Bradley Garrett

Books

Education

Garrett received a B.S. in anthropology and B.A. in history from the University of California, Riverside in 2003 before moving to Australia to undertake an MSc in maritime archaeology at James Cook University in 2005. He did his first ethnographic research with the Winnemem Wintu tribe in Northern California about their loss of access to ancestral land inundated by the construction of Shasta Dam. He then worked for private archaeology firms in Hawaii and for the Bureau of Land Management in California as an archaeologist.

In 2008, Garrett moved to the United Kingdom where he completed a PhD in social and cultural geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, with a thesis entitled Tales of Urban Exploration. He was supervised by the human geographer Tim Cresswell.

Career

Upon completion of his PhD, Garrett took up a two-year postdoctoral research post at School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford from 2012-2014, where he was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He then worked for two years at the University of Southampton moving to the University of Sydney where he is now based. He is currently doing research with survivalists preparing for apocalyptic scenarios.[1]

His most significant work is Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City. The book describes the exploits of the LCC, as they trespassed into hundred of locations over five years in an attempt to "reveal the hidden city". The book was chosen by Rowan Moore of The Guardian as one of the best architecture books of 2013. Garrett claims the goal of this work was to re-map London by opening out vertical urban imaginations and exposing the ways in which surveillance and control are embedded in modern spatial planning. Garrett suggests surveillance is subverted and rendered inert through the urban explorer's "place hack" when control of the city is temporarily taken back through creative practice. In a 2014 TEDx talk entitled "Trespass is Good for Cities", Garrett told the audience that "When we explore cities, when we ignore the "no trespassing" signs and cross those borders, whether we can see them or not, we open up opportunities for critical creativity, we re-create space and we make the impossible possible." Garrett was also invited to speak about his research at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House and at Google Zeitgeist in 2014, where he shared a session with Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States.

In his public lectures, Garrett describes how the LCC came to notoriety first in 2011 when they released photos of the mothballed London Post Office Railway, a 6.5-mile subterranean train network used by the Post Office to transport post across the city. The next year, the group (with Garrett) climbed the Shard, the European Union's tallest skyscraper, before it was completed, and released photos from the top of the building. Near the end of his research project, Garrett followed the LCC as they systematically infiltrated abandoned Tube stations in the London Underground without permission and posted photos online. Soon after, Garrett began appearing on UK media discussing these explorations, describing himself as "the scribe for the tribe".

In 2015, Garrett was the recipient of the James Cook University Early Career Alumni Award for the College of Arts, Society and Education in Queensland, Australia.

In February 2016 Garrett, along with writer Will Self, Green Party mayoral candidate Siân Berry, writer Anna Minton and comedian Mark Thomas, staged a mass trespass onto land owned by property group More London in protest of the privatisation of public space in the city. The group occupied a private amphitheater called The Scoop and held an unsanctioned 2-hour event for a crowd of people. On the Facebook page for the event, Garrett wrote that "one of the subsidiary effects of the rampant redevelopment of the city is that when the construction dust settles, often we find that open-air public spaces once maintained by civil bodies have been quietly passed into the hands of corporations as part of austerity-driven buyouts...It is time for our urban rambler moment; it is time to reclaim our cities."

In 2016, Garrett also released a virtual reality project built in collaboration with The Guardian called Underworld, which allows users to venture through the 'lost' Fleet River under London guided by Garrett who "guides users from the blood sewers beneath Smithfield Market in the City of London down to the Thames."

Garrett writes a news column for Guardian Cities where public space, trespass and the underground are frequent themes. Whilst recording for the 2016 BBC World Service radio show The Forum with Bridget Kendall, Garrett stated "if the 20th century was the age of the skyscraper then the 21st century is probably the age of the tunnel."

Controversy

Garrett has been criticised for being too close to his project participants and failing to maintain objective distance as a researcher. In 2011, four of his project participants were arrested inside the London Tube on Easter. Garrett himself was later also arrested at Heathrow Airport by British Transport Police investigating the group's means of access to abandoned Tube stations.

Garrett maintains that he does ethnography in the tradition of the Chicago school (sociology) and claims the only way to understand a culture is to become fully immersed in it. The charges against Garrett concluded with a three-year conditional discharge and a £2000 fine being issued by the court.

Will Self came to the defence of Garrett and the urban explorers, writing in the London Evening Standard that "place-hackers are performing a valuable service by reminding us that the city should, in principle, belong to its citizens" University of Oxford Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography Professor Danny Dorling also spoke out at the end of the case, contending that the prosecution had been a fundamental breach of academic liberty. In an interview with the Guardian in 2016, Garrett said "I realise that the trauma we were subjected to was actually the point. What the British Transport police wanted to do was stop me from publishing photos [of the sites visited] and stop me from writing about this thing, because what we did undermined their narrative of security.”