Philip Hoare: 30km
An essay from the monograph: ‘Going Nowhere’, published by Film & Video Umbrella, 2009

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On 15 September 1784, Vincenzo Lunardi’s hot balloon rose from the Artillery Ground, next to Bunhill Fields in the city of London. M. Lunardi floated over the fixture site of William Blake’s grave like one of the visionary’s angels let loose from Peckham Rye, then he drifted over the metropolis eating chicken and drinking wine, surveying the city from his gondola, all the while watched, like some eighteenth-century extra-terrestrial, by the Prince of Wales and 150,000 citizens.

For the first time, the world’s greatest city was seen from the air, ‘so reduced on the great scale before me.’ as Lunardi recalled, ‘that I can find no simile to convey an idea of it. I saw streets as lines, all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women but which I should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. All the moving mass seemed to have no object but myself, and the affectionate transport, admiration and glory of the present moment was not without its effect on my mind’.

A few years later, exiled in his own country by his subversive verse, Percy Bysshe Shelley attached copies of his Declaration of Rights to miniature silk balloons which he floated over the Devon moors, aerial samizdats to seed the rain of revolution, ‘Twinkling amid the dark blue depths of Heaven’. To the willowy poet, barely earthbound himself, the prospect of leaving the ground promised utopian revelation and universal manumission. ‘The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable,’ he declared. ‘Why are we still so ignorant of the interior of Africa? – why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely under neath it, as it glided silently over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery altogether’.

Shelley’s aspirations were shared by Horace Walpole, creator of the Gothic novel and builder of Strawberry Hill. ‘These new mechanical meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as if so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science, the aesthete believed. But he also suspected the worst: ‘The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the result of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom’.

In 1870, the artist and aerialist Philip Brannon devised a navigable balloon, from which he could paint his utopian scenes of Southampton – only he looked out on a scene irrevocably altered by the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Fields were now bisected by railways; the port’s suburbs sprawled over the countryside. Even as man was granted this remarkable vantage point, even as the balloon’s shadow fell, the land itself was disappearing.

A century or so later, I rose by hot-air balloon from Southampton Common, a few hundred yards from where Brannon made his ascent. I was quite unprepared for the experience. Modern travellers are used to being in the air. We see the earth and sea from pressurised cabins, peering through plexiglass over a world we long ago conquered. But in a balloon, silence replaces the roar a jet engine. Nothing stood between me and the vista unrolling below like one of Brannon’s panoramas: the woman hanging out her washing on that early summer morning: the antediluvian cranes of Southampton Docks and the Isle of Wight floating on a silvery horizon; the green baize lushness of the New Forest and the sudden scudding to ground of the wicker basket as we landed unceremoniously in a soft and muddy field, reclaimed by an earth determined not to let go of us again.

On its aerial mission from another Hampshire field, Simon Faithfull’s camera swings dizzyingly into the air, dangling from a weather balloon (the kind that was offered as an explanation for the UFO sightings at Roswell). Quickly gaining height, the contraption rises over the nearby concrete tower at Sway built by another Victorian visionary, Andrew Peterson, as an experimental temple to the new art — or was it a science? — of Spiritualism. The view from Faithfull’s experiment is equally magical and mysterious, a circular masked image from a camera obscura evoking Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death, in which a god-like surgeon surveys his domain through a roof-top lens, projecting bustling village streets onto his table-screen.