What it means to be an explorer in the 21st century with Professor Richard Phillips

What does it mean to be an explorer today? And what is the meaning of exploration? These are questions that challenge our traditional views of expeditions and explorers.

In this address recorded during lockdown for the annual RGS Explore Weekend in November 2021, Professor of Human Geography Richard Phillips guides the audience through a discussion on the definition of a modern-day explorer.

What does the video cover?

Richard uses the example of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, to explore the potential representations of contemporary explorers and what they reveal about our changing perspective compared to those of the Victorian era.

From mass-produced plastic meerkat toys and precisely crafted model ships to the mysterious guerilla geography movement, Richard draws on his experience to construct a thought-provoking narrative that connects historical notions of exploration to its current forms and prompts us to consider its future.

Looking to get involved in exploration? Watch this talk to learn more about how you can ensure your legacy is a positive and lasting one.

Key moments

• 00:16 – The portraits, statues and busts of Victorian explorers
• 03:36 – The Fourth Plinth
• 06:07 – Making the ordinary extraordinary
• 09:12 – A 20th century enigma
• 12:17 – Introducing the guerilla geographers

Full transcript

What does it mean to be an explorer in the 21st century? What could it mean? I’m going to ask you that question, but I’m going to help by making some suggestions.

It’s a shame that we’re not in the RGS building today, of course, but some of you will know it. If so, you’ll be familiar with the portraits, the busts and statues around the place. Many are of explorers, mostly from the Victorian period.

You don’t need to have been inside the building, like the lodge, to have encountered these figures. Mounted on the outside above Exhibition Road and Kensington Gore are two of the most famous of all: Livingstone, who you see in the slide, and figures associated with the Shackleton expeditions in equatorial and polar regions of the world.

We find portraits and statues of explorers all over London and other British cities, in parks and squares, galleries and public buildings. Some of these figures are now familiar to us through criticism: too many are white, male, masculine, heroic figures, adventuring in places they called terra incognita and others called home.

But for all that was wrong with many explorers in that tradition, there are things that some of them got right, which I think we can take forward. First, some were great storytellers and writers. They ignited geographical imaginations in ways we could learn from if we want to engage the public in the big issues of our time.

They also worked within a longer tradition. Carl Sauer, a founding figure in North American academic geography, put it this way: "the literature of geography", he wrote, "begins with the earliest sagas and myths, vivid as they are, with a sense of place and of humanity’s contest with nature."

Second, many explorers were eccentric figures who rejected mainstream values and prejudices. Alexander von Humboldt, remembered here in Quito, stood up to racists and empire builders after his expedition in the Americas at the end of the 18th century. He fell out with the Spanish colonial authorities. Soon he was persona non grata in the British Empire too. He put his principles ahead of the research he loved.

Incidentally, Humboldt was also probably gay. For all his fame and following, he was something of an outsider. Some of the most brilliant explorers contradict common criticisms of their tribe, so much so that they were not even recognised as explorers.

Mary Kingsley, who visited West Africa in the late 19th century, was labelled a travel writer rather than an explorer. As the geographer Alison Blunt has shown, Kingsley’s explorations really mattered. They challenged assumptions about the place of women and widened women’s horizons.

We today would do well to take forward the best things explorers have to offer: powerful storytelling and writing, defiance of the status quo, and critical perspectives on the world, as we decide where we would like exploration to take us today.

But how? How can we reimagine exploration for the 21st century?

I promised some suggestions, so here goes.

You may have heard of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. There are three war memorials and heroic figures around it. The fourth plinth is an opportunity: we can decide what to do with it, and we do, by selecting and rotating works of art.

One of my favourites is Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, a beautiful and provocative piece by the London-based artist Yinka Shonibare. Since its stint on the plinth, the ship has moved to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich. There it continues to delight visitors and passers-by, but also to provoke wonder and thought.

The African textiles and sails get us thinking about colonial and cultural encounters, past and present. This made me imagine a kind of fourth plinth given over to 21st-century explorers outside the lodge.

Like the fourth plinth, it could be used to reflect on the past, but also to think about the future of exploration. Like the fourth plinth, it could be controversial. Different ideas and suggestions could be heard and weighed up.

Here are some. None of these will be figurative. I want to move away from the idea that exploration should be represented in the form of an individual. There’s something universal about exploration which a particular figure would lose. We know this from gazing up at all those heroic white men.

Another thing these suggestions have in common is that they involve exploring close to home. Traditionally, explorers skimmed over the surface of the Earth in search of faraway places. The explorers I’m nominating do the opposite, looking ever more closely at things around them.

Tiny things. Minute details. Small changes. Little events. They travel vertically rather than horizontally. Their destinations are the opposite of exotic. This brand of exploration may resonate with those of us who came to value our daily walks during lockdown. Repeatedly covering the same ground, we noticed little things and made little but real discoveries.

My first suggestion, then, is a small plastic gnome of the kind you might buy in a garden centre or pound shop. You might not notice it at first. You have to stop and look closely to see what it is. But that’s the point. This is about noticing ordinary things in ordinary places.

Plastic garden accessories are prominent in blog posts, tweets and books by the first contemporary explorer I want to tell you about. Kevin Boniface is a postal delivery worker and poet in Huddersfield. He completed an arts degree in the 1980s and started delivering letters in the Yorkshire town.

"Soon after, it wasn’t easy," he explains. “I was forced to confront", he says, “the streets in the course of my job, and my initial response was to have a small nervous breakdown, shout at the pigeons, scroll through angry polemics with little punctuation or time for basic grammar.”

“In this miasma, as I perceived it, my impotent rage was far too easily stirred by unavoidable daily encounters with cheap garden ornamentation, stick-on fake leaded lights, the over-60s, casual racism, dogs and dog excrement, etc.”

“I was, however, writing these things down, which was a start.”

This brings us to some of the things I like about Kevin’s brand of exploration. First, he acknowledges his own frailty and vulnerability. This isn’t something we expect from explorers, though if we look for them, we find that the literature of exploration does present examples of physical and mental frailty.

Think back to Von Humboldt. For Boniface, exploration has been therapeutic, initially as a way of coping with a job he found boring and alienating. Beginning to pay attention to small things and details, exploring the streets of Huddersfield was a way of calming and distracting his mind. Looked at for long enough, the ordinary became extraordinary.

Next, I said that explorers have often been powerful writers and storytellers, and I think Boniface takes this tradition forward. His lists of objects displayed in gardens and discarded on pavements take inspiration from experimental writers, poets and artists such as Georges Perec and Ian Breakwell. They do something distinctive and new, very much Kevin’s own.

Another thing I like about his writing is that it can be funny. The meerkats and plastic owls bring a smile, one that I like to think is with rather than at their owners. Whether or not you find these observations funny, I hope you will join me in appreciating the serious point they speak to: an erosion of care and a deterioration of the environment.

My second suggestion moves us on. This one is more 20th century than 21st, which is true of both the artefact and the explorer it represents. You may think I’m cheating, but stay with me.

I once heard Jan Morris speaking in the lecture theatre of the RGS. I’m grateful for that, because I had read almost everything she’d written, initially for my work on geographical imagination, gender and empire, and later for pleasure.

James Morris became a household name when, as a reporter for The Times, he joined the expedition to climb the world’s tallest mountain. His dispatches, sent over the telegraph wires using a special code, reported the progress of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent of Mount Everest.

They fascinated people around the world, especially those on the drizzly streets of post-war London, many hoping to catch a glimpse of their newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. Later, Morris told the tale between the covers of a single book, Coronation Everest, writing with renewed panache.

But this was a last hurrah belonging to an older genre. I would not have nominated its author had it not been for a later book, which confronted a terra incognita of an entirely different order.

Published in 1974, Conundrum tells the story of Morris’s transition from James to Jan. We learn that the antics in Coronation Everest, though factually accurate and highly entertaining, had been a kind of sham. Striding over frozen mountains, James Morris had been playing a part, while knowing herself to be feminine.

Unflinchingly, Morris tells of the transition, which began with cross-dressing and reached its lonely climax in a North African operating theatre, far from the home country that refused to understand or accommodate such things.

Conundrum involves physical travel, and as such it might be placed on the same shelf as most of Morris’s other books. But the mysteries it confronted were as much psychological and corporeal as geographical.

Those who know the literature of exploration will know that Morris’s bravery was not entirely without precedent. Remember: the literature of geography begins with the earliest sagas and myths, vivid as they are, with a sense of place and of humanity’s contest with nature, including our own nature, our minds and bodies.

Still, in what she did and later wrote, Morris was ahead of her time, striking out into the unknown and leading us all out of our depth.

We could honour her today, a year or so after her death, by putting a giant copy of Conundrum on a bed. Ideally it would be a well-used copy, like the one I bought second-hand from Gloucester Public Library, with notes in the margins. Perhaps it once changed somebody’s life.

The first two suggestions have been individuals – adults striking out on their own in the lone-wolf tradition of exploration. My final suggestion represents a more collective and inclusive tradition, which I recognise and try to encourage in my teaching.

I do this with help from those who have gone before me and shared their ideas and energy, and also their sense of fun and their appeal to children as well as adults. A bunch of guerrilla geographers, as they describe themselves, calling themselves the Geography Collective, have come up with a series of little books and activities they call Mission: Explore.

Here’s an extract. One of the missions is: “Let a dog take you for a walk. You can even go on all fours if you like.” Think about sensing the world differently.

As a representation on a plinth, perhaps a dog on a lead, something we all recognise. The first thing I like about the Geography Collective is that their approach acknowledges that exploring has always been complicated and has involved many people: porters, guides, cooks, suppliers, funders, audiences and family members. The list goes on.

Exploration was often presented as an individual pursuit. That’s what the statues tell us: individuals on pedestals. The Geography Collective are different. They give their first names but are content to remain quite anonymous.

Second, I like the playful spirit we find in the Mission: Explore books, on their website and in the events they run at festivals. They explain: “We think it’s really fun and important to get exploring and questioning the world.”

It is, of course, possible to be fun and serious at the same time, and that’s something the Geography Collective have taught us. I also appreciate the accessibility of their missions. They can be done almost anywhere: where we live and work, at home and at school, in shops and hospitals, wherever we find ourselves.

They can be done far away, but it’s just as good to stay local. This is a democratic form of virtual and vertical travel. We’re all invited.

I could have made more suggestions. These would have included some of the people who will be speaking at the fieldwork event soon. For example, I’m a fan of Morag Rose, who can often be found shuffling around the streets of Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool, hanging around signs that forbid loitering and drifting with other psychogeographers.

I would want more to be represented on our plinth sooner or later. I could go on and make other suggestions, but I’ve made three suggestions for the first occupant of the plinth. Now I want to ask you to choose one.

Who will be first on our plinth?

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and web publication. The wording has not been substantively changed, and the speaker’s meaning and intent have been preserved.