Profile & the 'Spirit of LoHo'

My name is Andrew Bernhardt. Having worked as a Parole Officer for 22 years, I now work part-time as a Senior Lecturer in Child Protection and run my own private counselling practice. Having grown up between the South Downs and the south coast, I moved to London when I was 18.  Apart from a four year spell in Bristol, I’ve lived in the capital ever since.

LoHo evolved through the slow gathering of disparate thoughts along several thousand miles of rambling in England and abroad and, more recently, the exploration of the strange half-deserted streets of lockdown London, following little more than my curiosity and wherever the pavement lead.

This website arose partly as a result of experiencing in myself, and observing in others, how we expend our precious time and attention. Then, recovering from a serious illness, I had the existential wake-up call. ‘What am I doing with my time?’, which inevitably led to perhaps a better question, ’What makes enriches my life, what detracts?’

I considered how much of my thinking was being consumed by screen time – not an original observation but a worrying one.  But it wasn’t being consumed passively, I was an active and willing participant in the harvesting of my own attention.

As New York Times writer and attorney Tim Wu put it, “Your time is scarce and you know it… Your time is scarce and your technologies know it”.

By happy contrast, I knew I found joy and contentment when I had allowed my attention to drift wherever it would among my favourite places where I could be the harvester; where my attention was not reaped but sown.  I knew where, for me the harvest was and always had been; I’d seen it, smelt it, walked it and felt it on my skin. It was under the sky, in the wood, along the track and on the noisy city street.

Our ‘no-mission’ Mission

There is no LoHo Programme, method or ‘way’, no mission statement or manifesto. There is no incitement to transformative action, spiritual self-improvement or moral position taking. Should any of the above occur, bringing benefit to you or others then that’s all to the good.

The implied gentle directive to ‘Log Off’ is not a Luddite railing against the brilliant gifts of the Internet, or a guilt-inducing denunciation of our screen pleasures. Instead, it proposes a simple contention: by spending some other time immersed in the beautiful, enigmatic strangeness of nature, or attending to the myriad, human stories and histories hidden in our city streets, we receive other gifts, ones which restore and replenish our deeper selves.

Assuming, that is, we have a deeper self. LoHo welcomes everyone, including those annoying people: the contented and happily shallow. They have a gift all of their own.

So LoHo is just one idea among the many 1001 other things competing for your attention. No one has to go on a walk but if, or when, the mood should take you, log off, head out and see what happens…