The walking artist collective Wrights & Sites will mark the 20th anniversary of the launch of their most well-encountered work, A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, by releasing a free PDF copy of the full publication into the wild from Wednesday 8 April.

A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, was launched at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in April 2006. Mindful of at least a few of the ironies, impossibilities, contradictions and perils present in its title, A Mis-Guide To Anywhere provides a number of provocations for reader-walkers to make their own exploratory journeys in whatever environment they choose: metropolis, hometown, countryside, holiday destination… anywhere.

‘Anywhere you can walk slowly down the street without being shot at by Western contractors. Anywhere you can reorganise buildings without permission. Anywhere you can stand still without being questioned. Anywhere you can find abandoned beds. Anywhere the movie you always wanted to see is playing. Anywhere you legged it. A Mis-Guide To Anywhere is a utopian project for the recasting of a bitter world by disrupted walking.’

The book has been used in multiple contexts, and has been co-opted as a teaching aid across a wide range of disciplines, from Performance Studies at Tisch School of Arts (New York University) to Design Studies at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and Geography at the University of Manchester (UK).

Formed in the UK in 1997, Wrights & Sites are four artist-researchers (Simon Persighetti, Cathy Turner, Stephen Hodge and Phil Smith– see above) whose work is focused on peoples’ relationships to places, cities, landscape and walking. They employ disrupted walking strategies as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning-making. A Mis-Guide To Anywhere was created in collaboration with the visual artist Tony Weaver, and was financially supported by Arts Council England (Lottery Funded) and the Centre for Creative Enterprise and Participation at the former Dartington College of Arts.

‘You’ll never have to buy another guidebook again…’ – The Times, April 2006

‘This wonderful little gem of a book is the latest from Wrights & Sites, who have taken theatre into everyday life, and breathed new life into theatre, with their site-specific performances, art- journeys and tourist mis-guides to Exeter and beyond. See it as a replacement for the I Ching or as a script for the play of your life. Buy it, tuck it into purse or pocket, and discover the theatre of life on and off the edge of the map.’ – Total Theatre, Summer 2006

‘My favourite methodology book on place is A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, which I think is fantastic and helps us to look at place in a new way.’ – Professor Tim Edensor, at the launch of his co- edited book, The Routledge Handbook of Place, September 2020