Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Trip 1964: in which a cycling trip to Rome is resurrected

Trip 1964: in which a cycling trip to Rome is resurrected

Van Schaik, Leon
Turner, John

Paperback

General ArchitectureGeneral Europe

ISBN10: 0648428621
ISBN13: 9780648428626
Publisher: Stuart Geddes
Published: Jul 13 2022
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.57
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

1964, Spring. Two young men, John Turner and Leon van Schaik, school friends, still in their teens, set off from England to cycle to Rome, their Trip64. Leon wrote a daily journal, John drew and photographed. That journal structures this account, and the timelines are derived from it. Leon's first Trip64 night on 6 May (Day 1) was spent in Ostend Youth Hostel and John's first night on 27 May (Day 22) was under canvas in a field close to Maassluis. They met up on 31 May (Day 26) in Amsterdam and remained together until arriving back in England in early August. When the trip ended, they were home in Buckinghamshire, preparing for university. An unremarkable 'gap-year' activity you might think, yet that journey cut through a world barely recognisable today. The Second World War still formed a bell jar over everything, colouring our perceptions. Even in the early 1970s the wearing of a leather coat evoked sinister associations. The Iron Curtain hung across Europe, limiting the horizon. A veil of fascism hung over Spain and was soon to occlude Greece. 1984 lay in the unimaginably distant future. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was mounting its marches from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. The lives of adults were framed by reconstruction. Although British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had announced you've never had it so good on 20 July 1957, the full force of the post war economy lay ahead, and Jean Baudrillard's book 'The Consumer Society' was to be published in 1970. Cars did not yet dominate roads. In England, traffic jams hardly happened except in The New Forest on August Bank Holiday. Travel was an adventure for the young, and a 1957 book explaining how to do 'Europe on Five Dollars a Day' when six dollars equalled 20 shillings seemed targeted on wealthy Americans. That many shillings would last a week, as the soon to be students would discover. And most alien to how we live now, life was lived in analogue. The internet lay fifty years ahead. The boys had planned their journey in advance, plotting routes using a guide to the location of Youth Hostels, and having no guarantee that there would be a place in one until they arrived and knocked on the door. Contact with home was by post to a few pre-planned collection sites. Each photograph taken had to be carefully considered as film was so expensive. The past is a different world.

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