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Beneath the Dreaming Spires

Beneath Dreaming Spires feature

Five years in the making, A Certain Logic of Expectations is a surprising, intriguing photo narrative of a well-known university-dominated city, created by Mexican photographer Arturo Soto.

Soto studied at Oxford as a doctoral student, traversing the city incognito, capturing the quirkiness of British suburbia, a counter-narrative to the tourism blurbs that often quote Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s line that Oxford is a city of ‘Dreaming Spires’.

As he writes: “Photographers can either carry their cameras at all times or lament the pictures they missed. Undergraduates become walking tourist attractions. Visitors love to take pictures with them when they wear their ‘subfusc’ and a carnation on their lapel on exam days, or when they get trashed with foam, confetti, and prosecco at the end of Trinity term. The University’s guidelines stipulate that students have to live within twenty-five miles from Carfax Tower. The rule is rarely enforced with doctoral students, many of whom rather keep their cosmopolitan London lives. Some even commute from Amsterdam, Berlin, or Zurich just for the graduate seminars. They are usually unimpressed by the quality of coffee here and return to their havens as soon as possible.”


Walking Writers Salons are hour-long events in which you will get to meet a Walking Writer and learn from them how they weave writing and walking, and how they interpret their surroundings. Each Salon will include a discussion with the author, inviting questions from the audience, and may include a multiple choice quiz or other amusing challenge, in which a winner will receive a prize.

Hosts

Arturo Soto

Arturo Soto

(Mexico) 
Andrew Stuck

Andrew Stuck

Co-founder of walk · listen · create (United Kingdom) 
This event has happened

2025-10-21 18:00
2025-10-21 18:00

VIdeo recording
Online

Walking Writers Salon

Collection · 48 items

Related

book

A Certain Logic of Expectations

A Certain Logic of Expectations proposes a counter-narrative of the British city of Oxford that resists the visual imperatives of its ancient university. For the past five years, Arturo Soto (MX) explored the longstanding division between town and gown through a careful selection of spaces and objects.His visual narrative is loosely structured around the following thematic strands: notions of home and

Arturo Soto
video

Beneath the Dreaming Spires; Walking Wriers Salon with Arturo Soto

Five years in the making, A Certain Logic of Expectations is a surprising, intriguing photo narrative of a well-known university-dominated city, created by Mexican photographer Arturo Soto. Soto studied at Oxford as a doctoral student, traversing the city incognito, capturing the quirkiness of British suburbia, a counter-narrative to the tourism blurbs that often quote Victorian

Arturo Soto Andrew Stuck
Walking piece

Find Your London: Tree or False?

Devised by Andrew Stuck of the Museum of London, this walkshop became a regular event as part of the Mayor of London’s London Tree Week, and subsequent Urban Tree Festivals. Everyone has heard ‘an old wives’ tale’ about a certain tree species, some of which have a layer of truth within them, others are downright

Andrew Stuck
walkingevent

Walking the blue and the green

We welcome back Martyn Howe as a Walking Writers Salon guest to celebrate his new book The Coast is Our Compass. Why are we drawn to a place where the land meets the sea? And what deeper truths emerge when these instincts come together in a journey around England’s shoreline? The Coast is Our Compass

Martyn Howe Andrew Stuck
walkingevent

Walking towards a home in Greece

When author Julian Hoffman first arrived in Greece’s remote Prespa region, his Greek was “almost non-existent.” Walking became a form of literacy for him—a way to learn the language of the land by tracing the steps of others, reading stone walls, abandoned houses, plant communities, and animal tracks. “Walking was a way in,” he says,

Annemarie Lopez Julian Hoffman
walkingevent

A 100 day Walk across Europe with a Wolf for company

Conservation policies across Europe have been encouraging ‘re-wilding’ of landscapes, including the re-introduction for animals that once roamed more freely. Scientists have been tracking such re-introductions, and back in 2011, a wolf left its family pack in Slovenia, crossed the Alps and journeyed across Europe for thousands of kilometres. Critically-acclaimed and celebrated travel writer Adam

Adam Weymouth Andrew Stuck
walkingevent

Words to Light the Dark: Writing the worlds of other animals

How do we bridge the experiential gap between that of humans and other animals with writing that feels intelligible to us, while reaching for the differences in how other animals sense, think, and act? Join Chantal Lyons author of Groundbreakers: the return of Britain’s Wild Boar and our story writer-in-residence as she hosts Emma Geen,

Chantal Lyons Emma Geen

driftsinging

Drawing with (vocal) sound in response to place while passing through place. Driftsinging borrows from the Situationist Drift, and Baudelaire’s flâneur. Driftsinging also relates to the process of ‘sounding,’ the sonic measuring of distance and depth that locates position in place and ‘echo location’, the examination of place through sonic reflection and refraction, resonance and echo.

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