Cruising landscape-objects: inland waterway guidebooks and wayfinding with them

Abstract

This article introduces inland waterway guidebooks as cultural objects that deserve further attention from cultural geographers who have begun to shed light on inland waterway cultures in recent years. It contributes to the wider disciplines long-standing interests in representations and representational objects, and more recently the interest in studying representations and their relations to everyday forms of practice. Focusing on a popular series of waterway guide, the Collins/Nicholson Waterways guides, I employ textual and visual analysis alongside an autoethnographic account of using these guides to examine what waterway guidebooks are, how they represent waterway spaces and how they are used in the practices of wayfinding on a narrowboat. By doing so I argue that waterway guides are powerful objects of representation that can tell us much about how waterway spaces are represented and how they are experienced with a guide in hand from the perspective of boat users. In laying out these arguments, I build on the notion of the travelling landscape-object to develop a theory of cruising landscape-objects, which I define as waterway guides that both represent, (re)produce and circulate waterway spaces at the same time as they are representational and material objects that can co-constitute wayfinding practices on the water.