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Alastair is professor of social geography at Newcastle University.  His latest research projects are about memories of the city and themes of loss and yearning in modern politics.  He is the author of seven books including Off the Map: Lost Space, Feral Places and Invisible Cities and What They Tell Us About the World.

Berndnaut Smilde lives and works in Amsterdam and is best known for making clouds - real clouds - inside stately homes and austere churches. He has exhibited across the Netherlands and also in Toronto, Taipei, Istanbul, Dublin, London, Rotterdam and San Francisco. His recent shows include the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC as part of the High Art: A Decade of Collecting exhibition, and an exhibition about clouds at the Musèe de La Poste in Paris.

Rosalind Williams proposes the liberation of groundwater: it would reveal a whole world that has been driven out of sight and out of mind.  We should daylight, ie allow to run free, streams, rivers, ponds, marshes, and other wet areas and flows that have been pumped dry, diverted to culverts, embanked, or otherwise removed from the visible landscape.  Instead of commanding water where to go so it fits with our land-based charts, we can redraw our charts to take into account where the water is when left to its own devices.

Solitude: when is it a blessing and when a curse? With writers Eleanor Catton and Yiyun Li, and educator Diana Senechal.