I Know Where I’m Going: A Guide to Morecambe and Heysham by Michael Bracewell and Linder is our February 2025 Book of The Month, with 30% off all month.

A Linder retrospective, Danger Came Smiling, is open at the Hayward Gallery from 11 February–5 May 2025.

I Know Where I’m Going is a collaborative book by writer Michael Bracewell and artist Linder. It functions as a gazetteer for the Heysham and Morecambe coast, once described on a Victorian postcard as ‘The Naples of the North’. Whilst investigating and illustrating how a landscape can recollect its own past with a particular regional intensity, this book is also concerned with how our experience of the future can be discovered through history.

A key section in the book looks at the then semi-derelict Midland Hotel, built overlooking Morecambe Bay and considered to be one of the most important Art Deco buildings in Britain. Constructed in 1933, the ocean-liner shape of Oliver Hill’s breathtaking designs still retain their sense of sleek modernity − its exterior walls were treated with a mixture of carborundum powder and crushed blue glass which was electrically polished so the whiteness of the building literally glittered in the sun. Then there were the guests: Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, the Earl of Derby and Coco Chanel who, as legend has it, flew up from Cap d’Antibes landing her flying boat on Morecambe Bay. I Know Where I’m Going delivers an invaluable and visually demanding insight into the nature of regional studies from two celebrated creative practitioners.

Published in 2003 as part of the New Writing series, guest-edited by Michael Bracewell, and unlikely to be reprinted so these will be the last available copies