I was also happy to recently be part of the 10th anniversary of the Talking Walking Podcast. I walked (and talked) with Andrew Stuck 3 years ago and was delighted to update him on my current explorations to mark the event.

There is no occupation so sweet as scholarship; scholarship is the means of making known to us, while still in this world, the infinity of matter, the immense grandeur of nature, the heavens, the lands and the seas. Scholarship has taught us piety, moderation, greatness of heart; it snatches our souls from darkness and shows them all things, the high and the low, the first, the last and everything in between; scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and happily; it teaches us how to spend our lives without discontent and without vexation.

                               -Cicero (106-43 BC)

Our lives are always going to be governed by structures. What structures we are subjected to, and what capacity to have to shape them, is different for each individual. That said, I have never been convinced by structural philosophies that render the individual a simple victim of social, cultural or governmental forces. I tend, instead, to lean toward existentialist thinking that increases our capacity to act even under the most constrictive conditions, because this is where hope is found, and hope is the lynchpin to emancipation. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre famously argued that even prisoners are free because they have the power of consciousness – the prisoner may always choose to resist or acquiesce, even just in the mind, and the freedom is in the choice, not the circumstance.

I made a choice many years ago to give up my successful business in California to chase what Cicero describes in the opening epigraph – I always believed that spending my life absorbed in thought would make life richer and, ultimately, make me a better person. Whether it has or not (who is to know what lives might have been) I know I was right in making that choice, even though many friends at the time called it into question. More recently, many of my colleagues seemed shocked when I told them that I was quitting my coveted permanent lecturership at a UK Russel Group university to take up a fixed-term contract as a University of Sydney Fellow. And yet most of those same colleagues are perfectly aware that the promised structure of those ‘coveted’ positions, with 20% of your 40-hour workweek being dedicated to research, is a myth long evaporated into the bureaucratic fog of the neoliberal university. A year into my lectureship, I once again ran into Cicero’s words and never in my life had I felt so far from them.

Here I sit, a year later, with two and a half years ahead of me of near 100% research time, a near-empty inbox and days that are as slow as they are expansive. This was all expected – I chose it. What was not expected was the way that having this time would make clear to me that for many years, I had been so blinded by my struggle to free myself from the structures of the institution that even my body was failing. A renewed sense of having a body has meant taking the time every day to tune it, and taking the time to flex those once-again-tuned-in sensory organs to see the ‘grandeur of nature, the heavens, the lands and the seas’ all over again. I will spare you the details of the former (essentially I’m vegan, I drink less and I exercise every day), but in terms of the latter, the other day I was alone in Royal National Park wading through waist-high brackish water at the mouth of Wattomolla Creek, where it spills in the Pacific, and suddenly time slowed to what felt like a standstill. I crouched down and pushed myself out into the river with two grips of soft sand, flipped over and floated downstream. During my float I considered how my experiences had actually broken my sense of time – that I had, at some point, stopped experiencing those fleeting moments of structureless time that ground, and produce, great creative work.

I have moved at incredible speed since I started my PhD 10 years ago, and though it was productive, insightful and, to be honest, a veritable carnival of desire and peak emotion, I also hacked my way deep into a structural ticket, becoming not only disembodied in my quest for a profitable life of the mind, but also consciously complicit in the capitalist exploitation of my research and life, which became inevitably intertwined. The co-option was predicated by the structure of life under late capitalism where freedom can only be inherited or earned through prostitution of ideas. I became an academic streetwalker extraordinaire – I hacked a path deep into the system, holding on to just enough ‘edginess’ to make sure it was all marketable, and got everything I wanted. Imposter syndrome of course asserted itself daily. I was convinced someone would figure out I was a stowaway. But in actuality, everyone was too busy building thier own ‘brand’ to notice and I was too busy bolstering my defences to care if they did. So much for the life of the mind.

When I realised the means had become the ends, I quit my job, knowing full well that gaming the system, and almost working myself to death, had bought me a ticket to wherever I wanted to go. The question was, with freedom achieved, what then to do with it? And while I did take up another academic post, I made sure to put in place my own structure this time that would always take precedence over any structure imposed on me. This included:

1. Focussing on writing one book, and writing it well, over the period of the fellowship
2. Only publishing journal articles necessary to keep me in the game
3. Spending at least one hour a day doing something physical and, eventually, getting into the best shape of my life
4. Not working on anything that I’m not deeply invested in, unless it pays and, if it does pay, using that money for play
5. Streamlining my engagement on social media so it doesn’t feel like work
6. Saying no to conferences, paper reviewing, helping random students with their projects and anything else that sucks up time when I should be reading or writing or swimming or making love
7. Saying no to spending my own time or money doing things for institutions who are not invested in me on a personal level
8. Writing only four hours a day, but writing words that matter
9. Reading as much as a writing and tackling texts that have intimidated me in the past (see reading list here)
10. Being a better son, uncle and partner, having decided I have no interest in ever being a parent

I knew that I was alleviating mundane pressures by giving up the lectureship. What I didn’t know is that meditative space would open to begin a total rebuild. The ability to be reflective, calm, in the wild and in the body, comes from having space and no one is going to give it to you. If you manage, as I did, to grab it, you probably hurt yourself getting there and the next step in the process is not using the space to spin up to even greater speeds – do not fill the space! I have two and a half years to perfect spaciousness and I could probably line up another fellowship afterwards. But I wonder how long the string on this kite is? If I were to save everything I make here for the next two and a half years, could I not buy myself one more in 2020? And what if 2020 – call it a gap year or rolling retirement – had no structure at all? Where does the life of the mind lead if one were to, let’s say, just walk through National Parks in the American West for 12 months, unspooling until the structures of life are a Google earth view, pretty to look at but blissfully just out of reach?

The project was coordinated by the arts collective Fugitive Moments (Barnaby Lewer and Tristan Derátz) and as they write on the project website, the trail

‘follows – and displaces – the traces of human movement, commerce and war for over 40,000 years. It is the first Aboriginal pathway to be listed on the NSW State Heritage Register, and is a shared heritage pathway currently being developed by the Eden Land Council  – to become Australia’s first great pilgrimage trail.’ 

It was great to be part of the exhibition and I am happy to post some of the materials from it here, in the hopes that they can live on beyond that space. 

Thank you to Barney and Tristan for inviting me on the walk, Alexandra Porter-Hepworth and Tylor Wilson for handling logistics, and to the other artists, writers and guides who shared the journey with us.  The walk was a beautiful introduction to my new home.

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I studied for my PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I spent a great deal of time poring over maps and books to gather information about tunnel systems, including, of course, Antony Clayton’s incredible book Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London.[1] I was particularly interested in disused and off-limits subterranean sites, such as abandoned tube stations and government bunkers. This was not simply an armchair interest; I wanted to go into these tunnels, to photograph them. It was critical to my project to find access details, what urban explorers call ‘portals’: the thresholds where tunnel systems connected to the surface and where one could, in theory, wriggle into the underground like Alice down the rabbit hole.

Halfway through my PhD, after exploring many such tunnels, I was told by a reliable source that the Royal Holloway campus in Egham, which was once a women’s college (then Bedford College), was connected to the Holloway Asylum in Virginia Water by a tunnel. Given both sites were constructed within two years of each other by the Victorian multi-millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Thomas Holloway (1800–1883), this seemed somewhat plausible. But for what reason, I inquired of my source, would a college be connected to an asylum? The answer I was given played on nineteenth-century sensibilities: some at the time believed that women had less stamina for study and anticipated many might ‘go mad’ at college. In the interest of keeping these problematic scenarios under wraps, these women would be escorted through the tunnels to the asylum for ‘rehabilitation’.

A few weeks after hearing this story, I assembled some colleagues and we went rooting around the Royal Holloway Founder’s Building late one night. Behind the Crosslands pub, we found descending steps that led to a locked door, covered by a wooden enclosure with health and safety signs pegged to the exterior. My heart began to race. On the side of the enclosure, a small wooden panel had been kicked out. I stuck my head inside and although I could not see much, I could smell damp, packed earth – the familiar smell of underground Britain that I had come to know so well. I backed my head out and took stock of the situation. In all likelihood, if I removed most of my layers of clothing, including my belt, I thought I might just be able to squeeze through the broken panel. With a bit more luck, I could then open the locked door from inside the tunnel and let the group in. I proceeded to strip down.

It took some effort to get my chest and hips through the panel, but with some creative wriggling, eventually balancing my upper body on my hands inside the tunnel, I managed to pop through with a horrible shredding sound as my jeans ripped at the crotch. It was of no consequence however ‒ I was in. Checking the door, the latch did indeed turn and I opened it to find my colleagues covering their mouths to stop from laughing and giving away our location to patrolling security – I was covered in dirt and soot and the right leg of my trousers, from crotch to knee, was hanging by a flap like the backside of unbuttoned pyjamas in an old western.

With trepidation, we ventured into the tunnel. It was incredible. Parts of it were so hot we were sweating. Some side tunnels contained metal control panels with large glowing buttons that invited pressing (we resisted). Other parts stank of decay, dead animals, sticky polyvinyl chloride cable coating, and rust. We squatted through the tunnels for many hours, trying different offshoots by army-crawling under cable trays, finding corners where bunches of multi-coloured fibre-optic and telecommunications cables shot off under the grass to unknown destinations somewhere on campus. Finally, we emerged into a room filled with large boiler tanks and at the back found a green-lit emergency exit. We opened the door and walked out into the cold night air. After a moment of orientation, we realised we were next to the international student centre, not 300 metres from where we had gone underground. We were disappointed of course that we had not found the coveted tunnels to the Holloway Asylum, but also elated that we had made a fascinating subterranean ‘discovery’ nonetheless.

The next day, nursing bruised hips, I devised a plan. We had enjoyed the exploration of the tunnel but figured that if we had known that the tunnels only stretched a few hundred metres under campus, we may not have made the effort to find them. And so, the following night, we returned to the wooden structure behind Crosslands. Stripping down again, I squeezed myself halfway through, legs protruding in the night air, and had my friend take a photo. We then drove to Virginia Water, snuck into the grounds of the old hospital (now an expensive gated residential community) and popped open a sewer manhole. Again, I had my friend photograph me emerging from the tunnel. We then went home and spliced these photos into a slideshow, along with the ones from inside the tunnel, and circulated it on a Royal Holloway student forum board, claiming to have found the Victorian tunnel system for the ‘mad’ women of Royal Holloway.

To this day, I still get emails from confused students who went looking for the Victorian tunnels to the old asylum and instead found themselves sweating in a boiler room. I always explain to them, at risk of cliché, that our human desires to explore subterranean space are less about the spaces themselves and more about the journey to find them. I tell them they did not fail to find what they were looking for: the moment they set out in the dead of night to squeeze through that tiny wooden panel, ripping their jeans and unlocking the door for their friends, they found what they had set out to find – the reality behind a subterranean myth. What could be more exciting than decoding space for ourselves, no guides or interpreters in sight?

I have no doubt that Antony would disapprove of our little prank. The reason for this is simple: the English love a good myth and will do almost anything to perpetuate it. As a result, books, websites and archives are full of anachronistic, apocryphal and gratuitous stories about subterranean systems all over the country. Sieving fact from fiction is scrupulous and exasperating work. In a famous example, which Antony receives incessant requests about (I myself called him to inquire) many have suggested there is a parade of Victorian shops under Oxford Street in London. These shops were mentioned in a 1991 Channel 4 documentary hosted by the arch-prankster and Situationist Malcolm McLaren. Given what we know about McLaren, it is likely the man perpetuated the myth of the subterranean shopping centre simply to send us all on a wild goose chase, one that would continue even after his death. Obviously for a researcher things like this can be frustrating to untangle. However, Secret Tunnels of England is more than a catalogue of the real, it is also about the power of the imagination and about how we are doggedly drawn to sub-urban myth and folklore.

The imagination blooms when considering underground spaces for three reasons, I think. First, the underground has long featured in mono-and polytheistic religions as a place not just of burial, but of renewal and traversal.[2] Consider the plight of Persephone, doomed to dwell with Hades for partaking of a pomegranate, or Dante’s Inferno, perhaps the most well-known Christian depiction of the underworld. Second, underground spaces are spaces unseen, spaces off the map. How much longer this remains the case, given new technologies like Ground Penetrating Radar and 3D imaging, may be debatable. However, for the time being, subterranean space, sometimes right under our feet, remains a place to be imagined. Third, and perhaps most important, given the age of pervasive surveillance we live in, underground spaces (aside from metro systems) are largely unmonitored spaces. Once inside them, the mind and body work through unfettered feelings of freedom that, unsurprisingly, spark the imagination.

People like to envisage that everything is somehow interconnected underground, that, like a film representation, one can easily pass from sewer to utility tunnel to ancient cistern to crypt. In other places in the world, like Paris, this is often actually the case, the soft Lutetian Limestone and gypsum being relatively easy to excavate. Here in Britain however, underground systems are much more fragmented and isolated. Part of our need to create myths about interconnections comes from this desire to think of the underground world as one vast interlocked labyrinth. Some people take that desire more seriously than others and actually begin digging their own tunnels, cultivating their own myths through connections. One such person was William Lyttle, the ‘Mole Man of Hackney’ who passed away in 2010. Lyttle began to dig a cellar under his house on Mortimer Road over 40 years ago, which was eventually 8 metres deep, and 20 metres wide. As Iain Sinclair writes,

Lyttle couldn’t go down any deeper than his basement, so he branched off in every direction. He had a relish for en suite fittings: toilets hidden in cheese cupboards, rat holes equipped with broken basins and light switches cut in half. He imagined his hidden kingdom as an underground Piranesi prison for lodgers. [3]

Clayton also pays his respects to the mad excavator, who burrowed himself into London folklore in short order by being issued a £100,000 bill from the council for filling in his tunnel system. In trying to articulate his motivations, Sinclair extends the net:

The compulsion to dive beneath the carpet of river terrace deposits, Hackney gravel, shale and mudstone, down through old workings, the slag and clinker of demolished terraces and lost theatres, is demonstrated by every stratum of society, from City Hall and the major developers, offshore speculators hidden behind front companies and proxies, to unsponsored art collectives and ‘place-hacking’ crews posing for high-resolution selfies in Secret State bunkers and sewage outfalls. Underworld is the coming battleground. The epidermis of the city is so heavily policed, so fretted with random chatter, so evidently corrupted by a political assault on locality, that humans unable or unwilling to engage in a war they can’t win respond by venturing into forbidden depths. [4]

What is it about human nature that compels us to dig then? Is it an ancient defence mechanism that kicks in when we feel threatened at street level (Sinclair’s epidermis?) Is it about those overlapping desires outlined above to touch myth and to let the body and imagination run free, to shed what Blake called our ‘mind-forged manacles’? [5] I recently met a Dutch artist called Leanne Wijnsma who has been digging tunnels, sans permission, in parks, gardens and courtyards. Leanne describes her inclination toward excavation in an interview for Pop Up City as a reaction to modern society, a need to escape the freedom of choice:

Escape is a response to this world in which everything seems possible, in which we are always connected, always available. The digging is a basic act to escape and to disconnect. The act itself is an important experience, digging the soil to find fundament and autonomy. Escape is an urge to do something really banal yet essential. The tunnel doesn’t lead to freedom. You’ll see that the tunnel ends just a few metres from where it starts. The choice to dig, however, becomes the freedom itself. [6]

In the most poignant quote in the interview, Leanne tells us that ‘I love the structure of the city and its endless possibilities, just after a while I start wondering: who are we, who am I? And then I want to dig.’ Perhaps in this statement we find the kernel of those three motivations outlined above, for in venturing into the underground, in trying to understand and come to grips with our needs and desires to dig and to bury, we learn something about ourselves. For, just as in my quest into the tunnels underneath my university campus, the action of going underground, either physically or metaphorically, triggers acts of self-reflection through encounters with other people, other times and other places.[7] In seeking to encounter spaces that are buried like time capsules, off the map in some way, we confront a part of our own nature that is intrinsically fascinated and mystified by subterranean realms of death and escape.

There are many places in Secret Tunnels of England we have actually explored. We accessed Burlington, the ‘secret city’ under Corsham in Wiltshire in 2010 and drove electric buggies around the place. In 2012, we gained access to the Kingsway Telephone Exchange under Chancery Lane in London, another cold-war relic first revealed by one of our heroes, the journalist and proto urban explorer Duncan Campbell. Other places we knew existed and have never breached, such as the network of tunnels stretching underneath Whitehall. Underground and across the street from Craig’s Court, we held our ears to a breezeblock wall and, lacking the resolve to tunnel through it, walked away. Many of these locations we discovered by gleaning information from Antony’s book Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London. It is with great pleasure then that after years of sub-surface exploration I am able to preface Antony’s new book, which guides us from fact to folklore and back again. It is an imperative journey to make and one that is obviously an important constituent of the English character – everyone on this island loves a good tunnel story, as indicated by the myriad wonderful tales contained between these covers.

In closing, I suppose I should apologize to all of those who I misled into thinking the Virginia Water asylum tunnels existed – I hope to not have sent too many of you on a fruitless quest. However, I would also suggest that the most interesting part of exploring tunnels is often that you do not find what you were looking for. I would hope that new generations of explorers not only rediscover actual tunnel systems that are abandoned or off-limits, as we have, but that they also work to reinforce the innumerable folklores and mythologies of subterranea, for these too are an important part of our culture. Our desires to tell these stories, in the end, say as much about us as our desires to delve into the underground.

[1] Antony Clayton Subterranean City, Beneath the Streets of London (London: Historical Publications, 2000; 2^nd ed. 2010)

[2] See David Pike Subterranean Cities: the World beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2005) and R. H. Williams Notes on the Underground: an essay on technology, society and the imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1990).

[3] Iain Sinclair ‘Into the Underworld’ London Review of Books 22 January 2015 pp.7-12.

[4] Ibid.

[5] William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp.38-39.

[6] Orla Tiffney, ‘Hand-Digging Tunnels In The City: The Cure To Mental Stress (interview with Leanne Wijnsma)’ Pop Up City 16 April 2015 http://popupcity.net/hand-digging-tunnels-in-the-city-the-cure-to-mental-stress/

[7] Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso Senses of Place (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1996).

Some stories were seething with frustration. One person wrote to say that “on a personal level, I can attest to the nightmares associated with trying to get a student visa to study in the UK. I would not even have been able to do my PhD if I hadn’t involved my [US] Congressperson in contesting the (erroneous) denial of my student visa. By the time I was finishing my doctorate, there was a fervor of jingoistic anti-immigrant sentiment in the [UK]. As a result of this, my opportunity to stay in the country to seek work was taken away from me. I may not be in England anymore, but I am watching the election carefully. A UK full of solely British-born people and wealthy foreigners who can dodge the visa rules would pale in comparison to the vibrant and dynamic place it is today.” This “anti-immigrant sentiment” the researcher describes is clear in the streets, as I outlined in my piece, but is also institutionally systemic. It is clear that the Home Office is willing to go to great lengths and spend a great deal of taxpayer money to make staying here as difficult as possible for anyone with an even slightly “complicated” application, regardless of how valuable their presence is to the country, how long they have been here, whether or not their degrees were finances by UK taxpayers or what familial ties they harbour here. There is no reasoning with the machine – for Cameron and May, immigration is not about people; it is about statistics and metrics. Of course, the way this policy is applied under the Conservatives is grossly unequal: if you have £2million, you can essentially purchase a visa under the Tier 1 ‘Investor’ scheme. You can also get fast-tracked to citizenship in two years if you invest £10million.

One person that wrote to me to say they had been collecting immigration horror stories as I had. They told me that in just the last two years they have met:

• A mature student from India who was awarded a prestigious PhD scholarship but very nearly didn’t take it up because the Home Office would not allow her bring her 7 year-old daughter into the country. The father has had nothing to do with the child and the student’s parents were very elderly and in poor health, so she was the sole carer. However, she was forced to leave her daughter with her parents for a year in order to take up the scholarship – a once in a lifetime opportunity in her case – because UKBA [Border Agency] insisted she had a carer in India (i.e. the absentee father). Eventually the Home Office allowed her daughter into the country after two years and considerable pressure from the university.
• An Ethiopian PhD student who suffered several nervous breakdowns (including being sectioned) while dealing while visa extensions. Mental illness is deeply taboo in Ethiopia, which also made their condition worse.
• A South African scholar who completed a PhD in the UK and married an Italian after they both graduated. She couldn’t get an academic job here because she is non-EU, so they tried South Africa. He couldn’t get a secure post in South Africa because he is white and not South African. The result is that he now has a lectureship in the UK (which he can take as an EU citizen), while his wife is working in Cape Town. Who knows what the future holds for them.
• A Palestinian PhD student who already faces restrictions on movement by virtue of being Palestinian. This has been made worse by UKBA’s refusal to grant her mother (a law-abiding citizen from Hebron) a tourist visa for a two-week visit to see her daughter. No reason has ever been given.
• A colleague, who is a US citizen but has worked in the UK for many years, but still has to abide by the 180 days absence rule. Given that her husband works in the US, this does not make life very easy. Needless to say, she will not be working in the UK for too much longer.

This person agreed with my piece broadly and suggested that the “current visa restrictions are inhumane and pernicious in the effects they have on individuals and families. Moreover, the UK and universities, in particular, are poorer because of them. Universities need to be at the forefront of fighting against visa restrictions, but instead they are so threatened by UKBA that they seem more concerned with turning academics into border police through persistent monitoring of overseas students.” Another person summed up the general feeling of being unwelcome here under the current political climate when they told me they were “thinking seriously about what I should do if offered the post-doc position that I have an interview for at the end of this month…” How many good people are being driven away by shortsighted immigration policy with the Conservatives at the helm?

Immigrants like us (highly skilled or not) can’t vote today. Please place a proxy vote to kick the Conservatives out of Downing Street so that talent will flood back into our island and so that those of us who have chosen to bring our talent here can remain. After all, in many cases your taxes paid for our education and we would like to return the favour to the next generation.

Academics doing battle with the Home Office. Photo via FotograFFF/www.shutterstock.com 

Earlier this year, the UK lost a great scholar through a “soft deportation” when Miwa Hirono voluntarily left the country after an extended legal battle with the Home Office that left her and her family financially and psychologically exhausted.

Hirono, a Japanese citizen, worked for the University of Nottingham for nearly seven years as an expert in UK-China relations, had a child born in the UK, and had every intention of permanently residing here. However, she had been “absent” from the UK for more than 180 days over the past five years and as such was in breach Home Office residency requirements.

There is no doubt that the country benefited enormously from Hirono’s presence here. Even business secretary Vince Cable spoke out against the Home Office policies that compelled her to become a UK émigré.

I am an immigrant from the US grappling with my own set of work visa difficulties. After seven years here undertaking a UK-funded PhD, a two-year postdoc and now in a permanent position the University of Southampton, I remain under imminent threat of deportation, as do all of us lacking permanent residency.

Staying in the UK has cost me everything I have earned, destroyed relationships and severed ties to family in the US. I am regularly bewildered by my own stubborn desire to live and work here and struggle, as I know many of my colleagues do, to come to grips with whether this precarious existence is worth trying to maintain. Since arriving in 2008, I have been slowly collecting stories from colleagues about their costly battles with immigration authorities – and they are surely just the tip of the iceberg.

Visible targets

Riding a wave of EU-induced xenophobia, David Cameron declared in 2010 that he would “cut net migration to tens of thousands” from almost 300,000 per year. What Cameron did not say is who would be barred or deported from the country. Since that campaign promise, a steady war of attrition has been waged against Britain’s skilled workers arriving from outside the European Union, including those working at academic institutions, who, because they are playing by the rules, are most-easily targeted for removal through either “hard” or “soft” measures.

Soft measures make life untenable so that the migrant chooses to leave of their own volition, which is cheaper for the government. On the harder end of the spectrum, one person emailed me to say that his friend was in the middle of a PhD in London when he was “deported suddenly in the middle of the night after waiting a year for a decision on what should have been a routine visa extension”.

We can trace the implementation of these Conservative immigration policies to April 2012 when the Home Office scrapped the enormously popular Tier 1 post-study work visa, which gave students a window of up to two years to find work in the country with their newly-acquired UK university degrees.

A recent parliamentary report found that since the closure of the post-study work visa programme, there was a drop of 88% in the number of skilled and highly-skilled non-European graduates remaining in the UK to work, and that the number of students from overseas declined in 2012-13 for the first time in 29 years.

I was able to get my application in for a Tier 1 post-study work visa just before the closing deadline in 2012. This bought me enough time to secure a two-year postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford later that year. However, had I not been incredibly fastidious in following the changes in legislation, or had I not had the resources to pay the £918 application fee and been able to show £2,800 available funds for the preceding three months, I would not be here right now.

Tighter and tighter restrictions

The next blow to skilled workers landed in July 2012 when the Home Office also changed the rules of spousal visas so that families must make £18,600 in the 12 months prior to application in order to keep a partner in the country looking for work.

One of the first outspoken victims of this particular policy was Andrew Wilbur, a geographer originally from California, who had earned a PhD from Glasgow University, had been married to a Scottish woman for six years and was, by all measures, highly qualified. Wilbur was offered a job at Glasgow University after graduation but was unable to take it up because their combined household income did not exceed the threshold in the run-up to application. As a result, not only did Wilbur have to leave the UK, but the situation also forced his Scottish wife to leave. The only other option was to have their family split up.

Academic jobs are incredibly competitive. However, increasingly under these coalition policies, highly qualified immigrants do not even have to opportunity to compete.

When I eventually began my job at the University of Oxford in September 2012, I shared an office with a British-born natural resource expert who was working in a part-time research position as part of a larger project in the department. His wife was a US citizen and had, like him, recently earned a PhD from a UK university. After attending a series of job interviews (I went to six interviews over an eight month period before being offered my postdoc position) she received a letter from the Home Office stating that because her British husband made only £18,000 per year as a part-time researcher and she did not have an income, she would need to leave the UK, having fallen below the £18,600 threshold.

After watching them scramble find another £600 hiding in the previous year’s income somewhere, they both decided that they had had enough, packed up and moved abroad. They are good people and they were doing important work. They were no strain on the system. But faced with the prospect of their family being split up, their choice was obvious.

In 2015, along with making non-EU foreign nationals pay for the NHS (which we already pay taxes into if we are working), the Home Office also removed the right to appeal their refusal of visa applications in many instances.

Waiting it out

Currently, the Home Office is reviewing my work visa application (a move from the Tier 1 post-study work visa, now expired, to a Tier 2 employer-sponsored visa) and I got the application in before the Immigration Act 2014 took effect in May 2015. They have been “reviewing” the application since October 2014, which means my passport has been in a filing cabinet in Sheffield since then. It is clear that the Home Office has made a practice of retaining foreign passports for extended periods in many such instances, as they have with myself and Miwa Hirono.

I am used to being grounded. Since 2012, I have only been “allowed” to leave the UK twice. Both times required specific authorisation from my caseworker, which was only given after enormous pressure was exerted by my lawyers at great expense to myself and my hosting universities. I am fortunate to have the full support of the University of Southampton at present, but human resources is understandably wary every time my name comes up – they are as afraid of contravening confusing Home Office policy as I am. If, after waiting this long for a decision, the Home Office deny my visa for some reason, I will appeal and appeal again, as long as I need to. It is now a matter of principle.

My PhD research was overtly political and resulted in my house being raided twice and a high-profile court case. I was spared a jail sentence, but after pleading guilty to five counts of incidental criminal damage to railway property, I was given a three-year discharge and ordered to pay £2,000 costs.

I perfectly understand, in that context, why the Home Office is treating my application as complicated and I accept that due to the nature of my research I may need to prove, in Home Office speak, that my presence is “conducive to the public good”.

I have no problem fighting – but I am tenacious and single. Hirono, who had a husband and a child to consider, had her passport retained for a year through the appeal process. As much as we might appreciate Britain, being kept captive against one’s will is never going to be a situation one chooses without very good reason.

Rhetoric vs reality

Most people I ask about these situations, regardless of their political leanings, find them abhorrent. It seems to me there is a severe disconnect between the vitriol levelled at immigration into the country and the government policies actively curtailing immigration, which are damaging families, destroying careers and triggering an unprecedented skilled worker exodus from this sceptred isle.

A few weeks ago, in a cosy Hampshire pub, I was marking student papers when I heard a man at the bar loudly denouncing “immigrants” for “ruining the country”. When I ordered my next pint, I introduced myself and told him I was an immigrant. After speaking to him for a few minutes, it turned out his daughter had studied geography at Southampton. Had she been a few years younger, I likely would have been her lecturer.

By the end of our brief chat, he clapped a hand on my shoulder and told me “you know, when I say I’m frustrated about immigration, I wasn’t talking about people like you”. Perhaps by “people like you” he meant “white” or “American” or even “highly skilled”. I didn’t ask. But as I sat there sipping my beer, thinking about the upcoming election that I have no right to vote in despite paying the same taxes he does, I could not help but wonder if he was planning to cast a vote to cast me out.

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This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Louise Coysh, editor
LABYRINTH
A journey through London’s underground
by Mark Wallinger
320pp. Art/Books Publishing. £24.99.
978 1 908970 16 9

In 2010, Banksy’s agent placed an advertisement inside London Bridge station for his new film Exit Through the Gift Shop. The print depicted a young boy praying in front of a brush and bucket under a halo of dripping paint. Transport for London (TfL) refused to run the advert unless the dripping paint was removed. Two days after it was placed, sans halo, Banksy physically painted the halo back on the piece. TfL then removed the advert from the station, stating that it had been “defaced”. This situation is a good indication of how TfL engages with art: dissent and difference have no place in the London Underground. Mark Wallinger’s new book Labyrinth: A Journey Through London’s Underground is a handsome piece of corporate merchandise hiding behind a cadaver of democratic historicity.

The project pitch was relatively straightforward. Wallinger was commissioned by Art on the Underground to install pieces celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the tube. He decided to create 270 framed labyrinths in eleven stylistic variations, baked into black and white vitreous enamel. One was placed at each tube station in London. Wallinger’s choice of the labyrinth, rather than a maze, as his starting point is telling. In a transcribed conversation with Marina Warner that appears at the beginning of the book, he explains that he chose the form of the labyrinth because it is a condensed straight line, rather than a maze where one encounters dead-ends and potentially gets lost. TfL certainly do not want anyone getting lost in the tube: lost people, like unattended baggage or unsolicited art, is dangerous.

The installation never engendered much interest, perhaps because of a suspicion that the labyrinths, sanitised of any offending historic or aesthetic elements, might themselves be an advert. Or perhaps they were simply difficult to distinguish from the rest of the subterranean signage. As Wallinger explained to Will Self (who also wrote the foreword) in conversation at the London Review of Books, he had little say in where the art was placed. Flipping through the book, it is hard not to wonder how far that conspiracy stretches. In that context, Wallinger’s stated intent to stay close to TfL’s aesthetic, their roundel, their typeface, their brand, even to the point of having the company that makes TfL’s sings produce the prints, is disconcerting to say the least. Unsurprisingly, part of the funding for this project was provided by JCDecaux, the largest outdoor advertising corporation in the world.

The bulk of the text was adapted from Wikipedia entries about individual tube stations. Though the entries are loaded with fascinating detail and are remarkably up to date, this is more a repository of corralled records than an exercise in artistic flexing or critical creativity. Luckily the entries are paired with energetic photographs by Thierry Bal that drift between architectural and street photography. One can feel Bal struggling to make the labyrinths more stimulating, squeezing himself into contorted corners, using mirrors, and framing passing passengers in awkward spontaneous moments of self-awareness. Bal’s strained efforts to photograph all 270 labyrinths in an interesting way is actually a more luring piece of art than the labyrinths themselves.

However, Bals photos are also frustrating. It is obvious many of the photos were taken with a tripod, the use of which is expressly forbidden by TfL. As is “loitering” in stations. As is selling photos of stations one has captured. Bal’s photos then, however beautifully rendered, only serve to reinforce the fact that the tube today is one of the least democratic spaces in London, contrary to Tasmin Dillon’s comment in the preface that it is “one of the last truly democratic civil spaces”. The truth of the matter is that tube is no longer the participatory environment it once was.

For an exhibition celebrating 150 years of history, Wallinger’s pieces are conspicuously present tense. Once again scrambling to save the installation from itself, a contribution appears from Christian Wolmer at the end of the book – because that is where history goes, right before the index – where Wolmer praises the democratic nature of this innovative and inexpensive public transport network in a way only a historian could. Wolmer teases us by giving us glimpses behind the façade of the system: ghost stations, socialist histories, competing historical narratives, and tells us such anomalies make the tube a labyrinth. He meant a maze of course, since the labyrinth, with its single path in and out, has no room for “anomalies”, especially in today’s “political climate”. The contemporary tube is just a sterling chute.

Self buried a barb in the foreword for the book that serves as a useful hook. He suggests that, “it is in the conflict between perceiving the city as a labyrinth and experiencing the city as a maze that we discover the limits of our freedom.” It is obvious Wallinger is an anorak at heart and that he made a compromise for privileged access to private space that an artist could never engage with otherwise. I would venture to guess that Wallinger was as frustrated working through the commission as I was reading about it. Labyrinth is a cobbled bludgeon of colour and data that brings a bit of life to the exhibition but is ultimately more of a reflection of the unrelenting corporatisation of public infrastructure than the innovative art book it could have been – the book that Banksy would have made perhaps.