I’ll get my coat by Usman Saeed & Sukhdev Sandhu (2005) is our Book of the Month, with 30% off all August.

A writer, an archivist and a painter set out on foot to explore the landscape of Britain. Eschewing the heritage trail they walk the streets of Dalston and Stoke Newington, the cemetery in Ilford, and through Manningham, journeying after the Muslim vernacular across the landscape − mapping Asian history, culture and ruins in Britain.

I’ll Get My Coat is a collaborative artists’ book, the end product of walks and talks between Sukhdev Sandhu, Sara Wajid, and Usman Saeed. Two share a similar culture and similar memories, of being Asian Britons, of aspirations and shame. The other, a painter and fashion photographer from Pakistan, is drawn to the license and possibilities that Britain offers, to a glamour that the others find themselves rejecting for an anthropology of Asian ruins.

Published as part of Scape Specific, a project curated by Sara Wajid which explores the evolution of a Muslim vernacular in the British landscape.
Scape Specific is an imaginary map of a Muslim vernacular in the English language and landscape. The collaborators have taken a defiantly parochial focus on the everyday texture of dialects and local inflections close to our hearts. We’re not interested in the construction of British Islam, only the specificity of Mannigham Mirpuris, Essex Punjabis and Kurds from Stoke Newington. Scape Specific is both a record and a fantasy of a Muslim life more ordinary.