The Frogmore Press, 12 April 2023

Pb, 154pp

Matt Birch has run an independent bookshop and gallery in Lewes, East Sussex since 2006.After years of curating, looking at and selling travel and nature-based memoirs, he developed a strong urge to go on a journey of his own, and in a parallel journey, write it up as a book.The result is the sumptuous, hybrid, and unique Meridian: A Walk from Sussex to Yorkshire .

In July 2021, as COVID restrictions were being lifted, he chose his walk. Guided by the Greenwich Meridian, which passed through his hometown, the route was determined by an abstract concept rather than natural features and completed in stages over four seasons.

This book invites you to join him on his internal and external journey. Reflecting the rhythm of a long walk, his ‘snap shots’ alternate with short pieces of writing: writing that meanders through history, politics, nature, literature, music, etymology, prose and poetry as he follows this line cutting through a cross-section of England. An insightful and intriguing, personal and whimsical exploration of the places encountered between two little-known coastal towns, and of what the experience ultimately meant for the author.

Within the pages, there is a real synergy between the large format photographs, and their associated, short essays. The book is both a descriptor of some typical eastern English landscapes (and a selection of the people, flora and fauna that they support), and a wider celebration of the rich knowledge-reward that a long journey across this land can gift the reasonably curious and observant walker.

Chance incidents on the walk are frequently viewed through a wryly humorous lens. At other times, the reader is led into lively expositions on a range of subjects, from Daniel Defoe’s account of a famously wild Cambridgeshire fair, to the joys of wild swimming (and increasing limitations on it); from the troubling history of the Fennish who tried to resist the drainage of their lands to the pleasures of encountering British nature, whether a day-glo Spindle tree or those magnificent returning birds of prey, red kites. Through prose, poems and pictures, the reader will visit eerily abandoned canals, allotments with mermaid scarecrows, a strange tunnel under the Thames, the top deck of a bus full of teenagers, and the fastest-eroding coastline in Britain.

In the Afterword, the author reflects back on the value of the walk. He appreciates the self-reflective opportunity provided by a long-walk experience, and how this journey allowed him to realise with enhanced clarity what really matters in his own life.