Isolarion

Can someone with a job and a family still go on a pilgrimage, or does a spiritual journey require giving up ordinary life? James Attlee takes up this question in Isolarion, a reflective, street-smart and personal account of walking through a place he assumed he already knew: Cowley Road in Oxford, just beyond his front door.

The title comes from a fifteenth-century style of map that cuts out a single district and charts it in close detail. Attlee works in that spirit, notebook and tape recorder in hand, examining a road that has once held a leper hospital, a workhouse and a medieval well believed to cure the sick. It has little in common with the Oxford of students and visitors. What he finds is a busy, worldly street of shops, restaurants, pubs and places of worship that mirror the varied community around it.

His explorations range from floating in a sensory-deprivation tank to a discreet visit to an unmarked adult shop. Along the way he finds halal butchers beside jewellery makers, and reggae venues close to quiet churchyards. Attlee values this mix above all, yet it faces pressure from planners and developers, and his journey carries a note of unease about whether the street's rough variety will be flattened into sameness.

Drawing on sources from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee guides readers with warmth and humour, delighting in the remarkable details of everyday life. The result combines a travel narrative, a stand against uniformity and an appreciation of the twenty-first-century city.