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Led by Director and Chief Exec, Matthew Webb, over 120 editors, writers, and other contributors including Troy Onyango, Faith Adiele, Nicolas D. Sampson, Marie Baleo, Anne Louise Avery, Richard Ali, Robin Hemley, make Panorama possible.

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Issue 1: Firsts

Welcome to Panorama‘s first Quarterly Issue. Our purpose is to shift the perspective of travel literature and imagery towards a more panoramic, modern worldview, and we have chosen the theme of firsts to take you on a revolutionary journey through travel-themed fiction, poetry, imagery, essays, and memoir.

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Weekend Reading: Mapping Firenze

The day I learned to travel was the first time I ever was truly lost.

It was 1979 and I was nine years old. Surely, I thought as I sat timidly on the plastic seat, the bus driver wasn’t going to ignore two blonde girls. Every other adult in this city felt it necessary to touch or at least comment on our hair — cries of biondina! echoed in every piazza we crossed. It was one of the few words of Italian that I knew.

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Weekend Reading: An unreliable guide to London

Lord Kitchener, the late Trinidadian calypsonian, arrived in England on the Empire Windrush in 1948, with several songs in his back pocket. Kitchener, a then fresh-faced young man, not yet the calypso titan he would become, had a song ready for the Pathé News crew, when the Windrush docked at Tilbury: London is the place for me. A jocular, optimistic anthem, London is the place for me held within its upbeat melody the hope of an entire era of black, Caribbean Britons, making their way into Brixton’s industrial austerity. The ballad is, unmistakably, an immigration song – Paddington Bear, who hails “from darkest Peru”, navigates London to its tempo in 2014’s Paddington. London, the sanctuary and stomping ground of Paddingtons and Kitcheners alike, has been claimed – triumphantly and tempestuously – as the place for so many.

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Weekend Reading: Byron and Hobhouse in the Bernese Oberland

Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse were university chums. Hobby had been best man at Byron’s unlikely and short-lived wedding to Annabella Milbanke in 1815, and had accompanied him on a gap year to Albania in 1809. They stayed with despot Ali Pasha, who liked a bit of slap and tickle. Byron was partial to the local Greek youth, in particular Eustathius Georgiou: “Our parting was vastly pathetic, as many kisses as would have sufficed for a boarding school”.

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Issue 2: Treasures

Welcome to Panorama’s second Quarterly issue. Panorama exists to not only publish extraordinary diverse travel literature and imagery, but to widen the definition of what travel is. This Quarterly explores the idea of ‘treasure’ through travel-themed fiction, memoir, essays, poetry, photography, and illustrations.

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Treasures: Earthy Knowledge

It’s 1989, my brother’s fourth birthday. We all huddle together on Towan Beach, our backs against the autumn sea-gusts, and anoint him with headphones and a wired-up beeping stick. His present is a metal detector and we’re here to seek our fortune.

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Treasures: Cartography: I’le Glut you with Gold — The Strange Ambivalence of the Treasure Map

I beheld great heaps of coin and quadrilaterals built of bars of gold. That was Flint’s treasure that we had come so far to seek and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.

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Issue 3: Open

We present our panoramic vision of travel literature in our Spring ‘Open’ issue. A carefully curated collection of travel poetry, fiction, and memoir, the selections for the ‘Open’ issue invite readers into the landscape of the personal journey, and redefine what that can be.

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Open: The Meek Family Ed-venture

Tim and Kerry Meek were both full-time teachers in Nottingham, England but felt that their jobs were too life-consuming and they needed to redress their work-life balance.
They wanted to dedicate more time to their family, and so in 2014 they made the radical decision to give up their jobs, sell their house, and take thei...

Open: Bola Nuts

The sun was hot on the back of my neck. Hunger stretched and yawned like an expectant embryo needing nourishment in my belly. I unwrapped the plantain from the newspaper, the smell teased my nostrils. Boli roasted plantain, was usually eaten with palm oil, sold on the streets wrapped in paper. The groundnuts were in the second wrap of the newspaper. The trick was to break off a bit of plantain and follow it up with the nuts, that way, the sweetness of the roasted plantain blended with the savoury saltiness of the roasted nuts.

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Issue 4: Seen

Perhaps more than any other time in recent history, how we see places and one another will determine what happens next to our human family.
Panorama: the Journal of Intelligent Travel proudly offers up our latest collection, ‘Seen,’ in the spirit of sequi, to follow. Along...

Seen: Summer of the Bears

A ptarmigan squawked from the nearby willow bushes. Squatting by the pan of water on the Coleman stove, I called my husky, Paris, and did a quick mental calculation of the distance to the camper van – close enough if the reason for the bird’s alarm call was something other than the dog. The rustling grew closer: an undulating swath of yellowing leaves bent in my direction. Seconds later, Paris emerged at full tilt as if she was being chased. I stood, half expecting to see some other wild animal behind her. There was only me, the dog, and the ptarmigan that was now quiet.

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Seen: The Cotswold Way, England

I am standing barefoot on the soft green brow of Cleeve Hill, the highest point in Gloucestershire, holding up a faded cream-cotton parasol against the hot sun. I can see straight across the Vale of Evesham, to the blue swell of the Malvern hills, rising up through the heat haze, and then further still to the dark Welsh mountains on the distant horizon, sprawled like heraldic dragons en dormant.

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Seen: We May Never See Penguins

When I quit smoking the night before we left, it felt like a joke. My first attempt, in Korea, had been cutting down to five a day, ‘easing’ out of it. Nearly a decade had passed since. But, this time there was to be no easing. Quitting smoking, I’d decided, would help with the budget.

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Seen: High Hopes on the Cotswold Way

The plan was to quit my job then walk the Cotswold Way, a 102-mile path along a Jurassic-age escarpment in southwest England. Beyond that there was no plan, but part of me believed that, somewhere along the Way, I would have an epiphany. As the saying goes, solivtar ambulando: it is solved by walking.

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Lost: Letter from Panjim

It is just past 10pm on a weekday evening when I do something unusual. My son is safely in bed, dreaming of Legos and superheroes. This is usually wind-down time, a precious last few hours to catch up with deadlines, conversations, putting away the dishes, prepping for the next day. But that night, instead of heading to my computer, I put on my sandals, sling my purse across my shoulder and wedge my camera in, along with my wallet and keys. And then I walk out the door.

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Lost: Lost in an Empty Land

As an artist-writer adapting Paul Klee’s approach of ‘taking a line for a walk’, I like to lose myself in a landscape. Foot becomes pen; path becomes page. I find that this process occurs most often on longer walks, for it takes time for the white noise of the world, or one’s own neurotic echo chamber, to fade. Time also for the tendency to decode, to ‘translate’ a landscape into words, into meaning, to fall away.

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Lost: Lost and Found in St Margaret’s Hope

A silver acorn attached to a pocket watch, Pict skeletons under the floorboards, an ornate façade covering a concrete bunker, the tweeting from inner walls where birds are nesting, two journeys over the North Sea, and the feeling of a new hope. It is a Thursday evening in Thurso, Caithness, the northernmost town on the Scottish Mainland, when I learn that in the morning we will be travelling to St Margaret’s Hope on the Orkney Islands.

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