July 2025

July 30th: Dan Raven-Ellison on the Living Adventurously Podcast
Another recommendation from Alan’s LivingGeography blog and another really interesting listen. Many geography teachers will be aware of Dan’s work on various projects (and recognise him from the fieldwork videos of BBC Bitesize!) and the podcast gives a really interesting update on Slow Ways, the National Park City movement and much more.

I particularly enjoyed Alistair and Dan’s conversation about land use in the UK and their thoughts on how we need to be much better at educating our young people on how the UK landscape has been shaped and to be critical of what we see as the ‘natural’ landscape of the UK. This is something I’ve been working hard to ensure we teach explicitly in our KS3 geography curriculum and has led to us teaching about rewilding for the first time as part of our ‘Our Home the UK’ topic:
https://x.com/kate_stockings/status/1810376642466033934
https://x.com/kate_stockings/status/1880256596720382475

For resources to help teach about London as a National Park City and bottom-up urban greening projects, click here.

July 29th: Sir Gareth Southgate’s Richard Dimbleby Lecture
Having seen this shared by a fellow teacher on Twitter a while ago, I finally got round to watching this lecture now that the summer holidays are firmly underway. Talking about the importance of role models, identity, real-life connections and resilience, this was a fascinating listen and one I’d recommend to all teachers- it gave me lots of food for thought.

July 22nd: Down a rabbit hole of research about our high streets
Without a doubt, one of my most-used websites is Alan Parkinson’s excellent LivingGeography blog. This compendium of geographical resources, information, and recommendations ensures that I always feel clued-up about what is going on in the world around us and up-to-date with the latest resource offerings of various organisations. In a recent check of the blog, I saw Alan had shared this article from the Guardian about the health of our high streets and found myself diving straight into my ‘Healthy High Street’ resources to update them…

As well as a resource update, my research and reading also led me to these two podcasts which were very enjoyable listens:
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025d4j
2. https://www.centreforcities.org/podcast/city-minutes-the-varying-perfomance-of-high-streets/

The second was perhaps the most interesting piece on the urban geography of the UK that I’ve engaged with for a very long time. Although advertised as a podcast about the varying performances of high streets across the country, the conversation is much more broad than the title suggests and discusses the wider economics and geography of our urban centres. A highly recommended listen for all geography teachers!

July 2nd: RGS CPD Day
Today I joined the RGS for their ‘Gentrification and Complexity’ CPD day in Stratford, East London. Hosted with academics from UCL, this day took place at the new UCL East buildings and I finally got to go inside the buildings that I’ve passed countless times on fieldwork!

The day started with a walk around the Olympic Park and Hackney Wick. Although I know this area well, it is always a pleasure to undertake a guided walk with others sharing fresh insights. As we walked, the UCL team shared their knowledge of the impacts of gentrification with us and asked us to take photos of what we noticed for an activity later in the day. After our walk it was into the UCL Pond Street building for a lecture on Cities and Complexity before an afternoon on mapping and modelling gentrification using different softwares.

This was an excellent day of high-quality CPD from the RGS and I look forward to joining them again soon for more CPD.
This event in September caught my eye today- I haven’t engaged with the National Education Nature Park as much as I should have!

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June 2025