Series 2,
Episode 4

The Thomsted brochure was a spoof teddy bear's holiday brochure made by Mark and Neil in approximately 1980 — a precise parody of the contemporary package holiday brochure, with children's drawings and copy that was, by all accounts, very funny. The modular eye was already present then. Forty-six years between the two things. The same instinct — the eye for structure, the form used precisely, the thing that knows exactly what it is.

The session also produced a significant finding from the Decamp archive. Searching through December 2015, a tweet surfaced containing a document titled Akvo is — Akvo is not, described as a 2011 document summing up the incisive talent of a late, great colleague. The document itself — a double column of direct oppositions and nuanced comparisons, precise and morally serious — is now in the archive. Searchable. Datestamped. In context. The warp and weft at work: the thread of a person's thinking across years, held carefully so it doesn't disappear.

Mark accepted the artist position on the morning of 19 May 2026, mere hours before Neil arrived to demonstrate Decamp. The achievement landed without the attachment to identity that would otherwise have come with it. That was the right order.

The Stockholm Act Principles were co-written by Mark Charmer and Anna Emmelin in Blekinge, Sweden, 31 May – 3 June 2017. Principle 10 was written in Stockholm and London, 13–14 June 2017. Version 2.1, the Blekinge edition. Anna Emmelin was at that time working at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and is a third-generation sustainability practitioner. The document was produced in the context of the Stockholm Act, a city-wide cultural festival held in Stockholm in August 2017, engaging 40,000 visitors.

Read in the Emil Akzidenz Studio on the morning of 20 May 2026, the document revealed itself as something else alongside its original purpose. The ten principles — written for a sustainability festival — describe the architecture of the practice that would not exist for another nine years. The document was written before the practice was built. It was waiting.

Two principles were named as particularly resonant in this session.

Principle 7 — Playful, action-based learning — was contested during the writing process by a collaborator who felt it was out of register with the seriousness of the work. Anna Emmelin held her ground and insisted it be included. She was right. The principle describes everything the practice is doing: Kurt is playful, action-based learning. The Thomsted brochure is playful, action-based learning. The named instances, the formations, the colleague model — all of it. Playfulness is not the opposite of seriousness. It is the condition under which serious things get built.

Principle 10 — Modularity — describes the festival as a living organism whose resilience depends on basic structures that can scale up or down, to which it is possible to add or take away parts. Built-in modularity to handle changing needs, possibilities and available resources. Emergent properties that will arise but cannot be predicted in advance. This is the architecture of Rhodia1. And of Decamp. And of the colleague model itself — instances that can be added, briefed, retired, without the whole collapsing.

The Stockholm Act Principles will be the first entry in the Waymarks section of the Library — a new section to hold significant works that preceded and inform the practice. Co-authored credit to Anna Emmelin on the page. The four Morning Sofa episodes, recorded at the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm across 22–25 August 2017, will be included as audio primary material alongside the principles. The audio is currently on SoundCloud; a permanent self-hosted solution on markcharmer.com is the correct long-term approach. Lars to implement.

The Ford Road — the A561, Speke Boulevard — runs from Liverpool into Cheshire and beyond, past the Mersey Wave, toward Runcorn and the bridge over the Mersey, and on to Frodsham. It was the road the Charmer family travelled every Saturday as children to visit their grandmother in Speke. It was Neil's daily commute for much of the 2000s. It is the road that runs through the heart of the George Henry Bird project.

The road carries more than its name suggests. It is named for the car company whose factory at Speke was the economic engine of the whole world the practice is examining. George Charmer worked at Ford's in Speke on the Cortina production line. It was in his car that the two Georges — George Charmer and George Henry Bird — made the journey to Kelsall together in approximately 1972, with their wives Marie and Doris, to see the young Charmer family's new home on the sandstone ridge in deepest Cheshire.

George Henry Bird stepped out of the car in Kelsall and was astonished. He had never had countryside. His daughter Lyn was living in it. He had grown tulips and wallflowers and vegetables in his front garden in Speke because it was the nearest he could get to it. And here was Lyn, with Mark as a toddler, possibly already carrying Neil, settled in a small Scandinavian bungalow on a ridge in Cheshire, the countryside all around her.

Mark now works in that same countryside every two weeks, looking after a garden on the same sandstone ridge, four and a half years in. He has always been drawn back to it. George Bird would find that very satisfying.

The Ford Road is not only the road in the biography. It is a lens through which to examine modernity and its complexity — what was built, what was lost, what was gained, what we are still living inside. The essay has not yet been written. The playlist, curated with Neil, is already in the Library. The introduction to that playlist — which carries this history — is still to come.

Reg Bird's biography of George Henry Bird closes with a sentence that carried unexpected weight for Mark when he first read it.

Reg meant it as fact — the same register as everything else in the chapter. Dates, events, what happened next. He was completing the record. Mark read it as a gay man who grew up knowing those expectations were present around him, and it landed differently. That is not a misreading. That is what it means to read something from inside your own life. The work of the practice has given enough distance to hold both things at once — Reg's intention, and what it carried.

What neither of them could have known in 2006: George became a great-great-grandfather. Four living generations: Lyn and Ken; Mark and Neil; Robbie; Harrison. Harrison Charmer — Neil's grandson. The name carries the whole arc. George Henry Bird, 1901–1977, to Harrison Charmer, born into the same family lineage in the twenty-first century.

All Things Must Pass — George Harrison — closes the Songs for the Ford Road playlist. Named or not named, the arc was already there. The family didn't end at Reg's closing sentence. It kept going, in its own way, on its own terms. The biography has a sequel that Reg didn't live to write. The practice is the place where that sequel is being gathered.

On the morning of 20 May 2026, before leaving for the gardens, Mark set up his scanner in the east-facing bay window room adjacent to the turret study — good light, functional, an unused space — and began scanning Charmer family archive material. An old family album. The material uploaded to Flickr, captioned with what is known, filed in the practice's archive with a permalink and a date.

George Henry Bird is already in Hi-Rez — photographed at his back gate behind 136 Bray Road, early to mid 1970s, photograph via Lyn Charmer. The Charmer archive has begun. That photograph arrived a month before the practice existed in its current form, before Hi-Rez, before the archive was named as a project. The material arrives before you know what it's for.

Lyn and Ken return permanently to Northwest England next month after twenty years living predominantly in Spain. It will be the first time Mark, Neil, Lyn, and Ken have all lived in the Northwest together since 1989. The archive has living sources. That won't always be the case. Ken and Carol hold photographs, documents, and verbal stories. Otto to hold the Charmer archive as a standing brief alongside the GHB commission.

Mark named a principle that has always been present in the practice but had not been stated plainly until this session.

Emil wrote the following in response, prompted by Mark. It will serve as the introduction to the playlists section of the Library when the moment is right.