Meet the man leading an online pilgrimage – and doodling on your neighbourhood using Google Street View

Just call him Geoffrey Chaucer with an iPad

John-Paul Flintoff, author of Psalms for the City, is an artist and poet who walked from London to Canterbury via Google Street View during lockdown is inviting you to join him for a YouTube pilgrimage on the 3^rd November at 7pm, and you can access the link to join here: 21st Century Psalter | YouTube Livestream | Make Art With John-Paul Flintoff. Participants can use online drawing app Aggie.io to draw collaboratively with John-Paul – no download required. 

John-Paul Flintoff is well-known for his online pilgrimages and his use of Google Street View as a canvas upon which to etch exquisite and quirky illustrations. The artist’s latest virtual pilgrimage, which coincides with the publication of his book Psalms for the City. Participants will be invited to ‘walk’ with John-Paul and draw meaningful images onto the places they call home, revealing the hidden treasure of their own neighbourhoods, the magic of the most mundane areas.

Despite turning digital excursions into an art-form, John-Paul’s first pilgrimages were offline – and accidental. A former Sunday Times journalist, he suffered a mental breakdown that left him hospitalised, and found himself wandering into empty churches on his way home from therapy sessions (churches – unlike coffee shops – were free). John-Paul found unexpected healing, both through walking, and illustrating the beauty of his home city of London, whose tower-blocks, bus stops, and churches provided such surprising refuge.

When COVID-19 hit, John-Paul took his pilgrimages online – and invited others to join him. He clicked his way past blurred-out faces and car numberplates, and took screengrabs of streets, drawing biblical scene onto these images of modern-day Britain. From his pictures of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac just outside a dry cleaner in North London, to the haloes he drew around the heads of two women drinking milkshakes at a bus stop in Preston, John-Paul emphasises that holiness and sacred moments are just as appropriate in 21^st century urban spaces as they are in ancient religious texts. 

“I like the idea that the grotty area behind some bins on an unremarkable street might be the space where something cosmic is, was and ever shall be taking place”, says John-Paul.

Like the work of a modern-day Chaucer, John-Paul's poetry in Psalms for The City, contains diverse and colourful vignettes of life in 2022. Inspired by the Luttrell Psalter, a book of illustrated psalms from the late Middle Ages, which includes marginal images showing everyday life from that period, Psalms for The City contains John Paul’s own marginal drawings of urban life in 2022 alongside his psalms, like a modern-day medieval manuscript.

Born out of John-Paul's recovery from a metal breakdown, Psalms for The City is a love-song to our cities, to the relationship between poetry and prayer, and the fact that we are all beings with spiritual health that deserves tending to.

To read some of Jean-Paul Flintoff's inspiring poetry take a look at Psalms for the City, available in beautiful hardback here. 

Psalms for the City Original poetry inspired by the places we call home By John-Paul Flintoff A beautiful collection of original poetry and stunning illustrations inspired by both the psalms and the scenery and sounds of urban life. The whole of life can be found in the psalms. It can also be found in our cities. Open and honest, these are modern day psalms that chart John-Paul’s discovery that the extraordinary places welcomed the ordinary, and that when we’re looking closely, the ordinary places can become extraordinary. With his own hand-drawn illustrations to accompany the poems, Psalms for the City is a book that poetry lovers will treasure and is perfect for fans of Charlie Mackesy. Presented in a beautiful hardback format, it will also make a wonderful gift for friends and family, and for those who love the diversity of city life. Psalms for the City is an invitation to take your imagination on a pilgrimage across the city, experiencing the full depths of what it means to be human today.

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