THE NORTH ROAD by @robbiecowen This year’s module with The Open University - Understanding Politics - is both fascinating and mind-expanding. It’s making me think about concepts of politics in entirely new ways, including reflecting on notions of the ‘spaces of politics’ and the ‘politics of space’. I have been introduced to the work of Doreen Massey, a groundbreaking geographer, and in turn that has given me a new appreciation of one of the best books I have read this year, THE NORTH ROAD by Rob Cowen. Doreen Massey argues that space is never static — it’s ‘the product of interrelations’, always alive with overlapping stories, movements, and possibilities. Place, for her, is not a fixed location but a meeting point: a living negotiation between past and present, local and global, human and more-than-human. Rob Cowen’s THE NORTH ROAD brings that vision vividly to life. Across centuries of voices and lives, his northern bound road becomes a tapestry of coexistence — soldiers and travellers, animals and builders, refugees and family — all layered within the same stretch of earth. The road isn’t just a setting; it’s a palimpsest of power, memory, and belonging. Like Massey’s ‘global sense of place’, Cowen’s writing reminds us that every local landscape is porous, threaded through with wider histories and ecologies. THE NORTH ROAD turns geography into story, and story into a way of seeing how space itself is political, plural, and alive. I cannot recommend Cowen’s book highly enough. With poetic elegance, it celebrates our past and explains our present, in ways that bring Doreen Massey’s theories to exquisite life. #DoreenMassey #RobCowen #TheNorthRoad #ForSpace #AGlobalSenseOfPlace #PlaceWriting #CulturalGeography #politicsofspace @OpenUniversity @PenguinUKBooks