Colin Ellard Audiobooks

Places of the Heart: how the rooms, streets and screens around us shape the mind

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

92 listener ratings

Who is Colin Ellard?

Why does one room settle you and another set your teeth on edge? That question sits at the centre of Places of the Heart, and it turns out to have far more evidence behind it than most listeners expect.

The book belongs to the tradition of psychogeography, the study of how surroundings act on thought, emotion and the body. Homes, workplaces, city streets, green space, and increasingly the virtual environments we spend our hours inside, are all treated as things that do something to us rather than as neutral backdrops. Our catalogue files the title across health and wellbeing and technology, and that pairing is apt: this is writing as interested in what screens are doing to our sense of place as in what architecture does.

Colin Ellard in audiobooks

The audiobook runs to roughly eight and a half hours in a reading by John Fleming, and it holds a 4.5 rating with us from a solid body of listener reviews. Fleming’s measured pace gives the research room to breathe without ever tipping into lecture.

If you want the ideas at their most immediately recognisable, listen for what the book has to say about the home and the high street; the material on virtual space rewards a second pass. Whether you arrive through the science, through architecture or through simple curiosity about your own reactions to a place, it is an unusually companionable piece of non-fiction. The audiobook is waiting below.