4,000 people). It is a growing archive of inspiring talks with plenty of discussion, and includes all our Café and Salon events - and you can tap into it, by searching out the original event and clicking on the video-recording link.

This month we were hoping to hold an on-the-ground event here in London, working in collaboration with the Urban Design Group and the Academy of Urbanism, in which we were going to present Placecloud.io to their membership, however, it has had to be postponed, and we are hoping to run it early in the new year. Having taken over Placecloud earlier this year, we have been seeking out collaborations to increase the number of contributors as well as building its audience. Have you checked it out yet? It is already quite an impressive collection of location-based podcasts or audio stories. My colleague Babak Fakhamzadeh, who has modified the site to make it easier for anyone to contribute an audio story or podcast (called a Viewpoint), has recently been adding stories from historic cafés in Europe - these are narrated by a synthetic voice, an AI adaptation of Babak, which makes him sound a little American.

We had a discussion with the publishers of architecture critic Iairn Nairn (deceased) regarding a book on London's Modern Buildings, although we created a demo of what a Nairn Viewpoint might sound like, his estate didn't want to go ahead with his work appearing on Placecloud. Not be duly put out by this, we've had a promising discussion to add Viewpoints about buildings designed by acclaimed Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid (deceased). And we are developing a portfolio of Viewpoints of buildings and places which have mathematics hidden within them as a useful tool for Maths communicators.

Among our community, we have so many enthusiasts, keen to develop events, workshops and work with us, and we are delighted that Electra Rhodes and Cheryl Markosky are developing a two-part online workshop on how to write and narrate Viewpoints to be added to Placecloud. While in the new year, we will be launching a non-fiction writing and narrating competition linked to Placecloud, and we've just recruited Paul Wood, aka "The Street Tree" and author of "A Field Guide to London's Urban Forest" as our first volunteer competition judge. We are in discussion with the Bournemouth Literary Festival (April 2024) to incorporate Placecloud and the competition into their own marketing plans. So it is all go over on Placecloud.io, you really should have a listen...

On Tuesday, we have Ellen Mueller as our Café guest talking about Walking as Artistic Practice, which hopefully will prompt you, if you haven't already, to submit a walking art piece to our archive, as any work made since January 2022 is eligible for the Marŝarto Awards.

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