![Portrait photo of Bradley L](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Portrait_photo_of_Bradley_L._Garrett.jpg)
Bradley Garrett (born January 4, 1981)
is an American
social
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives from ...
and
cultural geographer at
University College Dublin
University College Dublin (commonly referred to as UCD) ( ga, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath) is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a collegiate university, member institution of the National University of Ireland ...
in Ireland and a writer for ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' newspaper in the United Kingdom. He describes his research interests as being at the intersections of cultural geography, archaeology and visual methods and writes that his research is about "finding the hidden in the world". He is the author of five books including ''Bunker: Building for the End Times'', a contemporary account of doomsday preppers around the world, and ''Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City'',
an ethnographic account of the activities of the London Consolidation Crew (LCC), a group of urban explorers Garrett calls "place hackers".
In addition to his work in human geography, Garrett has published academic research papers in archaeology, history, ethics, criminology, and visual methods.
Education
Garrett received a B.S. in
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...
and B.A. in history from the
University of California, Riverside
The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on in a suburban distr ...
in 2003 before moving to Australia to undertake an
MSc in
maritime archaeology
Maritime archaeology (also known as marine archaeology) is a discipline within archaeology as a whole that specifically studies human interaction with the sea, lakes and rivers through the study of associated physical remains, be they vessels, s ...
at
James Cook University
James Cook University (JCU) is a public university in North Queensland, Australia. The second oldest university in Queensland, JCU is a teaching and research institution. The university's main campuses are located in the tropical cities of Cairn ...
in 2005. He did his first ethnographic research with the
Winnemem Wintu
The Winnemem Wintu ("middle river people" or "middle water people") are a band of the Native American Wintu tribe originally located along the lower McCloud River, above Shasta Dam near Redding, California.
History
The Winnemem are one of what ...
tribe in
Northern California
Northern California (colloquially known as NorCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties, its main population centers incl ...
about their loss of access to ancestral land inundated by the construction of
Shasta Dam
Shasta Dam (called Kennett Dam before its construction) is a concrete arch-gravity dam across the Sacramento River in Northern California in the United States. At high, it is the eighth-tallest dam in the United States. Located at the north e ...
.
He then worked for private archaeology firms in Hawaii and for the
Bureau of Land Management
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is an agency within the United States Department of the Interior responsible for administering federal lands. Headquartered in Washington DC, and with oversight over , it governs one eighth of the country's la ...
in California as an archaeologist.
In 2008, Garrett moved to the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
where he completed a
PhD in social and cultural geography at
Royal Holloway, University of London
Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public research university and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It has six schools, 21 academic departm ...
, with a thesis entitled ''Tales of Urban Exploration''.
He was supervised by the human geographer
Tim Cresswell
Tim Cresswell (born 1965) is a British human geographer and poet. Cresswell is the Ogilvie Professor of Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh having formally served as the Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Tr ...
.
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
The School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE) is a department of the University of Oxford in England, which is part of the university's Social Sciences Division. It is located in the Oxford University Centre for the Environment on South Pa ...
from 2012 to 2014, where he was a fellow of
Wolfson College, Oxford
Wolfson College () is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Located in north Oxford along the River Cherwell, Wolfson is an all-graduate college with around sixty governing body fellows, in addition to both research and ...
. He then worked for two years at the
University of Southampton
, mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour
, type = Public research university
, established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...
before moving to the
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...
in Australia, where he was a research fellow and conducted multi-year ethnographic research with "doomsday preppers" building for apocalyptic scenarios.
His first book 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
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) is Australia's original disruptive festival that encourages debate and critical thinking, co-founded in 2009 by The Ethics Centre (formerly known as the St James Ethics Centre) held in Sydney, Australia.
...
at the
Sydney Opera House
The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre in Sydney. Located on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour, it is widely regarded as one of the world's most famous and distinctive buildings and a masterpiece of 20th-century architec ...
and at Google Zeitgeist in 2014, where he shared a session with
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson Clinton ( né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and agai ...
, 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
The Post Office Railway, is a narrow gauge, driverless underground railway in London that was built by the Post Office with assistance from the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, to transport mail between sorting offices. Inspire ...
, a 6.5-mile subterranean train network used by the Post Office to transport post across the city. Near the end of his research project, Garrett followed the LCC as they systematically infiltrated abandoned Tube stations in the
London Underground
The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or by its nickname the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent ceremonial counties of England, counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and He ...
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 a 2013 interview with Will Storr for ''
The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was fo ...
'', Garrett described "place hacking", otherwise known as
urban exploration
Urban exploration (often shortened as UE, urbex and sometimes known as roof and tunnel hacking) is the exploration of manmade structures, usually abandoned ruins or hidden components of the manmade environment. Photography and historical inter ...
, as a way of "...seeing the city like it's a puzzle and putting the pieces of that puzzle together, connecting things". Garrett went on to explain that "...the more we feel like there are things we can't do and places we can't see, the more urban exploration has
capacity to give people hope".
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
William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English author, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Sel ...
,
Green Party
A green party is a formally organized political party based on the principles of green politics, such as social justice, environmentalism and nonviolence.
Greens believe that these issues are inherently related to one another as a foundation ...
mayoral candidate
Siân Berry
Siân Rebecca Berry (born 9 July 1974) is a British politician who served as Co-Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales alongside Jonathan Bartley from 2018 to 2021, and as its sole leader from July to October 2021. From 2006 to 2007, s ...
, writer
Anna Minton
Anna Minton is a British writer, journalist, and academic. Born 19 April 1970, educated at Queen's College, Oxford, Minton has worked as a foreign correspondent, business reporter and social affairs writer and has won a number of national jou ...
and comedian
Mark Thomas
Mark Clifford Thomas (born 11 April 1963) is an English comedian, presenter, political satirist, and journalist. He first became known as a guest comic on the BBC Radio 1 comedy show ''The Mary Whitehouse Experience'' in the late 1980s. He is ...
, staged a mass trespass onto land owned by property group
More London
More London, part of an area known as London Bridge City, is a development on the south bank of the River Thames, immediately south-west of Tower Bridge in London. It is owned by the Kuwaiti sovereign wealth fund.
It includes the City Hall, ...
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." As a result of this campaigning, the Mayor of London,
Sadiq Khan
Sadiq Aman Khan (; born 8 October 1970) is a British politician serving as Mayor of London since 2016. He was previously Member of Parliament (MP) for Tooting from 2005 until 2016. A member of the Labour Party, Khan is on the party's sof ...
, established a charter regulating the management of privately owned public spaces in the capital.
In 2016, Garrett also released a
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...
project built in collaboration with ''The Guardian'' called "Underworld", which allows users to venture through the 'lost'
Fleet River
The River Fleet is the largest of London's subterranean rivers, all of which today contain foul water for treatment. Its headwaters are two streams on Hampstead Heath, each of which was dammed into a series of ponds—the Hampstead Ponds and ...
under London guided by Garrett who "guides users from the blood sewers beneath
Smithfield Market
Smithfield, properly known as West Smithfield, is a district located in Central London, part of Farringdon Without, the most westerly ward of the City of London, England.
Smithfield is home to a number of City institutions, such as St Bartho ...
in the City of London down to the Thames."
Garrett wrote 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."
In 2017, Garrett began a three-year research fellowship at the University of Sydney, which involved embedding himself with doomsday prepper communities around the world who were preparing for a global disaster. The resulting book, published in 2020, in first few months of the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
, was completed with eerie timeliness
according to writer Robert Macfarlane The book received positive reviews from US and UK media outlets.
In July 2020, as part of the launch of ''Bunker: Building for the End Times'', Garrett was a guest on
The Joe Rogan Experience
''The Joe Rogan Experience'' is a podcast hosted by American comedian, presenter, and UFC color commentator Joe Rogan. It launched on December 24, 2009, on YouTube by Rogan and comedian Brian Redban, who was its sole co-host and producer unti ...
hosted by
Joe Rogan
Joseph James Rogan (born August 11, 1967) is an American UFC
The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is an American mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is owned and operated by Zuffa, a wholly ...
. In the interview, Garrett revealed that he had purchased a forest cabin in
Big Bear Lake, California
Big Bear Lake is a small city in San Bernardino County, California, located in the San Bernardino Mountains along the south shore of Big Bear Lake, and surrounded by the San Bernardino National Forest. The city is located about 25 miles (40&nb ...
, where he'd begun to stockpile supplies for widespread social, political, or environmental breakdown.
Books
* ''Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City'' (2013)
* ''Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital'' (2014)
* ''London Rising: Illicit Photos from the City's Heights'' (2016)
* ''Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within'' (2016)
* ''Bunker: Building for the End Times'' (2020)
In addition, Garrett has authored over 50 academic publications, including journal articles and book chapters.
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
Heathrow Airport (), called ''London Airport'' until 1966 and now known as London Heathrow , is a major international airport in London, England. It is the largest of the six international airports in the London airport system (the others be ...
by
British Transport Police
, nativename =
, abbreviation = BTP
, patch =
, patchcaption =
, logo = British Transport Police Logo.svg
, logocaption = Logo of the British Transport Police
, badge =
, badgecaption =
, f ...
investigating the group's means of access to abandoned Tube stations.
Garrett maintains that he does ethnography in the tradition of the
Chicago school 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
William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English author, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Sel ...
came to the defence of Garrett and the urban explorers, writing in the ''
London Evening Standard
The ''Evening Standard'', formerly ''The Standard'' (1827–1904), also known as the ''London Evening Standard'', is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format.
In October 2009, after be ...
'' that "place-hackers are performing a valuable service by reminding us that the city should, in principle, belong to its citizens"
University of Oxford
, mottoeng = The Lord is my light
, established =
, endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019)
, budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20)
, chancellor ...
Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography
The Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography established in 1971 is located at St Peter's College, Oxford, St Peter's College of the University of Oxford. The post is named after Sir Halford Mackinder, the first Reader in the Department of Geograp ...
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
f the sites visitedand stop me from writing about this thing, because what we did undermined their narrative of security."
A 201
European Ethics Framework published by PRO-RESsuggested that Garrett's research was ethically problematic because, "Garrett adopts various professional and personal roles – sometimes he is an ethnographer, sometimes an urban explorer, sometimes a political activist, film-maker or gonzo journalist."
Popular references
In the 2015 book of short stories ''
Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories'' by
China Miéville
China Tom Miéville ( ; born 6 September 1972) is a British speculative fiction writer and literary critic. He often describes his work as ''weird fiction'' and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers called '' New Weird''.
Mi ...
, the character Infiltrex is based on Garrett.
In the 2017 book ''The Last London'' by
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSL (born 11 June 1943) is a writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography. Biography Education
Sinclair was born in Cardiff in 1943. From 1956 to 1961, he was educate ...
, Sinclair writes about how Garrett and friends in London had been busy constructing a network of illegal structures they called "urban bothies". Sinclair writes that "They are bivouacs, where people are free to rest, write, eat, sleep, disguised by black paint and a padlock. They look like any other workman's hut, within the dead zones of some of the most secure and spooked enclaves in the City of London."
In the 2019 book ''
Underland: A Deep Time Journey'' by
Robert Macfarlane (writer)
Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
He is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include ''The Old Ways'' (2012), ''Landmarks'' (2015), ...
, part of the chapter entitled "Invisible Cities" is based around Macfarlane's explorations with Garrett underground in London and Wales. Macfarlane also describes acting as a character witness in Garrett's trial with the London Consolidation Crew. He writes, "As well as a daredevil adventurer's streak, Bradley had an archaeologist's interest in contemporary forms of obsolescence, and a natural historian's interest in how the wild returned to abandoned places... I came to associate my time away with Bradley with adrenaline, alcohol, and extreme fatigue."
References
External links
Dr Bradley Garrettat
University College Dublin
University College Dublin (commonly referred to as UCD) ( ga, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath) is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a collegiate university, member institution of the National University of Ireland ...
Bradley Garrett's websitePlace Hacking
{{DEFAULTSORT:Garrett, Bradley
Living people
Social geographers
Academics of University College Dublin
University of California, Riverside alumni
1981 births
American expatriate academics