Children's Geographies

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'To Go Back up the Side Hill': Memories,

Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood

CHRIS PHILO

To cite this article: CHRIS PHILO (2003) 'To Go Back up the Side Hill': Memories, Imaginations
and Reveries of Childhood, Children's Geographies, 1:1, 7-23, DOI: 10.1080/14733280302188

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Children’s Geographies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 7–23, 2003

‘To Go Back up the Side Hill’:

Memories, Imaginations and
Reveries of Childhood

CHRIS PHILO
Chris Philo, Department of Geography and Topographic Science, University of
Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. E-mail: cphilo@geog.gla.ac.uk

ABSTRACT This paper offers theoretical reflections on how adult researchers access,
process and represent the ‘worlds’ of children and childhood. Recognising previous
claims and warnings issued by geographers, it is argued that researchers can and should
take advantage of the fact that all adult researchers have once been children, meaning
that there are always fragments of connection allowing ‘us’ at least some intimation of
children’s geographies as experiencede and imagined from within. Gaston Bachelard’s
(1969a) ‘poetics of reverie’ is partially built upon just such a sense of connection, laying
out the basis for a phenomenology of childhood wherein adults seek an imaginative
revisiting of the reveries—the absent-minded daydreaming—of ‘bored’ and ‘idle’ chil-
dren. This paper provides a critical exegesis of Bachelard’s work in this respect,
emphasising the importance to his thinking of geography, landscape and environment as
both elements within and embodied spurs to childhood reverie. Questions about the
admixture of adult imagination and memory in the recovery of childhood reverie are
considered, and conclusions are reached about what can usefully be taken from
Bachelard’s ‘poetics of childhood’, notably in terms of a methodology of ‘not doing too
much’ as an adult researcher in this field. Claims are also made about needing to take
more seriously than hitherto the mundane reveries of childhood, those contained in
children’s own undirected jottings, drawings and play, as a possible source for future
inquiries into children’s geographies.

Childhood flows from so many springs (sources) that it would be as futile to

construct its geography as to write its history. (Bachelard, 1969a, p. 112)

Introduction: Adults, Children and Connections

‘Adult researchers are not children’, writes David Sibley (1991, p. 270) in his thoughtful
comments on Sarah James’s 1990 Area paper that restated the case for mounting
geographical studies of children.1 Responding to her call for geographers to attempt
‘viewing reality through the eyes of both children and adults’ (James, 1990, p. 283, my
emphasis), Sibley’s simple observation that geographers as adult researchers are no
ISSN 1473-3285 print; ISSN 1473-3277 online/03/010007-17  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1473328022000041634
8 Chris Philo

longer children announces a problematic that has hovered in the margins of this
emerging new field of inquiry ever since. In some respects, it is a difficulty standing as
one instance of a more general conundrum for geographers studying all manner of
human groupings, in that there is often a gulf—sometimes massive, sometimes more
nuanced—in terms of attributes, identities and backgrounds between the person of the
researcher and the persons of the researched. Peter Jackson (1993) referred to this as ‘a
geography of position’, and much ink has been expended, both in the geographical
literature and beyond, on the problems entailed when a researcher remains an ‘outsider’
to the everyday worlds of the people being studied. Up for debate is the credibility of
the researcher’s findings and conclusions, as linked to the representational problems
arising as the academic seeks to portray these ‘other worlds’, all as framed by the fraught
ethics of the research process from the moment of entering ‘the field’ to when research
write-ups circulate and become available for external use.
For adults researching children, such questions perhaps have a special charge, not least
because of the perceived (and often very real) vulnerability of this particular cohort of
research subjects, as linked to the great nervousness felt by many other adults—parents,
schoolteachers, social workers, politicians—about allowing ‘strangers’ access to children
and their spaces. In consequence, we are immediately forced to assess exactly why and
how we are proposing to conduct research with children, and to wonder whether there
are methodological and ethical issues arising in this context that are fundamentally
different to those arising in research with (most) adult cohorts. Various such issues
integral to researching children have already been inspected in the geographical literature
by the likes of Aitken (1994, especially pp. 31–38), Matthews et al. (1998) and Valentine
(1999), and doubtless this new Children’s Geographies journal will be doing more to
satisfy Sibley’s (1991, p. 270) injunction that ‘[a]ppropriate research strategies, in both
methodological and ethical senses, need to be thought through very carefully’.2 While I
do not see the present paper as a direct input to this debate, it may still have a relevance
through the speculation that we could usefully envisage being less interventionist than
is presently the case in most of our qualitative research endeavours as geographers
interested in children and childhood. Indeed, I will be arguing for a research practice that
allocates a role to the inactive daydreaming of the adult researcher, as well as
recommending that greater emphasis be placed upon such simple activities as the
researcher responding imaginatively to things produced—written, drawn, danced, sung,
acted, whatever—by children outside of the research encounter and independent of the
researcher’s prompting. The final section of my paper is designed to clarify such claims,
strange as they may first appear, and the hope is that it will be easy to detect how such
claims emerge from the main arguments elsewhere about adults (re)kindling their senses
of childhood.
Some attention has been paid by geographers to the question of whether or not adult
researchers can adopt strategies allowing them ‘to stand in the place of the child’. A
useful early statement from Stuart Aitken (1994, p. 30) runs as follows:

It is one of the great ironies of human development that by the time we are old
enough to reflect on what is it like to be a young child, we are so far removed from
the experience that it is difficult to empathise. Schactel (1959, p. 285) articulated
this principle as ‘childhood amnesia’ wherein adults can no longer cognitively
process early childhood experiences. Our mental structures have changed to the
extent that we have great difficulty in imagining the world of the child. Certainly
we see ourselves in … children, but we no longer appreciate the nuances that
comprise the child’s world.
 Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood 9

The issue may not be so pressing with respect to older children and teenagers, and many
of the essays in a collection such as Skelton and Valentine (1997), tackling the
geographies of youth cultures, evidently depend in part on authors’ well-remembered
experiences of adolescent years.3 The pertinence of the question with respect to younger
children cannot be denied, though, and it is here that the ‘study of children as other
echoes most glaringly the current crisis of representation in the social sciences’ (Aitken,
1994, p. 30).4 A key paper explicitly considering this apparent ‘unbridgeability’ of the
gap between adult and child is that by Owain Jones (2001, p. 177), who offers this
observation:
We have all been ‘children’, or at least biologically young, so perhaps uniquely in
this concern for a form of otherness, we have all been that other once, and may still
contain some form or traces of it. This raises the question of whether it, or elements
of it, are retrievable through memory, or whether the illusion that it is in fact makes
the other/other[5] even more inaccessible and invisible. Once childhood is super-
seded by adult stocks of knowledge,[6] those adult filters can never be removed to
get back to earlier states. Adult constructions and memories of what it is/was to be
a child are inevitably processed through adultness.
Jones is not suggesting that researchers should forsake all efforts to reconstruct
children’s geographies as ‘felt’ from within by children themselves, and he himself
(Jones, 1997, 2000) has contributed greatly to a corpus of work now embracing a range
of possibilities from the analysing of children’s ‘mental maps’ (e.g. Matthews, 1992) to
the interpretation of children’s most intimate feelings about place and landscape (the
classic geographical work in this latter respect being Hart (1979)). What Jones is
suggesting, however, is that researchers should beware a too ready insistence that they
can (re)visit this particular other. He is warning us to guard against an approach that
effectively ‘clos[es] in on the otherness of childhood’ (Jones, 2001, pp. 177–178) to the
point where the dimensions of this otherness—‘those very characteristics which might be
at the centre of understanding children’s geographies’ (Jones, 2001, p. 177)—are
reconfigured into shapes, sizes and meanings comprehensible to adults but no longer
recognisable to children. I agree entirely with this warning, and in many ways my paper
here is moving in the same direction of asking about how to preserve ‘the otherness of
childhood’ in our studies.
Where I differ from Jones (2001) is in the extent to which I accept the ‘unbridgeabil-
ity’ of adult’s and children’s worlds. Whereas he rightly worries about the difficult
materials with which a bridge might be built between these two worlds, my stance is that
we should avoid portraying the situation as one of totally unbridgeable ‘distance’.
Indeed, while being alert to the problem of ‘childhood amensia’, I think it worth
repeating the banal but important fact that chronologically all adults have at an earlier
time of their lives been children. We have all ‘been there’ in one way or another,
creating the potential for some small measure of empathy—some sense of recognition,
sharing and mutual understanding, even if slight—with the children whom we encounter
in our adult lives. This is not to deny the enormous variability in the childhoods once
experienced by adults, as shaped by the contingencies of time, space, gender, class,
ethnicity and countless more factors, and in no way is it to reject the crucial gains of
scholars who ‘have challenged essentialist understandings of “the child” by arguing that
childhood is constructed in different ways in different times and places’ (Holloway and
Valentine, 2000a, p. 9). Nonetheless, I am speculating that in geographical studies of
children, perhaps more so than in many social–cultural projects where ‘we’ do remain
fundamentally ‘other’ to the peoples being researched, there is still a fragment of
10 Chris Philo

connection between researcher and researched because we have all at some stage been
younger, bodily smaller, experientially deficient and largely dependent upon, provided
for and regulated by adults. One writer talks about ‘what we once felt all too vividly,
the otherness of grownups and the unavailability of true knowledge’ (Meadowlark, 1979,
p. 78), and I reckon that there are occasions when we are recalled to the peculiar
psycho-social circumstances of childhood—to that inkling of not being the same as
adults, but knowing that one day we would become them—and also to the sights, sounds,
smells, other sensations and ‘childish knowledges’ made available through this thor-
oughly embodied but temporary difference. Moreover, this fragment of connection
simultaneously draws us back towards instances in our own childhoods and provides us
with resources for an enlarged, open-handed, meeting with children in the here-and-now.
There should be no arrogance about positing such a connection, no presumption of
transparency before the adult gaze, and maybe something to (re)learn is precisely the
humility of children who, as Meadowlark (1979) nicely indicates, ‘know’ that they do
not know. Rather, for me, identifying such a connection is to bring into play a sense of
common lives, worlds and spaces that is nonetheless fully aware of its own precarious-
ness.
I am therefore proposing, in part contra Jones (2001), that we can and should build
a bridge of sorts, and that this bridge need not lead inexorably to the land of children
being colonised by invaders from the land of adulthood (even if this remains a danger).
In his piece following the present one, Jones (this issue) adds to my argument here,
exposing for more critical comment the status of memory in facilitating the adult
re-entrance to childhood, and considering further the emotional charge of memory which
maybe leads to memories being so shaped by present circumstances that their meaning-
fulness vis-à-vis an individual’s past is thrown into doubt. The snares and potentials of
misremembering, of then and now becoming so deeply entangled that the relevance of
memory in recovering ‘real’ childhoods becomes unclear, of adults reworking memories
to allow them to cope better with the residues of unhappy childhoods, of adults
imagining paradisical childhoods informed by popular mythologies rather than by actual
experiences: all of these vital matters and more are hinted at by Jones, and in so doing
he maps new terrains for exploration by geographers and other scholars of children and
childhood. What I wish to contribute is perhaps narrower in scope, launching from the
simple fact that in children’s research all of the adult geographers and other researchers
involved have once been in the position of the very research subjects who they now
study.7 In what follows, I propose to address this fact through a detour into the writings
of one particular theorist whose ideas are probably less than fashionable in these
post-structuralist and post-humanist days, but whose message—provided that it is treated
with caution, and probably not followed to its own logical conclusion—can, I feel, add
a new ingredient to the debates indexed above about the ‘crisis of representation’ in
researching children’s geographies. I will therefore offer a reading of Gaston Bachelard’s
remarks on ‘reveries towards childhood’, contained in his 1969 text The Poetics of
Reverie, itself a translation of his original 1960 text La Poétique de la Reverie. Leading
from this reading, I will conclude by pondering the implications for research on
children’s geographies, including a reference back to the notion of ‘not doing too much’
as a researcher in this field.

On ‘Reveries towards Childhood’ and their Geographies

Bachelard is not unknown to geographers, given that his most famous work The Poetics
of Space (1969b, originally1958) offers a challenging account of the deep ‘psychology’
 Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood 11

underlying how the spaces of everyday human habitation, notably the ordinary house, are
constituted, apprehended and lived within. As such, his ideas filtered into the thinking
of those humanistic geographers who post-1970 countered the empty abstractions of
spatial science by turning to the so-called ‘philosophies of meaning’, specifically
phenomenology and existentialism, as a window on the fundamental meaningfulness of
human being-in-place (Ley, 1981). The writings of these humanistic geographers (e.g.
Tuan, 1974, 1977; Relph, 1976; Seamon, 1979) undoubtedly contain refrains of
Bachelard’s approach, which is unsurprising given the obvious bridge that his texts offer
them between difficult psycho-philosophical territory and the substantive concerns of
geographers with space and place (with space as place). In a somewhat different vein,
his poetics of space inform what Edward Said claims about the ‘imaginative geogra-
phies’ configuring how ‘us, here’ (in the West) tell our stories about ‘them, there’ (in the
East), in the account of which he explicitly borrows from Bachelard to declare that
‘space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby
the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here’
(Said, 1978, p. 55). The abiding interest of post-colonial and other geographers in Said’s
work, and specifically in imaginative geographies (e.g. Gregory, 2000), has meant that,
albeit indirectly, Bachelard’s ideas have retained a currency, if up for criticism, in this
rather different tradition of scholarship to that pursued by the humanistic geographers.
Bachelard’s last major work, The Poetics of Reverie (1969a, henceforth PR), has been
almost if not entirely neglected by geographers. This text sees him continuing his
‘phenomenological inquiries’ into the ‘poetic imagination’, confronting ‘poetic images’
and striving to retrieve from them ‘their original quality … the very essence of their
originality’, and thereby ‘taking advantage of the remarkable psychic productivity of the
imagination’ (PR, pp. 1, 3). More narrowly, he seeks to access the domain of ‘reverie’,
not the dreams of sleeping for which other analyses are required, but the ‘daydreams’ of
wakefulness when we are in ‘relaxed time’ and ‘function[ing] with inattention’ to either
the things around us or our more reflexive senses of self, biography and intentionality
(PR, p. 5). ‘By following “the path of reverie”—a constantly downhill path—conscious-
ness relaxes and wanders and consequently becomes clouded’ (PR, p. 5), but in this
‘raw’ state, paradoxically, reverie becomes of little use because the resulting ‘conscious-
ness which diminishes, which goes to sleep’ eventually ceases to be conscious—it ‘is no
longer a consciousness’ (PR, p. 6)—and stops being available for phenomenological
reflection. Instead of using the formal techniques of empirical psychology to probe such
pre-consciousness, Bachelard’s project is that of bringing ‘poetic reverie’, the ‘docu-
ments’ of poets who are themselves drawing inspiration from reverie, into contact with
a phenomenological sensibility able to distil from here the shards of an imaginative
insight into the deeper verities of the human condition. All of this endeavour is designed,
for Bachelard, ‘to restore, even to an average reader, the innovating action of poetic
language’, and more foundationally to ‘establish … a phenomenology of the imaginary
where the imagination is restored to its proper, all-important place as the principle of
direct stimulation of psychic becoming’ (PR, p. 8). Numerous reservations can immedi-
ately be signalled about such a project, given that its search for essences in a conceptual
framework obsessed with depths rather than surfaces sets it squarely against that
post-structuralist preference for ‘systems of dispersion’, to adopt a motif from Foucault
(Philo, 1992), present in much contemporary human geography. Additionally, the
deference given to the ‘inspired’ creations of supposedly superior poets, novelists and
other writers, as linked to judgements such as that recorded above about ‘the average
reader’, cannot but smack of a cultural elitism that has been repeatedly critiqued
whenever it has appeared in humanistic and cultural geography (e.g. Daniels, 1985: see
below).
12 Chris Philo

For the purposes of the present paper, though, there may still be merit in following
that specific strand of The Poetics of Reverie that leads Bachelard to contemplate,
precisely not ‘a child psychology’, but the reveries of childhood that arguably remain
within adults as ‘the durable character of childhood’ (PR, p. 20). Harking back to the
connectedness of adult and child with which I began, Bachelard (PR, p. 20) hence insists
that:
[b]y certain of its traits, childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad
sections of adult life. First, childhood never leaves its nocturnal retreats [night
dreams]. Within us, a child sometimes comes to watch over us in our sleep. But in
waking life itself, when reverie works on our history, the childhood which is within
us brings us its benefits. One needs, and sometimes it is very good, to live with the
child which he [or she] has been. From such living he [or she] achieves a
consciousness of roots … Poets will help us find this living childhood within us, this
permanent, durable immobile world.
Bachelard is not saying that adults can straightforwardly remember their childhoods, but
is insisting that intimations of childhood, flickers and hints of what we experienced in
childhood, do stay within us and can be accessed,8 infused with ‘wonder’ and given a
‘quality’ with the help of inspiration from poetic sources. Indeed, he is less bothered by
‘a doctrine of the utility of memory’, and, even if adults were to possess an ‘exact
memory’ (mémoire) able to recall with precision ‘having learned a lesson on a garden
bench’ on a particular date, his chief concern is with the imaginative constructions that
run in tandem with whatever memory does return to our consciousness (and especially
to the scribbling pads of poets) for us to use (PR, p. 115).9 Bachelard’s focus is hence
not ‘the historian’s memory’ wherein factual accuracy is usually the goal, but rather ‘the
psychological memory–imagination mixture’ (PR, p. 119) wherein the history of fact,
detail and precision is refracted through the lenses of imperfect memory and weakly
constrained imagination. Moreover, he argues that it is in the midst of reverie that this
mixture swings most creatively into play, writing that ‘in our reverie which imagines
while remembering, our past takes on substance again’ (PR, p. 119),10 thus permitting—
as in the quote above—‘reverie’ to ‘work’ on ‘our history’ in the production of a hybrid
resource for phenomenological reflection with the potential for spying deeper truths.11
Again, I must acknowledge that many readers, myself included, will probably have
trouble with the latter goal, but disagreeing with this destination of Bachelard’s project
does not disallow us from accepting that there may still be merit in taking seriously the
memories, imaginations and reveries of childhood.
According to Bachelard, childhood reveries are the reveries of the child himself or
herself, normally occurring in solitude—and solitude is another key concept for
Bachelard—and entailing moments when, away from the ‘unhappiness’ often brought to
them by adults, childhood ‘can relax its aches’ and find the ‘peace’ for idle daydreaming
(PR, p. 99). The geography of this daydreaming is important, and the image that
Bachelard conjures up in this respect is of the solitary child sitting on a hill gazing down
absent-mindedly on a picturesque landscape, nothing troubling his or her thoughts, and
simply drifting off into musings that may have some anchoring in what can be seen but
hardly being constrained by its factual presence. Somewhere like the home is not
conducive to such reverie, being too dominated by the cares and activities of adult life;
and somewhere like school is certainly not conducive to such reverie, being too
structured by what adults want children to learn (and schools are places ultimately
designed to make children lose their childhood). Bachelard (PR, p. 127) elaborates on
why the spaces of childhood reverie have to be in some fashion located away from the
world of adults:
 Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood 13

[w]hen we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound
sense of seeing. Seeing and showing are phenomenologically in violent antithesis.
And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! … They know; they
think they know; they say they know … They demonstrate to the child that the earth
is round, that it revolves around the sun. And the poor dreaming child has to listen
to all that! What a release for your reverie when you leave the classroom to go back
up the side hill, your side hill!
‘[B]ack up the side hill’, maybe looking back down on the schoolhouse: that, for
Bachelard, is where childhood reveries can begin. In addition, he underlines the point
about these needing to be moments of idleness, and he envisages the child by himself
or herself, ‘very much alone in the profound boredom of being alone, free to think of
the world, free to see the sun setting, the smoke rising from the roof, all these great
phenomena’ (PR, p. 127). For the adult re-entering such reveries, therefore, ‘[t]imes
when nothing happened come back’, these being ‘[g]reat beautiful times from the former
[i.e. childhood] life when the dreaming dominated all boredom’ (PR, p. 119).12 It is clear
that Bachelard regards the spaces bound up in such reveries as more significant than their
timings, given his observation that ‘it is no living memory which runs along the scale
of dates without staying long enough at the sites of memory’ (PR, p. 119). The
implication is that the phenomenological treatment of reverie is preoccupied less with
when a reverie occurred—its exact dating, something only likely if the date was
associated with a definite ‘event’,13 in which case true reverie was probably absent—and
more with the details of the spaces where it occurred. Bachelard himself tends to speak
of ‘sites’ rather than spaces, and in one passage he declares that ‘[t]he site overwhelms
poor and fluid social “situations”’, where the terms ‘situation’ and ‘event’ are probably
equivalent, before discussing the ‘great value’ of compiling ‘an album of sites’ which
were the spaces supporting our situated childhood reveries while now also being the ones
revealed to us, as adults, in our recovery of childhood reveries (PR, p. 23). We might
criticise Bachelard’s somewhat romanticised sense of the solitary child in reverie; we
might criticise his portrayal of such reverie in an idyllic country setting (see also Jones,
1997, 2000), given the crowded, noisy and troubled urban surroundings endured by
many children today; we might criticise his too-easy assumption that children can be
released from adult charge and concern, particularly in a modern world where ‘stranger-
danger’ and other threats prompt parents to structure the time-spaces of their children in
a manner leaving them scant solitary time (e.g. Valentine, 1996; 1997a,b,c; Pugh, 2000),
certainly not in outdoor spaces such as ‘back up the side hill’. Even so, I would still
argue that in this respect Bachelard is introducing valuable notions—to do with the times
and spaces of boredom, reverie and childhood—that, substantively if nothing else, can
bring new sustenance to the table of our geographical research.
In Bachelard’s vision, the next step—following the theme of adult–child connected-
ness—is to think about how adults can indeed reacquaint themselves with the reveries
of childhood. At this juncture, the issue becomes in effect a communion between
reveries, those of adulthood striving to reconnect with the reveries of childhood, and it
is intriguing that once again for Bachelard (PR, p. 102) the geography comes to the fore
as an element encouraging such a meeting of reveries to take place:
We are standing before a great lake whose name is familiar to geographers [i.e. a
real location], high in the mountains, and suddenly we are returning to a distant
past. We dream while remembering. We remember while dreaming. Our memories
bring us back to a simple river which reflects a sky leaning upon hills. But the hill
gets bigger and the loop of the river broadens. The little becomes big. The world
14 Chris Philo

of childhood reverie is as big, bigger than the world offered to today’s reverie. From
poetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world, to childhood reverie,
there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of the
greatest landscapes.

The thoroughly embodied aspects of this passage back to childhood reverie deserve
mention, the suggestion of returning to a setting wherein everything seemed much larger
because the child was so much smaller, and these remarks hint at another theme—the
embodiment of children in space, as compared to that of adults—that has so far been
little explored in the geographical literature (but see Winchester et al., 1999; Aitken,
2001, chapters 3 and 4). Bachelard is not saying that adults need to revisit exactly the
same spaces as spawned childhood reveries, merely that certain spaces are likely to be
triggers because something about them returns to us the sensations and even contents of
these childhood moments. It may be the attractiveness of a particular sort of physical
landscape, which is why he writes about ‘a commerce of grandeur’ between adult and
childhood reveries, as well as implying that childhood feelings about such scenery
perhaps survive into adulthood to determine what we, as adults, herald as the most
beautiful landscapes.14 Alternatively, it may be something as humble as smells from the
spaces of childhood performing this function.15 As Bachelard puts it, ‘whoever would
wish to penetrate into the zone of indeterminate childhood … would no doubt be helped
by the return of the great vague memories like the memories of odours from the past’
(PR, p. 136); and again, albeit this time more geographically, he notes that ‘[t]he rooms
of the lost house, the corridors, the cellar and the attic are retreats for faithful odours,
odours which the dreamer knows belong only to him [or her]’ (PR, p. 137). Bachelard
devotes several pages to smells as entry-points to childhood reverie, using numerous
poetic references to the odours of childhood and claiming that ‘a whole childhood [can
be] evoked by the memory of an isolated fragrance’ (PR, p. 141), but this emphasis
merely serves to underscore the environmental (or geographical) contingencies of adults
reconnecting with their childhoods.
Finally in this exegesis of Bachelard on childhood reveries, attention must be paid
again to his insistence that such reveries only come to light through the admixture of
memory and imagination. There is no possibility of accessing with any exactitude the
contents of any one childhood reverie, he would claim, and the phenomenological
method that he follows hinges primarily on the imaginative attempts of adulthood to
reconnect with the imaginative diversions of childhood: something much more precari-
ous than the ‘double hermeneutic’ of ordinary interpretative social research (Gregory,
1978).16 This is why he acknowledges that adult ‘[r]everie towards our past lives, reverie
looking for childhood, seems to bring back to life lives which have never taken place,
lives which have been imagined’ (PR, p. 112). Or, in other more dramatic words, ‘in
reverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destiny has not been able to
make use of’ (PR, p. 112). Thus, it is in the horizon of adult imagination that childhood
is revisited and childhood reverie recast; and, while the empirical psychologist might be
unnerved by the free-wheeling play of imaginations scarcely bound by the facts of
memory or history, Bachelard’s fascination is with the resulting weave of psychic
‘substances’ from within which the phenomenologist may detect patterns, depths,
essences and portals on to the ‘cosmos’. Once more, we need not concur with such a
phenomenological manoeuvre to accept the invitation to ponder the dynamics integral to
adult reimaginings of childhood imaginings; and neither do we have to be fully
Bachelardian to realise that in any one of us there are different childhoods, varying
senses of both who we were as a child and what we could now have become had we been
 Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood 15

able to pursue different trajectories out of childhood. ‘[P]sychologically we are born

many times’, comments Bachelard, quoting too a poet who writes: ‘Of childhoods I have
so many’ (PR, pp. 111–112). Furthermore, when reimagining our pasts ‘[w]e go into a
very nearby elsewhere where reality and reverie are indistinguishable’, an imaginative
location that Bachelard terms ‘the Other-House’ or even ‘the House of an Other-Child-
hood’, and wherein we might stumble across the promises of ‘all that should-have-been’
(PR, p. 121) or at least could-have-been for ourselves. Countless factors press upon both
children’s perceptions and adults’ reimaginings of their own childhoods, influences
spearing from a host of different times and spaces encountered during a lifetime, and this
is why Bachelard talks about the futility of trying to capture the sources of these
childhoods in their entirety—including their multiple geographies or histories—for any
one individual let alone for a collectivity (and hence the epigram opening this paper).
Actually, the geographer of children and childhood might reply that, impossible as it will
be to ‘map’ all of these influences, there is still a vital task to undertake—yet again, one
where we are only just starting (e.g. Jones, 1997; Gagen, 2000a,b)—in tracing the
historical geography of those factors and influences that have patterned, and continue to
pattern, the imaginings of childhood for both children and the adults into which they
grow.

Conclusions and from Elite Poetry to Children’s Jottings

What can this engagement with Bachelard on the poetics of childhood reverie tell us that
might be useful for geographical studies of children? I hope that some answers to this
question have already been provided above, but let me draw to a close by both
summarising my chief claims and adding to them preliminary remarks on more mundane
childhood reveries. In the first instance, and putting aside what might be judged more
dubious or extreme features of his phenomenology, I think that Bachelard does provoke
us to a more sustained consideration, not just of what separates children from adults, but
also of the possible lines of connection residing in the continuity of psychic materials
from childhood through into adult life. Psychoanalytic insights, as already deployed by
some geographers studying children and childhood (e.g. Sibley, 1995; Aitken and
Herman, 1997; Aitken, 1998, 2000), trade on this continuity in various ways, but the
implication of Bachelard’s assessment here is that we could usefully initiate a dialogue
between adult imaginings and childhood imaginings (an imaginative resonance between
different orders of reverie) very different to that developed in the literature of psychoan-
alytic geography (see Philo and Parr, 2003).
More narrowly, Bachelard does indeed alert us to this realm of bored daydreaming—
perhaps we can retain the name ‘reverie’—that surely is a central component of
children’s everyday lives. Such reverie is arguably more significant to children than it is
to adults, who are often too busy at work or with personal affairs to daydream, or whose
consumption of imaginative ‘products’ (books, music, films, television, even sports) is
rarely a potent source of influences in other spheres of their lives (unlike in the case of
children yet to learn the adult boundaries between work, coping and play).17 It is true that
quite a few geographers studying children now do seek to reconstruct something of the
imaginings, the fantasies and the like that maybe shape children’s worlds (and geogra-
phies) from within (e.g. Jones, 1997, 2000), but my own view remains that Bachelard has
put his finger on a particular corner of childhood—its flitting into reveries full of
imaginative content, often with a solitary characteristic as the individual child enjoys
uninterrupted time in peaceful spaces to daydream—that is far more relevant to
understanding children’s geographies than has hitherto been recognised. Actually, the
16 Chris Philo

geographer Dennis Wood long ago urged greater attention to children ‘doing nothing’ as
a time ‘of searching, a time of change, a time of aesthetic’ (in Aitken, 2001, p. 16),
reflecting that:

… the kids with nothing to do were poets waiting for their muse … Doing nothing
is filling. Doing nothing is an unfolding of things to do, an unfolding of things that
have no names, like mooning around a lamppost or kicking stones into the drain
across the street … Doing nothing is almost everything. As a term, it conceals as it
identifies. It is both comprehensive and evasive, simultaneously screen and mirror
(Wood, 1985, p. 9).

Bachelard might respond that there is still too much activity here for the onset of reverie,
but I reckon that Wood’s reference to ‘poets waiting for their muse’ implies a closeness
to the state envisaged by Bachelard. Aitken (2001, p. 16) adds that the worldly context
matters, in that ‘[c]hildren must have time to do nothing and the space within which to
do it’, whereas ‘it may be argued that the freedom to be unsupervised and do nothing
is becoming less and less a possibility for children, particularly in the global north’ (see
also Pugh, 2000).18 Maybe this Bachelardian corner of childhood is itself disappearing,
rendering much that I have argued in the paper increasingly redundant, which is why I
echo Aitken’s and Wood’s insistence on a politics that values ‘non-activities’, ‘seem-
ingly inconsequential exchanges’ and ‘maintaining portions of children’s lives that are
not organised and institutionalised by adults’ (Aitken, 2001, pp. 16–17).
There is the additional methodological provocation to contemplate precisely how
adults might enter this fuzzy landscape of childhood reverie, and there are perhaps two
possible ways in which such an entry can be envisaged. The first involves the adult
researcher’s own ‘daydreaming’, entailing in effect a hermeneutic exchange between his
or her adult reveries rooted in the here-and-now and recollections of his or her
childhood, complete with its own dynamics of reverie, spearing from the there-and-then.
Exactly what such an exchange is supposed to entail, release and produce is less than
clear-cut—as has always been the case for geographers considering the phenomenolog-
ical method—but some indication is nonetheless forthcoming from the ‘evidence’ of
Bachelard’s reflections above, presumably bearing the imprint of his own childhood. The
second way involves the adult researcher striving to open himself or herself up to the
reveries of children around them, including those who might more formally be desig-
nated their research subjects, and such an approach veers closer to the double
hermeneutic as conventionally understood. In practice, the complex bricolage19 of
elements confronting the researcher in both cases—some being artefacts of faithful
memory, others the artifice of imaginative projection—is little different whether
‘sourced’, as it were, from the person of the researcher or from the persons of the
researched. In neither instance can there be a simple social-scientific formula for how to
process the ‘data’ to hand, and the researcher has no choice but to operate in the realm
of subjective appraisal, responding as creatively as possible to the leads, hints and
intimations arrived at in the process of ‘working with’ the materials of the bricolage
(whether notes on personal reveries or documents recording those of others).
Sticking with the second of these approaches, that where researchers deal with the
childhood memories, imaginations and reveries of persons other than themselves, it is
telling to hear Bachelard’s (PR, p. 107) assertion that:
… a phenomenological project of gathering the poetry of childhood reveries in its
personal actuality is naturally much different from the very useful objective
examinations of the child by psychologists. Even by letting children speak freely,
 Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood 17

by observing them uncensured while they are enjoying the total liberty of their play,
by listening to them with the gentle patience of a child psychoanalyst, one does not
necessarily attain the simple purity of phenomenological examination.

Geographers studying children’s worlds have made liberal use of the various qualitative
techniques gestured to here by Bachelard, of course, and a collection such as Holloway
and Valentine (2000b) is full of suggestive quotes from children being interviewed in a
variety of formats, commonly unstructured ones permitting them to ‘speak freely’, as
well as findings derived from detailed ethnographic observations. There is nonetheless
warrant for cautioning that these techniques all carry with them some measure of
intrusion—some sense of creating, in Bachelard’s terms, an ‘event’—that concentrates
the minds of the children in a manner quite different to the unstimulating circumstances
of bored daydreaming, of reverie. Arguably too, such techniques cannot but be hedged
around by the patterns of adult consciousness, even by a ‘willing’ of the child to respond
in ways intelligible to adult strictures of ‘reason’ and ‘sociability’, which thereby risks
forcing the child into the ‘die’ of being a ‘premature adult’ (PR, p. 107).20 Jones (2001,
p. 177) is getting at something similar when complaining that social science research on
children too readily prioritises ‘(rational) representations through language’, problemati-
cally expecting children to provide ‘answers’ to research questions ‘worded’ in what are
effectively mini-versions of what adults might say and reveal.21
Bachelard’s preference is hence to avoid standard qualitative methods in turning
instead to methods that he regards as phenomenologically ‘purer’, as less contaminating
of the childhood response. More specifically, he turns to the inspiration of poets, since
he regards such writers as having peculiar powers of insight allowing them to translate
their own childhood reveries into a shape that is both faithful to ‘real’ reverie—to the
genuine admixture of memory and imagination stirred therein—and amenable to further
(phenomenological) processing. The obvious objection is that this deference to the poets
brings in a yet more imposing barrier between ‘us’ and children, a thick line of poetic
sensibility that is arguably less a zone of simple openness to the world and more one of
sophisticated adult self-awareness, intelligence and learning about poetry, its history and
traditions.22 It hence surprises me that Bachelard does not pay more heed to his own
warning that ‘[g]rownups write children’s stories too easily’, causing them to ‘make
childish fables’ instead of appreciating that ‘it is necessary to be serious like a dreaming
child’ (PR, p. 118).23 He presumably reckons that poets do not fall into the same traps
as the authors of children’s stories, but I would still have my suspicions about adult poets
too easily encapsulating children’s worlds, and inserting too much baggage between
themselves and the ‘seriousness’ of the daydreaming child.
Let me finally propose that adult geographers might take seriously the more mundane
reveries of children, not those that have been converted into the ‘poetic reveries’
favoured by Bachelard, but the seemingly quite banal hints at the contents of everyday
bored daydreaming that can be found in the written or other inscribed ‘documents’
which many children are making most days of their young lives. The stories, diaries,
drawings, paintings and photographs made by children have been used by adult
researchers for years,24 of course, but it would appear that these stories, drawings and the
like have usually been explicitly asked for by the researchers as part of their projects
(thus rendering the acts of production definite ‘events’). My impression is that very little
has been done with documents that children have made for themselves in a more relaxed,
unstructured and perhaps relatively purposeless manner, and yet it is arguable that such
documents are more likely to allow the researcher access to bored daydreams, to reverie,
18 Chris Philo

to these elusive but pivotal fragments of a child’s sense of self-in-the-world. An

imaginative engagement between the adult’s sensibilities and the child’s reverie, as jotted
into a story, scratched into a picture, or whatever, may just furnish a new key to unlock
certain ‘internal’ mysteries of children’s worlds (and geographies). Having dimly
recognised this potential myself and capitalising on the connectedness of adulthood and
childhood, in this instance the palpable continuity in my own personal biography, I once
included in a paper on sports geography (Philo, 1994, pp. 8–11) reflections on my own
childhood reverie—captured in countless drawings and scribblings, but still a shadowy
presence in my mind as an adult—of a sports landscape full of tiny settlements, each
with their own football team, which somehow linked my bedroom to the wider world.25
Rather than rehearse this example again, though, I will conclude by quoting two items
written by a friend of mine at school when she was circa 6 or 7 years old:

[o]ne day me and Donna saw a witch and the witch saw us and then we ren [ran][26]
away and we came to a house But it was a red house and we went in the house and
we saw Susan in the house and Susan went with as [us] but the witch was sail
[still?] rening [running] after as [us] and then we went to the park and then we went
on the string [swing] and then we went to the zoo and we saw a rabbit and then
we saw a bird and then we went to a play house and we saw Rhona and Rhona was
in the play house and then we went to my house and then we had an ice-cream and
mum had an ice-cream and then Dad had a ice-cream and then we went to bed.

One day I saw Luice and me and Luice went on the park and we went on the swings
and when we came out of the park we saw Rebecca H and Rebecca said lets go on
a boat so we did and then we came to a island and on the island we saw a witch
But the witch was good and saw [she] said come in my house and we came in the
witchs house and we went to sleep on the witchs bed and when we woke up the
witch had gone so we went out of the witchs house and we went on the park again
and then we we[nt] to a island on the boat and the island was called the island of
emeralds and we saw mummy on the island and we saw Daddy on the island and
we saw granny and we all had a ice-cream and the[n] we all went to bed.

Written nearly every day as ‘news’, but also being referred to as ‘stories’ in one
teacher’s marginal comment, my friend managed to write basically the same piece over
and over again, well over 100 times, and as such its production was clearly not an
‘event’ but rather a highly routinised accomplishment suggesting a definite pattern in the
imaginings underlying them. While these mini-narratives are mostly built around real
people and practices—family members, named friends, lashings of ice-cream—they do
nonetheless embrace various imaginings, notably of witches but also of (in other
versions) wizards, pirates, robots and dinosaurs. The term ‘reveries’ would seem quite
appropriate for describing such stories, since they surely do reflect this individual’s
abstracted musings every morning at school which, I suspect, were also central to her
imagination, talk and play outside of school. Inspecting these reveries as a geographer,
they reveal a hybrid geographical imagination full of real places—the family home,
friends’ houses, the park with swings, the zoo—supplemented by numerous more-or-less
made-up places such as witches’ houses, islands and (in other versions) woods with
many trees. It might be possible, with my friend’s help, to identify the influences feeding
the more fantastic elements of her stories, doubtless specific children’s books, television
programmes and the like; and yet a full reconstruction of exactly how and why these
influences became mixed up as they did, both with each other and with ‘real’ people,
practices and places, would almost certainly be much more difficult. Even so, I believe
 Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood 19

that we are here travelling very close to the neglected ‘stuff’ of childhood worlds, ones
energised by absent-minded reveries that happily fuse the real and the imagined, often
displaying deliciously chaotic geographical imaginations. If we were to work more with
documents such as my friend’s stories, extending the opportunities for imaginative
exchange as we—the adult researchers—try to re-envisage ourselves once again as
children daydreaming about families and witches, friends and dinosaurs, local streets and
distant spacecraft, then, strangely enough, we might actually end up writing more
‘accurately’ about children’s geographies.

Acknowledgements
Huge thanks are due to Owain Jones for his extremely perceptive comments on my
paper, and would that I had been able to tackle his comments more fully and capably
(but see now his own paper following mine (Jones, this issue)). Thanks are also due to
Fiona Smith for her encouraging remarks, as well as to Eric Laurier, Hugh Matthews,
Hester Parr and Nicola Ross.

Notes
1. I say ‘restated’ because earlier rounds of interest in geographical studies of children, taking seriously their
cognitive mapping abilities, their environmental experiences and play, and their spatial oppression can all
be traced in the literature prior to 1990. For reviews that emphasise the earlier work, see Aitken (1994,
especially pp. 3–5), Aitken (2001, especially pp. 12–18), Holloway and Valentine (2000a), Matthews and
Limb (1999) and Philo (1997). Holloway and Valentine (2000a, p. 8) suggest that ‘for the most part this
[earlier] work has been ignored within an adultist discipline’, and that it is only ‘[t]he last decade of the
twentieth century [that] has seen renewed interest in incorporating children’s voices and experiences within
the geographical project’.
2. Excellent initiatives have recently been taken by various geographical researchers to empower children in
the research process, not merely to inform them in detail of what is occurring but to consult them about
appropriate methods for the researcher to use and even to enlist them as ‘co-researchers’ insofar as that
is ever possible: see, for instance, Smith and Barker (1999a,b, 2000a,b). In this respect, we might talk
about striving to work with children.
3. ‘Memories of childhood remain clear in the minds of most adults’, observe Margaret Jones and Chris
Cunningham (1999, p. 31) in a chapter on the geographies of ‘middle childhood’, and they add that such
memories ‘may provide ideas for the examination of childhood today’. They draw upon adult reminis-
cences of growing up in Australia that tell of ‘fondly remembered childhood sounds and scents’, and they
include a reference to the author Ruth Park’s (1992) recollections of being like a ‘forest creature’ in her
own ‘quiet kingdom’ saturated in ‘physical and spiritual influences’ (Jones and Cunningham, 1999, p. 31).
4. See also Aitken (2001, especially pp. 5–8) for further reflections on the ‘crisis of representation’ lying at
the heart of geographical and other research on children.
5. I take it that what Jones is getting at with this construction of ‘other/other’ is the ambition of writing about
‘otherness’ that does not simply convert this otherness into the comforting vocabularies of ‘sameness’. He
is drawing on Bauman’s (1993) warning about ‘us’ inadvertently recasting otherness in ‘our’ standard
concepts, models and terms, thereby stealing otherness’s authority.
6. Jones takes the notion of ‘stocks of knowledge’ from the significant early paper on such matters by Thrift
(1985).
7. I should acknowledge that one or two recent PhD students working on children’s geographies have noted
how few years, relatively speaking, separate them from the children and young people who they are
studying, adding that there are aspects of the lives, experiences and spaces of their research subjects which
really do not seem so different, so alien, to them as supposedly ‘adult’ researchers: neat points in this
respect were made in a presentation by Morris-Roberts (2000), and they bubble just under the surface of
Tucker (2002).
8. ‘Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined’ (PR, p. 100), writes Bachelard, adding later the telling
phrase that ‘childhood is a state of mind’ (PR, p. 130). Were we to pursue these claims, particularly the
second one, then geographical studies of childhood would potentially acquire a very different character
(one in which children and young people per se would not always have to figure).
20 Chris Philo

9. Here Bachelard counters Bergson’s faith in ‘psychic facts’ that can be retrieved as ‘framed images’,
repictured moments such as the garden lesson, which a ‘pure memory’ can locate with certainty in
time–space (PR, pp. 115–116). This is also another reason why what he is advocating is not an empirical
psychology of experiences.
10. Bachelard is not saying that all adult reveries (as in the reveries of an adult) entail a return to childhood,
but the impression seems to be that for him most reveries do nonetheless contain the potential for
reacquainting us with moments of childhood.
11. At this point, Bachelard talks about recovering ‘a memory of the cosmos’ (PR, p. 119), a theme of utilising
reverie to access deeper truths of human being immersed within the elemental foundations (water, earth,
fire) of the cosmos, a theme with Jungian undertones. Many will be suspicious, I think rightly, about such
an orientation.
12. This is also why he sometimes talks about ‘useless childhood’ (e.g. PR, p. 116), meaning those moments
of childhood when the child is simply left to be a child, free from any demands about learning,
contributing to the family wage, looking after siblings, and the like.
13. ‘Events’, for Bachelard, are moments when something happened, not nothing, and he supposes that such
events are usually ones disturbing the peace required for reverie. It is clear that he does not want his
phenomenology to be distracted by events, and that he sees psychoanalysis as the intellectual complement
to phenomenology for the very reason that ‘[p]sychoanalysis studies the life of events. We are trying to
know life without events, a life which does not mesh with the lives of others. It is the lives of others which
bring events into our life. In comparison with this life attached to its peace, this life without events, all
events risk being “traumas”’ (PR, p. 128). ‘Softening, erasing the traumatic character of certain childhood
memories, the salutary task of psychoanalysis’, he continues, ‘returns to dissolve those psychic concretions
formed around a singular event’ (PR, p. 128). Elsewhere he proposes to ‘leave to psychoanalysis … the
task of curing badly spent childhoods, of curing the puerile sufferings of an indurate childhood which
oppresses the psyche of so many adults’ (PR, pp. 99–100). Thinking about this distinguishing of the roles
of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in the study of childhood, as linked to intimations about the
respective roles of time–space in each, raises fascinating questions in the light of, say, Aitken’s (Aitken
and Herman, 1997; Aitken, 1998, 2000) and Sibley’s (1995) turn to psychoanalytic theory to inform their
work on children’s geographies.
14. The likes of Cosgrove (1984) and Daniels (1993) would of course qualify the suggestion of such ‘inherent’
judgements about landscape, preferring to talk about landscape as a ‘way of seeing’ into which we are all
socialised and which is bound up with wider socio-economic imperatives.
15. See also Porteous (1985) on ‘smellscapes’.
16. Wherein the issue is mediating between the ‘horizons of meaning’ possessed by both the researcher and
the researched as integral (inescapable) dimensions of their respective everyday worlds of encounter and
exchange. I would contend, all the same, that such mediation requires imaginative leaps, hopefully
empathetic ones, on the part of the researcher.
17. I hesitate when writing this sentence, given that music, sport and other creative ‘moments’ can be such
an influential presence in the lives of many adults; but my point is that for the most part adults
compartmentalise their lives in such a way that their immersion in—even reveries about—such moments
is unlikely to generate influences with the potential to leak so promiscuously throughout their everyday
actions, thoughts and, yes, daydreams. I would be happy for readers to argue with me on this one!
18. It should be noted that Wood’s research, ethnographically based as it was, took place in Barranquitos,
Puerto Rico.
19. The bricoleur, a French term, ‘is a “jack of all trades”, a builder and handy[person] or a “tinkerer” who
the anthropologist Levi-Strauss opposed to the engineer who begins from plans and models. The bricoleur
starts from what is there and tries to make it work by adapting, innovating, reusing and refashioning
materials’ (Crang, 2003, p. 5).
20. ‘The child thus enters into the zone of the family, social and psychological conflicts. He [sic] becomes a
premature man. This is the same as saying that the premature man is in a state of repressed childhood’
(PR, p. 107). This line of reasoning may also explain why we are sometimes ‘disappointed’ by the
qualitative evidence that we collect through interviews and ethnography, since what the children say to us
and what we write down about their activities can seem so, well, ‘banal’. This may therefore be because
we are trying to interpret this evidence as we would the words and acts of adults—we crave the levels of
self-insight, the wide-ranging reflections, and the like; we crave something dramatic and out-of-the-ordi-
nary—when really we should be seeking to be more open to, and able to work with, what children as
children are giving us.
21. Jones hence anticipates a ‘non-representational’ critique insisting that ‘[n]ew ways of questioning and
knowing the world … may be particularly pertinent for future research into children. There are theories
which emphasise the body (children always have bodies), non-representation and even performance’. A
 Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood 21

relevant reference is Thrift’s (2000) account of what human geography (or social science more generally)
might look like if taking seriously the need to get beyond an obsession with words—to construct an
approach ‘after words’—and thereby to register the extent to which so much of what ‘we’ are as humans,
even as sociable humans, occurs in the bodily realm ‘before words’ and their post hoc cognitive
rationalisations.
22. Such a critique precisely echoes Daniels’s (1985) brilliant deconstruction of an approach in literary
geography that supposes ‘great literature’ to offer a superior yet somehow unmediated, even more ‘true’,
access to landscapes and environments beyond in ‘real’ earth. It should ideally, of course, be fleshed out
at greater length and with appropriate referencing.
23. This remark might also stand as a plausible critique of using children’s stories by the likes of Arthur
Ransome and Enid Blyton as a window on children’s geographies: arguably, they are an ingredient in such
geographies, possibly as but one influence on how their young readers end up perceiving landscapes and
environments, but in no way are they are an unproblematic window on children’s own imaginings (and
imaginative geographies). Compare Jones (1997) with Jones and Cunningham (1999).
24. I have recently seen particularly good examples in McCormack (1998) and Tucker (2002). The ‘mental
maps’ drawn by children have of course been another oft-used kind of ‘document’ particularly used by
geographers: see Matthews (1992).
25. In effect, the ‘research’ that I have conducted here runs across both of the approaches under discussion
in this conclusion: the researcher working on his or her own childhood reveries, but also the researcher
working on documentary traces of the reveries of a child (who will usually be someone other than
themselves).
26. I am only inserting small clarifications in these quotes to aid the reader. Otherwise, I am repeating the
extracts as they were written, without punctuation. These are of course wordy documents, but they need
not be, and I could have concentrated more on the pictures that accompanied them. I am certainly not
trying to convert the words into ‘rational representations’.

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