“The Arrangement” is a site-specific pod-cast commissioned by RADAR in Loughborough
that could have happened anywhere and yet it all happened here or hereabouts. It is a sonic document, the only document I have left, of a brief visit to Loughborough that casts doubt on whether the town actually existed as a solid architectural fact, however firmly it was established on a map, or evidenced in a photographic tourist brochure.
You make an arrangement, book a ticket and arrive, but as you arrive and walk through its streets it becomes clearer and clearer that it is not there, you are there. The fleeting voices, yours included, the sounds all around you, the messages left, all spins an elaborate and opaque web that designs itself in the form of the town. But it lacks the assumed opacity of its own architecture, its buildings, its sights, in favour of life living now, dense, porous and complex and there. The buildings seen are but façades, pretending a permanence that is contradicted by the sounds of the town, talking and moving; proclaiming a far more tangible presence than they actually have. The town itself is transitory, passing the trains arriving at its station, rather than the trains passing it. Loughborough in the end becomes the visitor rather than Loughborough, because Loughborough itself, as shown on the map, does not exist.
