BOWIE IS STILL OUT THERE... Following open heart surgery poet and writer Peter Carpenter was
given one instruction - 'Walk if you want to stay on this planet'. And so when his hero and
inspiration David Bowie died in 2016 he knew what he had to do. The man who was to so many a
companion and guide had left no shrine no focal point of understanding. To reconnect with
Bowie he would take a walk into the past to the streets towns and places where David Jones
became something more. Walking to recover to stay alive Peter realised he was also
recovering his lost hero. Leaving behind Heddon Street and Brixton well-known Bowie shrines
he moved out through South London edgelands and suburbia to remoter Bowie haunts: Croydon
Aylesbury Pett Level Southend-on-Sea. Finding the windows Bowie had stared out from in
Clareville Grove the streets in Beckenham where he'd scurried by. He sifted through debris on
a patch of waste ground in Tunbridge Wells where Bowie's parents first met. He turned the
handle and entered Shirley Parish Hall to find the same stage where a young Davy Jones and the
Kon-Rads set up to play back in 1962 and travelled to Berlin to emerge from the S-Bahn to
gape at the ruined portico of the Anhalter Bahnhof and asked 'What is this?' In Bowieland
Carpenter's peripatetic trampings seem to echo Bowie's own wandering creative spirit the walks
often uncovering hidden layers and making fresh connections to key Bowie stories uncovering
and influences conscious and subconscious. Through walking an understanding is reached of
where Bowie sits in the culture his place among the poets painters artists and musicians who
came before him who inhabited the same spaces and in doing so passed on their wisdom to Bowie.
Through Carpenter's travels these suburban lands became a new very real place that anyone can
visit if they take the time... Welcome to 'Bowieland'
