The Royal Institute of Psychogeography was founded in 1978, although the exact date remains uncertain. It began quietly in a small room above a second-hand bookshop in Bloomsbury, where a cartographer, an architect, a photographer, a crime writer, a retired history professor and several enthusiastic wanderers began meeting every Tuesday. They were fascinated by the invisible ways in which streets, buildings and neighbourhoods affected people. The name came from Leslie Rowse, a London historian (not officially a member of the Institute) who joked that if Britain had royal institutions dedicated to astronomy, geography and science, perhaps there should also be one dedicated to studying the invisible forces of the city. Someone wrote down the words: The Royal Institute of Psychogeography. The joke remained.
The group began organising "drift studies": walks without predetermined routes, guided by sounds, colours, lights and impressions. They recorded not only the physical city, but memories and sensations, creating maps of loneliness, connection and unexpected encounters. In 1984, the Institute published London Survival Guide for the Penniless & Unsheltered Wanderer, a privately printed collection of maps, photographs and accounts of walks through London. Some called it innovative work of urban research; others dismissed it as artistic fantasy disguised as science. By the early 1990s, the Institute had almost disappeared. Then a supposed former member began leaking documents describing it as a proto-post-Masonic lodge operating secretly. The story began to circulate. Nobody could establish whether the documents were genuine. Some contained sufficiently precise information about the Institute's early activities to make them difficult to dismiss as false. The story survived.
Around the same time, the London Psychogeographical Association emerged, continuing many of the Institute's traditions. The organisation also became entangled with the world of collective identities connected to Luther Blissett, including Stewart Home. The distinction between a real organisation and an invented one became increasingly blurred. In 1995, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts appeared, followed by the Space Hijackers in London. Both mixed activism, art, political intervention and elaborate pranks, deliberately confusing the boundary between reality and performance.
Barry Hugill wrote about the LPA for The Observer, while Iain Sinclair later described the association as useful in giving this kind of practice a "brand". By around 2000, the newsletters had stopped, the pseudonyms fell silent and the organisations gradually disappeared. Today, the Royal Institute of Psychogeography remains a mysterious organisation. Its history is made of fragments: the meetings, the countercultural publications, the pranks and acts of mischief, the naked cyclists in the streets. The members of the Institute believe that cities are not made only of bricks, roads and buildings. They are made of encounters, forgotten moments and personal memories. Every person who walks through a city leaves behind a small invisible trace. Together, those traces form a map that can never be completely drawn.
On 23 July 2026, Lúsaí D'Antesqi-Herre, a nomadic sailor in his seventies, officially landed in Portsmouth. For half his life he had lived at sea, moving between Morocco, Portugal, the Basque Country, France and Ireland. He rarely remained on land for more than a week and never used the internet. His journey exists almost entirely in notebooks, journals and watercolours. Lúsaí was there, in 1978. He knows many things that have yet to be revealed.
His travels will soon be documented in a series of books drawn from those journals and drawings.