To navigate, is to find your way through a problem, to a solution or a destination. Navigation is the way you achieve this.
I have always loved the sea and have been lucky enough to have had time on the water. I have done a lot of sailing and it has always fascinated me that to go on a journey you could not just get up and go on a whim. You needed to understand the tide, tidal flows, tidal heights. The wind, it’s direction, it’s speed and the bloody weather, which out of nowhere would either leave you totally becalmed or in the middle of a gale. You had to obey all of these forces, work with them and somehow harness them. They were in charge and not me.
When I came to London, clearly no sea, but I discovered the Thames. Running through the heart of the city it has a different story to the sea. It seemed a tamed, controlled piece of water, very different to wildness of the open water. But over the years I have got to know it much better, spent many hours on its waters, on its banks at low tide or cycling on its towpaths. I have begun to understand its power, its rhythms, its ability to change and reshape man-made objects.
This story is about that journey.
James Fisher is a chef, food product designer and is currently the product lead for plant based foods at Marks and Spencer. He has a life long fascination with materials, their creation, growth and decay with particular reference to their relationship with nature. It is through cooking, handling food that he begun his journey on his appreciation of the complexity and sheer beauty of nature and to build a respect for the pace and rhythms of the seasons.
Navigation is just an extension of this. Last year, having completed his RYA yacht skippers licence, he gained a knowledge of how oceans and rivers work and how these waters effect us and the materials we make….