New Uses for Old Bunkers # 31: WD’s Posting Sentries Project

Last year I had an academic paper published that offered up some thoughts and reflections on why some people (predominantly male) invest considerable amounts of their spare time cherishing the dank concrete ruins of defensive emplacements. In part of my paper I ruminated on bunkerologists observed restoring their prized structures, and the pervasive desire to resurrect these places and their stories from the mundane background into which it was felt that they had slid. Their fear was that these structures had become imperceptible – whether through ubiquity or physical and informational decay. There was also an evident faith in the power of the materiality of these buildings to convey something above and beyond what books could achieve.

Thus, often driven by the dedicated efforts of amateur enthusiasts, individual pillboxes, bunkers, tank blocks and so forth had became foregrounded via local initiatives – an interpretive sign added here, a memorial plaque there, a coastal walk leaflet, a local history book or talk, a re-enactment or other event day now and again.

Such projects appeared to meet little if any opposition, they were seen as a valid (if at times a little nerdy) example of localism and community spirit.

But what if the attempt to rescue a site from obscurity is carried out by an individual and involves affixing artwork to the fabric of the structure itself. Should that be lauded any less?

This was the issue I found myself grappling with after becoming aware of War Department’s ‘Posting Sentries’ Project. War Department (WD) is a Scottish street artist who stencils life-size sentries and other period-inspired images onto and into the fabric of abandoned pillboxes and related structures. The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by me with WD earlier this week. WD is aware that it is being published here and has given permission for the use of photographs of his work.

LB – How do people react to your work (e.g. visitors, site owners, heritage groups)?

WD – Very positively with some heritage bodies recently asking for work to be produced for them especially at their own sites and events. I get a lot of emails with photos taken by people who have found a piece which are always great to see and I do get the occasional email from other artists and urban explorers wanting to come on a mission with me which is something I don’t allow. The only negative comment I had was that someone thought that one of my prints featured the wrong model of Bren Gun for that location…they were right and I replaced the print at the site a few weeks later.

LB – What types of people do you meet in these places?

WD – I have met a few people on site and they are generally either hikers or geocachers. Once they see me, they tend to hang about and watch me work and have a chat about the project which is good.

LB – How does your project approach the issue of respect for place and authenticity?

WD – I avoid any sites that have a very documented past, maintained in any way or are in private ownership – I look for the forgotten and do my research in to its past before I create a piece. I try to find out unit names/tasking/equipment etc to give the work some accuracy for those in the know. The majority of the sites I work with are in ruins and are in no way maintained, a fact I am very careful about. For example I do not work with Royal Observer Corp (ROC) posts as they have groups dedicated to their upkeep and I would not wish to upset them as they do a great job in keeping the past alive.

LB – Is there a tension between selling prints and declaring yours a noncommercial project?

WD – Not at all. The prints went on sale after I received dozens of requests from followers of my work who wanted to own a print themselves. The money raised from the sales of prints pays for the materials I require (which are rising in price every day) and a percentage of each sale goes directly to a UK armed forces charity I support. I don’t make any ‘profit’ from the prints and that will remain the case for the length of project. The company who sell the prints on my behalf make no money from the sales either and have been a great supporter and promoter of the project.

LB – Has your work ever been vandalised / ‘written over’ by others?

WD – Not as far as I know, but I am not too worried if they do.

LB – What prompted you to add the safety disclaimer about the inherent dangers of visiting your sentries?

WD – Unfortunately some people are not prepared for exploring such sites and although the majority of the sites are safe, I would hate for anyone to get hurt looking for a Sentry. So I thought it wise to highlight that safety should be uppermost in the mind of the would be Sentry hunter. It is also partly for that reason I do not list the locations on the website.

LB – What got you interested in targeting bunkers in particular (i.e. why not similarly re-populating abandoned farms, derelict mills or old quarries with stencil people?) – was the attraction the bunkers’ non inner-urban locations, their ‘forgotten ruins’ status, their link with militarism/defence or was it family or other interest in wartime heritage?

WD – In the area that I live there are hundreds of wartime structures strewn throughout the landscape. I realised that although I knew what they were (thanks to summer holidays with Grandparents) many people didn’t and they were at risk as being regarded as just a lump of concrete and having no significance by future generations. I began looking into the history of the structures and found that the stories and the people behind them were fascinating so I started the project as my way preventing the loss of these stories.

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So, what’s going on?

WD appears a well meaning enthusiast, driven by the same memorial urges as the more ‘mainstream’ bunker-savers. Both seek to re-remember these abandoned structures and the time and seriousness of their deployment. Both invoke the language of research and public engagement. Both co-opt popular graphic styles to achieve their aim, neither are ‘high art’, conceptual or otherwise obscure in their intention or execution.

And yet, I initially found myself uncomfortable about WD’s project, and that unease hasn’t entirely gone. One anxiety was that of copy-catism, WD’s designs are very well executed and there appears to be a restraint (borne of respect) in both choice of site and approach. But does such re-energising attract adverse attention to these sites, encourage them to be seen as canvasses for a variety of others? But then I remind myself that bunkers close to urban centres were targeted by graffiti long before WD came along, and graffiti is itself an archaeological artefact (see www.grafarc.org for example).

Issues of ‘authenticity’ lingered in my mind too – would these stencils spoil the original structures?

But then I thought about it further. What are the differences between WD’s augmentation of these derelict hulks, and putting up interpretative boards, guides, directed pathways, and/or restoration activities that seek to portray a moment in time during the 1939-45 war? The only differences that I can think of are (1) how well does the intervention conjure something beneficial to the experience of the encounter and (2) who is the doer – the site owner, a national custodian or self-appointed enthusiast?

Two essays by conflict archaeologist John Schofield are helpful here. Schofield argues that such sites have little value without interpretation, and that contemporary approaches to interpretation take a wide view of that term. These places are not beholding a single essence, one that can only be extracted carefully by expert investigation. No, there are many possible meanings and the act of foregrounding one of them, is a necessary act of choice, and will reflect the preoccupations of the host society in which the interpretation takes place.  Few places lend themselves well to a flat, ‘facts-only’ presentation, and certainly not crudely build defensive emplacements which even in their operational life had few home comforts or other ‘trimmings’.

What good (i.e. effective) public realm art can provide is what we might call ‘positive provocation’: confronting the visitor such that an intellectual and/or affectual response is summoned by the artist’s appropriation of place, structure and signs and the relations summoned between them via unexpected juxtaposition: and the stumbling upon a lifesize image of a crouched sentry in an otherwise overgrown and desolate abandoned outpost certainly fits the bill.

Schofield quotes fellow combat archaeologist Graham Fairclough thus:

“sense of place is not a given, and therefore cannot necessarily be passed on only by interpretation. It is created by individuals, and the aim of displays should be to give people the means to develop their own appreciation of significance…The sense of discovery is vital.” (Schofield, 2009: 46)

Schofield tables the notion of artists as ‘incavators’: that whilst the archaeologist finds meaning by excavating the layers of materiality at a site, an artist can add matter to a site (incavating) thereby adding, or drawing out, greater understanding, experience, engagement, meaning, significance, value (choose your preferred term).

Schofield’s writings here summon a refreshing view of the mutability of material culture – these structures cannot stand still. If left untouched they will eventually decay to nothing, any intervention – whether with preservation or interpretation at the fore, involves change and choices, opening up one possibility, whilst necessarily closing down (or at least subduing) others.

So, if I end up concluding that WD’s interventions are successful augmentations, then that only leaves (2) to work through, and that tumbles into the politics of who should be the custodians of ‘heritage’ and how such assets should be both preserved and presented.

I suspect that my initial adverse reaction was a classic Romantic ruin-porn one, that to discover a site warped in this way would be to not find an ‘authentic’ site. Yet, when out exploring I sometimes come across other street art augmentations of non-military ruins and feel that I’ve come across something delightfully surprising, something that has added to the experience of the trip.

I think, ultimately for me it comes down in large part to this issue of augmentation – adding something of worth – but also issues of community engagement, is the intervention done with the approval of the local community? But here that gets complicated, who are the local community and how should approval be measured? Is the local community only those enthusiasts who already know of these structures, or does it include the unknowing mass, whose engagement with these structures will only be triggered by such interventions?

Perhaps the only difference that ultimately matters is that WD is doing this without permission. It is interesting to hear that WD has been approached by heritage groups seeking to co-opt him into ‘legitimate’ interpretative work (a step which he doesn’t appear to have any ideological opposition to). To my mind there is nothing inherently wrong about WD’s interventions in an aesthetic or interpretative sense but if done without the place owner’s permission (and without regulatory sanction in the case of sites designated as listed buildings of protected monuments) it is probably criminal damage. The legislation looks to preservation of the fabric of these buildings (no matter how dank or decayed). The application of paint, paper or any other materials to these surfaces is an infraction.

It was particularly interesting to see WD’s answer above to the question of site selection, that he would not target sites that appeared in private ownership. This comment seems to equate private ownership with habitation or use, the reality is – of course – that everywhere is owned by someone, even if there are no apparent signs of use.

In pulling this piece together I find myself with a left/right brain tension. The lawyer in me says ‘clearly unlawful’, the other part of me says this is an interesting way of appropriately augmenting these forgotten structures. I’m left stuck on the fence on this one…

References

Bennett, L (2012) ‘Who goes there? Accounting for gender in the urge to explore abandoned military bunkers’ Gender, Place & Culture: a journal of feminist geography iFirst article, 2012, 1–17, DOI:10.1080/0966369X.2012.701197

Schofield, J. (2005) Combat Archaeology: material culture and modern conflict, Duckworth: London.

Schofield, J. (2009) ‘Constructing Place: when artists and archaeologists meet’ in Aftermath: readings in the archaeology of recent conflict; Springer: New York.

WD’s website: http://www.war-department.com/

Another interview with WD: Issue 4, twohundredby200 magazine at: http://www.twohundredby200.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/twohundredby200-issue-4.pdf

Parkwood Scree: making matter mountain

 

This essay is an early draft of what is likely to be the closing piece in my and Katja Hock’s photography and text collaboration exploring the Upper Don valley escarpment in northern Sheffield. The preceding pieces will reflect on the areas of scrub, scar and dross-scape that we visited. This piece however steps back a little from the act of walking this terrain, and instead recounts one portion of it (the area of Parkwood / Shirecliffe) through the experiences of others as found by me on various community forum sites.

This hill is not a mountain, at 175m (575 feet) at its highest point it falls short on that score. But it still looms over the valley beneath it. The occupants of a wide plain of valley houses look up at this vast seemingly empty hillside, a dull swathe of scrub and broken earth, a wasteland as big as London’s Hyde Park. In what follows, using the online testimonies of others, I will show how this hillside is actually rich in both matter and meaning, for it is both an extraction space and a projection space: a venue for visceral engagement with the stuff of this hill and a canvass for diverse practices of meaning making.

Working with scree

This hill is partly made by people, and their lives in turn are partly shaped by their interaction with it. The place names in this area attest to the longstanding human engagement with this hillside, and of the matter that can be made to matter here – Neepsend, derived from Hnip Old English for steep hill. Shirecliffe, a bright or gleaming steep hillside in old English, and two ancient remnant woodlands Rawson Spring and Scraith Wood, the latter echoing Screith, a  boulder-strewn slope in Old Norse.

This place has a long history of systematic exploitation of its natural resources. In 1392 Sir Thomas de Mounteney was given a licence by King Richard II to make a deer park on this hillside, a woodland area to be farmed for venison, hares, rabbits, game birds, fish in fishponds, plus cattle and sheep in launds, cleared heath/pasture areas. By the end of 16^th century the park had been reoriented towards coppicing, in particular by charcoal burners and 18^th century records show sophisticated woodland management here, including bark harvesting from oak trees to make a liquor from which leather was tanned, alongside increasing timber felling  to build and power the water mills down in the Don valley.

But still, much of the hillside remained wooded, with the Old Park Wood, described by Joseph Hunter in 1819 as “beautifully clothed with a forest verdue…the ground declining to the River Don” whilst John Holland could still write in 1836 of its “sylvan ornament of the neighbourhood of Sheffield”. But as industrialization took firm hold down in the valley, deforestation increased at an increasingly aggressive pace – partly due to demand for timber and charcoal to build and power the furnaces, but also to clear space for rock quarrying, brick pits and ganister mining. By the early 20^th century most of the woodland at the centre of the site had fallen, with roads and mineral tramways appearing on the hillside. But not all work was productive, with rumor of a parish-pit type scheme in operation near the then present piggeries, a field pointlessly dug over backwards and forwards in return for parish assistance.

The hill’s ganister mine operated between 1936 and 1963, its 28 miners and a pit pony named Tommy extracting 200 tons of the silica rich hard rock and 40 tons of coal each week. The coal went down the hill to the power station and the ganister was processed into refractory linings for local furnaces. By 1954 this drift mine stretched half a mile into the hillside, capillaries reaching out within the mountain in search of this locally valuable rock. Stories abound of the miners accidentally driving their tunnels into the daylight of the railway embankment or the allotments, and then hastily filling the surface eruption before anyone noticed, like an errant mole, or a wayward escape committee. Upon closure of the mine, Tommy the pony, now blind after a lifetime underground, was put out to pasture on the hillside.

The mining and quarrying up on this hillside also created many intentional holes and spoil banks, and in the early 20^th century the landowner the Duke of Norfolk, granted tipping rights to Neepsend power station for the disposal of ash from the power station upon the hillside, a system of gantries, aerial ropeways and buckets carrying the hot ash up the hillside, and then tipping it in smouldering heaps.  Mapping from the 1930s shows these tips as conical piles along the course of the ropeways, acne on the hillside. Progressively the hill’s many quarries came to be in-filled too and the mapping shows vast curling landforms as the hillside slowly rose.

But this was not the first use of the hillside for disposal of matter. That accolade went to burial of the dead, for Wardsend cemetery had opened in 1857, interring 20,000 of Sheffield’s citizens in the lower reaches of the hillside over the following 120 years.

The present tipping of municipal waste by Viridor plc will conclude by 2020 and the plan is then to restore the tip’s presently occupied central area to country park use. Attempts to restore previous portions of the site have faced mixed fortunes. Nature (in its scrub form at least) has already returned to the former Parkwood Springs housing settlement. Whilst the gouged hillside zone of the former Neepsend Brickpit (closed 1978) is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest, to protect   the flora and geology of its exposed outcrops of the Lower Coal Measures, formed amidst Carboniferous sandstone 290 – 354 million years ago when the British Isles were in an equatorial location, swathed in tropical forest.

The stuff brought onto this hillside has shaped the way that nature ‘returns’ here. Japanese knotweed and Himalayan Balsam are prevalent along the river, whilst upland heather is spreading in the dry acid conditions of the ash tipped zone, in place of the woodland bluebells for which Old Park Woods was renowned, where they once grew now lies 30 feet under graphite dust tipped from the former Union Carbide factory down in the valley.

Living with scree

In reading through reminiscences of the area on the local community bulletin-board, Sheffield Forum, what has struck me most is how residents of this part of Sheffield remember their material encounters with this place – they don’t just write about where they went on the hillside, but also what they did there and the significant role given to stuff found and used there. This recollection captures the point well:

“The best den I ever saw was made by best pal … it was in the old derelict allotments at Parkwood. It was built on the foundations of an old bombed in greenhouse. He obtained bricks, timber, sheeting and old glass window frames from the tip.”

In their accounts, this hillside is recalled as a place of play, exploration and abundance of material for co-option. The stories tell of fossil hunting amidst the ganister mine’s shale heap, gathering tadpoles from the quarry ponds, rabbiting, pilfering coal, gathering scrap, searching out discarded knives from the local bowie knife factory, making braziers from gathered clay in which to burn “oil wop” (fabric soaked in oil) given to kids by the local foundry workers, digging bullets out of the firing range embankment, hunting for dynamite in the quarries, gathering bricks and stones as ammunition for the hill’s so-called ‘brick wars’ – in a battlespace betwixt rival gang territories. They also tell of co-option of the typography of the hillside – the slope for sledging, rolling old tyres, riding bikes down perilous courses. The river for rafting using found materials: crates, drums.

Then there are the tales of the hillside’s structures – whether derelict or active – being co-opted into new playful possibilities, the quarries, the mine, the engine shed and of the ruins of the hilltop anti-aircraft battery’s bunkers being a place of deep dark exploration and optimistic rooftop leaps.

It is particularly notable in the following reminiscence how the hillside is remembered as simultaneously abject, and a delight:

“The sulphur from the Electricity Power Station used to smell unpleasant, rot the curtains and kill privet hedges. As children we used to climb the massive spoil heaps of black ash at the Power Station, jump into the empty buckets going up the hillside and jump off at the next heap.”

It is also interesting to look at how the forum posts engage with the past and present ‘state’ of the hillside. The deforestation is noted and frequently linked to a recurrent fable of workers in the 1926 General Strike harvesting the central woods. Given the amount of trees that disappear from the map between the 1920s and 1930s this suggests an unfeasibly intensive locust swarm of felling during the nine day strike and its aftermath. But the story resonates, through the popular accounts of this hill. It is part of its history, whether true or not. The effect is to ennoble the felling – oddly keying into the dignity of labour, rather than the avarice of landowners.

Likewise, the ganister mine and the hill’s quarries and brickpits attract a positive recollection, and even the tipping is seen as an inevitable part of a ‘natural history’ of this site. That is not to suggest that the present tip is without its opponents – there are action groups, concerned residents and a swirl of anxieties about what may have been tipped. Interestingly though the arrival of suppositional stories about the tipping of radioactive waste from Windscale is challenged by forum elders. As one commentator notes: there is a tension between drawing attention to the tip as a way of opposing expansion (and/or pressing for its early closure) and a risk of adding to blight for properties and the poor fortunes of the area by foregrounding the tip and its conjectured hazards.

This hill is also haunted by a folktale of bodysnatching at Wardsend Cemetery. The truth is slightly more prosaic but the more emotive version continues to circulate. In 1862 a labourer living above the cemetery’s coach house complained of unpleasant odour. His complaint triggered a riotious assembly at the cemetery and the destruction of the cemetery manager’s house by the angry mob. The odour trail had revealed dissected corpses buried in an unmarked grave. The manager and the local vicar were prosecuted for falsifying of burial records and sentenced to brief imprisonment. The court had found that the bodies had come from the local workhouse, they had been lawfully dissected but re-interred without coffins in the mass grave. As it turned out this was more a case of fraud (the manager re-selling grave space) than the supply of bodies from the cemetery for illegal dissection.

What haunts the forums (and oddly echoes the dominant conventions of psychogeography and urban exploration) is a fascination with the seemingly mundane, and a desire to re-energise it with (in the case of the forums) reminiscence and attesting to the practical engagement with this place and its matter. Indeed such rumination was in play even before the mountain was stripped of its trees. In 1836 John Holland stood at the foothills of the hill and its verdant vista. But his attention was drawn first to two (then state of the art) foundries beside the Don: Old Rolling Mill and Club Flour Mill. Reflecting on the strange lure of these structures, Holland signaled a proto-urbex sensibility:

“at no great distance from each other, stand two buildings, both in reverse of elegant certainty, but respectively interesting to a person who is apt to make visible objects, not always in themselves striking, the nuclei of thoughts and feelings depending in a peculiar manner on the association of ideas”

Meanwhile in 1936 George Orwell stood at the same spot, figuring it in his diary rather differently (but still foregrounding a mundane structure in order to make his point):

“In front, across the piece of waste ground, a cubical building of dingy red and yellow brick, with the sign, ‘John Grocock, Haulage Contractor’. Other memories of Sheffield: stone walls blackened by smoke, a shallow river yellow with chemicals, serrated flames, like circular saws, coming out from the cowls of the foundry chimneys, thump and scream of steam hammers (the iron seems to scream under the blow), smell of sulphur, yellow clay….”

On the Sheffield History Forum site I find research striving to trace Mr Grocock, as if to bring his cubical building of dingy red and yellow brick into the foreground. The research finds the Grococks to have been a dynasty of fruiterers in this area, that business spawning – via coal and furniture shipments – a more generalised transportation services in due course. The researcher trawls trade directories to map this dynasty.

This reassembly process plays itself out with a multiple cast of participants on Sheffield Forum, in the collaborative reconstruction of the ‘lost’ community of Parkwood Springs. In reminiscence, posters to this site swap names, dates of remembered residents, at times working towards clarification of misremembered points (establishing the ownership history of the local chip shop for example), at others swapping colourful stories at others simply telling where their lives took them after they left Parkwood Springs, an enclave of around 200 back to backs and houses with small back yards, five shops, two pubs, a chapel and a windswept playground, an

“island village flanked by the Manchester railway, quarries, earthworks and a vast tipping area On all sides the land rises so steeply that the only entry by road is through steelworks under a low, narrow railway bridge” (Sheffield Star 1970).

For George Orwell (he stayed here, with Gilbert and Kate Searle in 154 Wallace Road, in 2-4 March 1936 as part of his research for The Road to Wigan Pier) it was habitation at the limit of habitability. With a southerner’s disdainful eye, Orwell noted the offset cobbles needed to give grip to horses and the wobble of womens’ bottoms as they pushed prams up the (to his eye) unfeasible slopes of Parkwood Springs’ streets.

By the early 1970s this area was depopulated. The houses boarded up and this streetscape erased by demolition in 1977. The roadways remain vaguely evident on maps and on the ground but this settlement remains firmly etched in the minds of those who once lived or visited here.

We are scree

To wander this hillside attentively by foot or via internet forums, alerts us to the richness of this place’s history, use and significance for those attached to it. If we look closely we find plenty of material on and about this hillside. It is not empty, it is not meaningless. This hillside is riddled with scree, both matter strewn across this hillside, AND the memories and meaning making actively projected onto this surface and its matter.

Select sources (future publication will list them in more detail):

Holland, J. (1836) The Tour of the Don, extempore sketches Made During A Pedestrian Ramble Along The Banks Of That River, And Its Principal Tributaries. The Sheffield Mercury: Sheffield.

Orwell, G. (1984) ‘The Road to Wigan Pier Diary’ – Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This 1920-1940, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth

Jones, M & Jones, J (n.d.) Parkwood Springs – from Deer Park to Country Park?, Sheffield City Council: Sheffield (available via: www.parkwood-springs.btck.co.uk)

Sheffield History Forum: http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/

Sheffield Forum: http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk

Behemoth: on the beguiling monstrosity of the wandering factory

“Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth. There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet….He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire.”

Psalms 18: 7-12

 

Many of the practices that I’m interested in involve walking factories – in the sense of walking around and within them for a variety of reasons. But what about factories that walk? That’s worth a ponder.

There’s something monstrously captivating about the idea of a moving factory – a truly mobile plant unmoored and roaming abroad, rapaciously consuming all in its path. It’s the point at which a vehicle become more complex, more totalising in its operations, than it feels a vehicle should. A point where the factory function starts to foreground and the vehicular elements retreat into the background. Think roadsweeper, combine harvester, dragline, tarmac layer. Factories on wheels, churning, belching – slow, but relentless. And  beyond human, for any driver seems dwarfed, superfluous, stuck somewhere spare that hasn’t already been consumed by an asymmetric (and unstreamlined) productive purpose. And then there’s the nomadic dimension: this machine is untethered. It is free to move next wherever it may, there are no rails or foundations to constrain it. This thing has chaotic potency.

A Walkley Factory walks

This week started with an expedition, a search for an invisible hole. The task was to trace to source the origin point of a house brick that I found when my garage was demolished a few summers ago. The brick helpfully had an inscription in its frog, ‘Chas. Wirkworth – Wadsley Bridge’. A bit of map work found the site of the former brickworks and we trekked to it. But this piece is not about that trip. Instead it is about a trip that we did not take. My research found many ‘vanished’ brick work sites across the historic maps that I’d spread out on the kitchen table. Flicking through as a time sequence, holding location stable but skimming through successive editions of the ‘same’ map, my attention was drawn to a former brickworks and clay pit on Carnaby Road in the Walkley district of Sheffield. Here’s the time slice:

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Two things grab me here. First that the brickworks doesn’t – does – doesn’t exist. It is a blip in time. In its day it dominates its site, then its gone, the clay cavity in-filled with refuse. The second is the thoughts triggered by thinking about the scale and extractive / generative ferocity of the plant whilst it existed. Through time the brickworks appears mobile. Maybe I’ve been watching too many end-of-the-world-alien-invasion films with the kids recently, but the strange two kiln beast appears to travel (an effect of the doesn’t – does – doesn’t flicking through maps and the eras that they represent). Thus an alien brick-ship descends upon an empty field, chomps into the land consuming earth in its fiery furnaces and spewing out millions of identikit bricks. But then something weird happens. The bricks start to form houses. The brick-ship becomes surrounded and flies off, leaving its empty field. The house army laying siege to the field pause (perhaps awaiting reinforcements from elsewhere) before finally crashing in, tide like, filling the field with their next generation host.

And then it’s all over, at least until a wave of urban clearance or a road scheme pulverises the houses in turn, rendering them back to fractured brick and block-dust and the ground level swells with a new layer of ground. Made ground.

Credits

Photo: http://www.agg-net.com/resources/media-gallery/image/mobile-feeder-0

Maps: Digimap

The books that bind – thoughts on merging with place

“Objects surely don’t talk. Or do they? The person in that living room gives an account of themselves by responding to questions. But every object in that room is equally a form by which they have chosen to express themselves” (Miller, 2008: 2)

Whilst in Devon just before Christmas I visited an elderly relative. I’d not been to his house for over 30 years. I was last there in my early teens and stepping inside I was struck by how much I’d remembered, and how little seemed to have changed. Time moves slowly in cosy suburban family homes, capsules that pass through decades with only modest (but diligent) periodic adjustment of decor and utility. But in that fundamental sense of ‘home’, the houses themselves remain the same; the same footprint, the same proportions, the same textures of wood, woollen carpet, sideboards and occasional tables.

Stepping into the warm sitting room, as the youngest member of a rather elderly posse, I was welcomed and guided to a sofa by the room’s chief resident – Uncle T, for this was a visit to the room of a terminally ill man. But this man was still in control of his immediate world. That day, Uncle T was the consummate host, the master of ceremonies, his armchair positioned at the apex of the room, face on to the TV. A side table had a neat row of remote controls readily available for his hand’s grasp.

In this room, all seats faced towards the TV and the sideboard beyond. On those shelves were Christmas cards, assorted decorations gathered and cherished over the years, and an abundance of cotton wool simulating the snow that hardly ever falls on the real ground outside. I quickly came to realise that, in this room, everything had its place, both physically and also within a rich symbolic order. My fellow visitors and hosts discussed cards and clan-family allegiances intently, and in doing so mapped out a rich socio-spatial hierarchy, for it was revealed that the positioning of particular cards on the display shelves was a product of an assessment of a measured quantum of love, and of the degree of concordance of motif and inscription to what was expected. This was a rich anthropology of sign and status, a system of propriety offering itself up in a warm sitting room in suburban Torquay.

But what struck me most then (and even more so looking back now) was the neat rows of books about Devon arranged on shelves at Uncle T’s right shoulder. This was a pre-internet treasured trove of Birthday and Christmas gifts. An archive built lovingly through a lifetime by an enthusiast. And, I must assume, reflective of a deep interest in the context of the locality within which Uncle T had lived his entire life, a life which finally ended yesterday after a long illness.

In recalling the scene in that room: the people, the chatter, the cards, the ornaments and the books I’m left with an impression of connection to place, connection to context and the comfort born of both relationships with things themselves and of cherished knowledge about those things and their orderings.

And here I’m reminded of Nick Papadimitriou’s yearning to become Middlesex, to merge into the place that means so much to him, and which he has written about so eloquently in Scarp, and which he more than hinted at in John Roger’s documentary, The London Perambulator (2009). Papadimitriou shows in both how throughout his life the northern London edgelands were akin to a cherished parent, and how from seeking solace a deep urge to know this territory at all levels and in all conceivable ways came to the fore. He would forage both land and bookshops and libraries, amassing an archive of local knowledge – ecology, topography, infrastructure, history and ghosts: in his words a ‘deep topography’, one built from a process by which:

“I pull my region closer, dragging its leaf-fall, scrap iron, blotting-paper substance home with me after every walk. I spread my finds out on the trestle table and spend long evenings in examination. I hear voices hovering around these tiny fragments of other times, other people’s lives…” (Papadimitriou 2012: 77)

Papadimitriou and Uncle T were very different people. To Uncle T the terms psychogeographer, urban explorer or antiquarian would have been meaningless (and probably corrosive). Instead, I think Uncle T was performing something straighter, but no less engaged in seeking out a context, an understanding of his locality. Whether motivated by local history, rambling  or appropriatism (the ‘Local Interest’ section in any bookshop attracts many who would regard such an interest as healthy, positive and socially aspirant) these books were accumulated and – I must assume by their multitude and prominence – read, re-read and cherished.

Mike Parker, in his wry thoughts on how best to differentiate funky middle-aged psychogeographers from third-aged ramblers and local history enthusiasts, offers up the view that these respective practices are distinguished (only) by a difference in reflexivity. As he puts it:

“The greatest difference is humour: a deep map of anywhere needs irony, poetry and a sharp sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime, not qualities generally found among the serried ranks of bank managers in the local history society.” (2010: 272)

As Parker notes, this is rather a harsh judgment on the non-psychogeographers. But I think it carries some truth. Uncle T was a serious headed man. Those of Uncle T’s cast carry a sober faith in the journey towards truth and completeness that their engagements with their localities are achieving. Deep topographers of Papadimitriou’s hue seek and find a dislocation at the heart of what they find; a mystery rather than a mastery. Psychogeographic enquiry, it seems to me, seeks an experiential multiplication of the pieces, and not necessarily with the aim of totalisation or conclusive understanding.

But whilst the reason for each of these types of journeys may be different, each – at their extreme – points to an ultimate absorption into the place that is the subject of the intense scrutiny. And so, I’d like to think that Uncle T has now at last – in an entirely unpsychogeographic manner – found a way to finally become Devon itself.

References:

Miller, D. (2008) The Comfort of Things, Polity: Cambridge.

Papadimitriou, N. (2012) Scarp, Sceptre: London

Parker, M. (2010) Map Addict, Collins: London

Rogers, J. (dir) (2009) The London Perambulator (documentary) available to view at http://londonperambulator.wordpress.com/

Photograph: http://www.fusionuk.co.uk/autumn/fusbm/Devon%20Range/bookcase.jpg

Craterology & Legal Geography – searching for law and other meaning in quarries and elsewhere

I’ve spent a lot of time writing about bunkers and bunker-hunters in recent years, so it is with a tongue pressed firmly in my cheek that I declare 2013 as my year of writing about quarries. It’s not that I don’t mean it (I do) – but I’m fully aware of the need to be seen not to be taking this all too seriously. And yet, I’m not just looking at those who playfully enchant these places, I’m also studying those who own them, and do their best to manage them. So, some of the time I need to be very serious. I’m writing for two different communities, about one place type with me in the middle trying to make sense of both sides, and shuttle alien perspectives back and forth across the mid-line.

So, hello craterology

But, having caused some friction (and hopefully some insight) with ‘bunkerology’, this is probably the one and only time that you will see me talk of my projects under the label ‘craterology’. But, essentially that’s what I’m up to: investigating how people go about making sense and order within areas of hollowed out stone.

Alongside some more user-aesthetics based investigations of these spaces, this year will be about writing up my study of the British Mountaineering Council’s quarry managing (and climbing encouraging) practices, and seeking out further angles from which to think through my research question ‘how do people interact with these places?’, and in doing so also address the sub-question ‘and how do these people make sense of both the rock and each other?’

To kick off, I will soon be posting up another blog post that will link to a short article by me for popanth.com on climbers’ reactions to a graffiti incident in a former North Wales slate quarry. And more will follow in due course on culture clashes and normative orders in abandoned quarries.

But it’s actually the ‘other’ side of my work that I want to flag today. The BMC invited me to spend time with them learning about how they manage their quarry/climb sites, so that I could see owners who are not averse to climbing from a liability point of view, and how they achieve that equilibrium. My study will consider how they do that, and also examine why most other owners of these places are less relaxed and instead see the idea of recreational access to these places as a major risk issue. All sorts of issues, and ways of reading place and risk, tumble out of this.

Legal geography

And the origin for all this focus on meaning making? Well, I’m an environmental lawyer by training, but in recent years I’ve been publishing mostly in cultural geography journals. So, any opportunity to square the circle and write about all the angles that interest (or distract) me in one unified place is the holy grail. That’s essentially what this blog site is about: me sitting up on the fence, looking at both sides and trying to squeeze views, information, juxtapositions in both directions through the mesh.

So, today was especially satisfying, for with Antonia Layard (University of Birmingham) we’ve issued a call for papers on law and geography for the 2013 Royal Geographical Society conference. Our aim is to get the ball rolling towards establishing the legal geography hybrid as a worthy branch of both law and of geography scholarship, by building a conversation with all interested parties on how law and spatiality/matter co-act to construct place and space. And this is not a domain incursion – law trying to colonise a corner of a rival discipline. No, it’s more humble than that. It’s based on a realisation that spatiality and physical matter need more attention in legal scholarship, and that geographical sensibilities probably help to point us in the right direction.

As Antonia (who is Professor of Law & Geography, the first such appellation that I’m aware of in the UK) puts it, what seems to connect those projects that qualify for a putative legal geography is a concern to investigate law’s spatiality ‘from the ground up’: the studies we are thinking of start with the experience of visiting and/or being at a site. The analysis that then follows is grounded in the physical reality of that site, as it refracts through the discursive layers of site practice, local understanding, and thereafter appreciation of the wider context, and imposition of more formal legal frameworks onto places of that type, and people of the type who manage or visit them.

And that neatly brings me back to quarries – start at site level, understand the local normative order and the actors through whom it manifests, think about the interplay with the physical and the wider discursive context and formalities. Then pull it all together.

So, here’s the CFP if anyone’s interested in joining in the conversation:

Call for Papers and Contributions – Legal Geography

Submission Deadline for papers – Friday 8th February 2013 (other contributions can 
come later, please see below).

Organisers – Antonia Layard (Birmingham) and Luke Bennett (Sheffield Hallam)

Legal geography is an emerging discipline, located both within geography and law and 
society studies. At its core, it draws on legal and geographical techniques and 
concepts to understand ‘the role and impact that space and place have on the 
differential and discursive construction of law and how legal norms and practices 
construct space and places’ (Blomley 1993, 63).

While legal geography has been an emerging discipline for some time particularly in 
North America, it is not yet a clearly defined site of research in the UK or (with 
some notable exceptions) internationally. With the 2013 RGS Conference theme of ‘new 
geographical frontiers’ this seems as good a time as any to try to develop, 
collaboratively, how legal geography (or geographical law) might be understood and 
undertaken in the UK and beyond. 

We make two proposals for sessions. The first is for a Roundtable on Legal Geography 
and we would be very interested in hearing from anyone with a paper that engages 
explicitly with legal geography as a discipline, mapping the subject in some sense, 
investigating the subjects, techniques and approaches that legal geography uses.

We also hope to organise a world café session, which would be entirely participatory 
aiming (perhaps) at creating some initial networks, contacts, collaborations (for 
grant or scholarly purposes), bibliographies or ideas for further research.

Please do get in touch if legal geography holds any interest at all! 
(a.layard@bham.ac.uk).

Antonia Layard
Professor of Law & Geography 
Birmingham Law School

 

On curating strange encounters at Furnace Park

 

Luke Bennett (Sheffield Hallam University) and Amanda Crawley Jackson (University of Sheffield) are currently preparing an academic paper on the Furnace Park project. We hope to give it its first outing at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference in August 2013. Here’s the abstract as a taster of some of what’s to come…

On curating strange encounters in multidisciplinary space: a case study on opening up a plot to multiple reading

In the long retreat from essentialism, prevailing orthodoxy has it that the experience of place is multivalent, partial, subjective and/or pragmatic (e.g. Creswell 2004; Harman 2009, Delaney 2010). In this paper we will explore what this means in concrete terms by examining our involvement in the valorisation and art-led repurposing of a small plot of derelict land in the heart of Sheffield’s industrial quarter. At the core of our project has been a conscious desire to reveal and then linger over the multiple ways in which stakeholders associated with this project have each brought their own ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972) – their aesthetics in the widest sense of that term – to bear in making sense of the site for their purposes. Through this the project has seen a small abandoned scrubland site suddenly heavily traipsed by police, surveyors, writers, engineers, artists, scavengers, architects, police, film makers, ecologists, poets, lawyers, children, groundworks contractors and ambivalent bystanders. We will show how these visitors are strangers to each other, and this place, and yet through their proximity in time spent on site, their involvement in the project and the similarities and divergences of their sense making strategies, their paths, thoughts and actions start to interweave to create a rich, vibrant set of place-forming narratives for a supposedly ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995). In bringing these ways of reading out of their disciplinary silos, by creating a context in which their discursive grip of the situation was rendered slightly askew – we summoned intriguing patterns, commonalities and charming juxtapositional effects (Highmore 2002), a loose project specific community-assemblage of the type theorised by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière, that energised this forgotten site with new life, colour and purpose.

Blank slate or gallery?: art in the quarry

“Slate quarrying is not a matter of mere manual labour but an art which years of patient practice will hardly acquire…a slate splitter is like a poet…and contends with the poet on an equal footing at the National Eisteddfod where slate splitting, music and poetry are stock subjects of rivalry.”

So wrote the Pall Mall Gazette, in 1885 in acknowledgment of the skill and craft of the slate worker, and it’s place within the culture of North Wales. Wrenching the lumps of slate from the hillside rock mass was one thing, but doing so in a way that produced workable slate was something else. As one Ffestiniog rockman put the artistry of applying explosives to rock faces in 1893: “to bore a hole is one thing, but to know where to put it is quite a different matter” (quoted in Jones, 1977: 121).

The quarryman’s artistry comprised an intimate acquaintance with the qualities of the rock – an ability to read it, and through reading it to know how best to engage with it. This human/rock  interaction was acted out upon the hewn terraces of this vast quarry, spaces known as ‘galleries’ by those who formerly worked there.  But should these desolate spaces now become galleries for the display of art brought to this place? And what art is fit for a carved mountainside?

The picture above was taken in October 2012. It is a photograph of Jack Murray, a rising star of the street art scene,  laying down a preliminary glyph at the former Dinorwig slate quarry at Llanberis in North Wales as a prelude to returning and executing a much larger work. But that larger piece is now unlikely to go ahead, for Murray’s plan caught the attention of the climbing fraternity, and he was told in no uncertain terms to leave the quarry’s rock faces alone.

I examine this culture clash in a short article published today on the popanth.com website. The article focuses on the themes emerging from the reaction to Murray’s plan, and what the on-line debates show us about the territorial, ethical and aesthetic sensibilities of climbers. You can read it here: http://popanth.com/article/no-rock-art-here/

Another recurrent theme in the opposition to Murray’s plan was that it was out of keeping with the area – that art per se was fine within quarryscapes, but that it needed to reflect the character of the place, to fit with it and ideally enhance it. Murray’s ‘urban’ offering was seen as an unmerited (and unsympathetic) addition to this landscape. To be acceptable here, art would need to work with the grain, to acknowledge the qualities of the rock and the working lives lived here. In echo of the slate worker’s hands, and of the climbers’ fingers, it would need to be art underscoring each of their engagements with (and ability to read) the “posts, crychs, bends, sparry veins, faults, joints and hardened rock” (Davies 1880).

Sources

Davies, D.C. (1880)  A Treatise on Slate and Slate Quarrying, London.

Jones, M. (1977) ‘Y chwarelwyr: the slate quarrymen of North Wales’ in Samuel, R. (ed.) Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, Routledge & Kegan Paul: London

The photo above is reproduced by permission of Jack Murray.

Going inside – the alien world of nooks, crannies and other non-human spaces

“…the imagination, by virtue of its freshness and its own peculiar activity, can make what is familiar into what is strange. With a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world. From then on, the detail takes precedence over the panorama, and a simple image, if it is new, will open up an entire world.”

Gaston Bachelard (1964) The Poetics of Space

This essay is about confined spaces that only reveal themselves to humans fleetingly (if at all). It is about the effect of noticing them and lingering to contemplate them. In spirit it follows in the footsteps of Gaston Bachelard’s meditations on the shelter-world of homes, shells and nests. But I will drift more towards man-made interstices, with the voids within walls, furniture and floors. Bachelard’s project was to enquire into the ways in which the creative unconscious and places of dwelling are linked in human minds and actions. I find myself drawn more towards the alienness of spaces that are non-human due to their size, location or other form of human inaccessibility. In what circumstances are these spaces noticed by us, and in what ways do we possess, know or colonise them?

Revealed by flames

Watching an old sofa burn earlier this week, it was the moment that the fabric panel beneath the arm rest rolled back in the face of the flames that caught my eye. For, in that unfurling, the inside of the sofa arm revealed itself to me as a cavity, a small cavern bounded by a wooden framework, iron springs and matting; an unknown hollow that I had spent many hours resting against. This was a place that had not seen daylight since it was enclosed by the upholsterer many decades ago. But for a few moments fresh air was able to rush into this once enclosed territory, flames then quickly following in air’s invasive wake, briefly filling this void with overwhelming heat and light before bringing about the collapse of the framing tiers of this now failing structure, and the extinction of this space.

This sofa’s fate was sealed by an incontinent cat. This furniture had to go, it couldn’t be passed on. So, it went by fire. During the life of this sofa this enclosed space was inhabited only by stale air, crumbs, dust mites, fleas (courtesy of our dog and cats) and perhaps holidaying viruses and bacteria migrating there from the surficial smear-strips of youthful residents or their guests. It was an alien ecology, a vibrant place (perhaps) for some life forms, but not a place of human habitation. It was, in human terms a ‘non-space’, a place beyond access, beyond the human everyday realm. I’d fleetingly glimpsed another world down the back of the sofa.

Looking in the wardrobe

We normally only venture inside our possessions when we are searching for something. A lost key causes us to explore coats, pockets and sofa crevices in a way quite out of keeping with our usual disregard for such locations. Briefly we pour over them intently, inspecting such cavities with unfamiliar intimacy, often with hesitancy. Contorted fingers venture tentatively beyond sight into foreign lands, fearing spiders, dirt or other unknowns. Then we withdraw once again from these spaces, they cannot be occupied permanently, the body and/or the mind could not stand it. To slide under a car or bed, to probe a sofa, cupboard or wall void, to climb into a wardrobe, attic or inspection chamber: all are challenging and thrilling, but they are temporary incursions. Daily human life could not be lived in these spaces.

And yet, occasionally humans do in extremis seek to dwell in such places: priests, fugitives and other refugees have all sought out spaces to dwell within the hidden portions of houses. In such situations the acquaintance with those spaces would energise otherwise liminal space. In a feint echo of this perhaps, hiding as a child, striving to suppress the sound of breathing whilst squeezed into the wardrobe you became strangely aware of the nature and features of that furniture. The grain on the door, the smell of the place, the occupation of this space by other stuff stored there and the resistance to your weight as it creaked to accommodate its new exceptional loading. For a few moments you might have glimpsed the sentinel-like essence of what it must be like to be a wardrobe. But then you stepped back into the real world, stood up straight and got on with being a human.

Human engagements with non-human space

Clearly we can never actually come to know what it’s like to be a wardrobe, or even what it’s like to be a creature whose natural habitat is such spaces. Yet fictions of miniaturisation, like The Borrowers, Mrs Pepperpot or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids embrace this alienness. The humans are for some reason shrunken, and find themselves exploring the familiar home-world in new ways. Everyday objects become functionally mutated. A shoe becomes a house or a boat, a puddle a lake. As a room becomes a continent, an alien landscape is glimpsed in all its now-apparent jeopardy. And then a full-size human appears and the mini-people have to flee the ‘giant’s’ footsteps, as that giant goes about his everyday engagement with mundane spaces and things. If the mini-people are lucky they will manage to reach the relative safety of a mouse-hole, and will enter the wall cavity.

These mini-people get to go where the full size humans cannot. To explore floor voids, cavity walls, rafters – to see a house from the truly-inside, to scurry sideways through a house like a mouse or a spider. I’m jealous. The closest I’ve come is in a videogame adaptation of Disney’s Ratatouille film, in which players get to venture, like a rodent Laura Croft amidst the cavity wall of a Parisian town house. To see the wall from the inside is to see the way that plaster oozes there in sensuous bulges through the lath strips. On the outside the plaster is all smooth and neat, but on the inside it is the epitome of disorder, irregularity and an excess of matter. The quest for epic smoothness on the exterior, requires this secret opposite effect inside the wall. There is something Dorian Gray-like in the banishment of imperfection from one zone into another. But this by-product effect isn’t meant to be seen by the human eye.

The authenticity of the invisible

And yet the invisble stuff seems important, or at least it does to me. I recall a recent work meeting. A gathering to view a nearly complete 3D virtual reality model of a house, designed for building surveying students to practice upon. During the meeting the presenter was keen to assure his audience that this simulation was a replica of a real house, and that the design of the model was one strictly shaped by adherence to ‘real world physics’ (which meant the students could not levitate, walk through walls or otherwise use super powers in their engagement with this place). But it was an abrogation of real world matter-detail that irked me. I asked whether it would be possible to lift up the floorboards, to search for the wiring, to observe the runs of the central heating system or the remnant traces of the gas lamp piping. ‘Um, no’ came the reply, ‘building surveyors don’t report on those systems’. So, that aspect of detail would be ignored, partly because in disciplinary terms it was considered irrelevant and partly because of the vast coding and data resource that would be entailed in depicting hidden features of the house that might never actually be searched for.

At the level of logic I understood, but at gut level this felt like a serious dent in the authenticity of this depiction of the house. Like an obsessive dolls house maker I felt the need to paint walls it would not be possible to see, to fully populate this model. To strive to include everything, even the invisble stuff. Eventually, a concession was offered. A few bounded zones of subsurface detail could be added, places where the students could chase out mold, damp or other building pathologies. Students would there have the equivalent of ‘dig here’ prompts, and could mine at those locations into the ‘relevant’ interior detail. This was a token nod to the invisible realm, but better than leaving the invisible entirely unrepresented.

The hidden portions of a house have always fascinated me. Pulling up a floorboard a few years ago I discovered fragments of a bell wire run in an attic bedroom, the remains of the maid calling apparatus. Then there was the time that I pulled up some floor boards in an old house and found a marble fireplace dumped below. Occasionally in fitful dreams I uncover unknown rooms beneath my known house. Bachelard tells me this is all quite normal, reading via Jung the cellar as disquieted unconscious, such that:

“If the dreamer’s house is in the city it is not unusual that the dream is one of dominating in depth the surrounding cellars. His abode wants the undergrounds of legendary fortified castles, where mysterious passages run under the enclosing walls, the ramparts and the moat put the heart of the castle into communication with the distant forest.” (20)

But Bachelard seems to be conflating two different drives here, and neither is what I feel. In Bachelard’s quote there is a concern with escape from the house, and with colonisation beyond its borders. But what drives me to pull up floorboards, or to look in the wardrobe, each so that I can sleep better at night is a desire to fully know the house that I’m in. I don’t want to escape or to invade next door. I just want to be fully connecting to my own home.

Rewiring, plumbing and exorcism

I’ve come to realise that there is something ritual in my floorboard-thing, and yet I usually end up looking into floors or walls for pragmatic DIY reasons. The soul-resting bit usually comes as an afterthought, a realisation that I know have made peace with an otherwise alien void space. It has become known, claimed. It is part now of my home, rather than a brooding alien presence within the fabric of my house. Yet this resulting purging effect does have a feel of solving (or at least salving) a haunting.

I’d imagine that those who may have experienced an actual infestation – a wasp nest or some other living, breathing and breeding alien presence within their home – would have that sense of release in even greater measure. The antagonistic pest co-resident banished at last from somewhere within the recesses of the home, must make the home feel fully known and possessed.

And perhaps to get rid of that alien presence a specialist was procured. Someone well versed in inspecting, reading and probing these non-human voids. Someone who knows the ways of these spaces, understands their ecology and/or the infrastructure that passes quietly through them. The humble pest exterminator, plumber or electrician is not so humble when viewed from this perspective, for these are the silent custodians of an arcane knowledge, the product of a daily acquaintance of many hundreds of homes’ hidden voids.

Were those professions more literary we might have legion of psychogeographically inclinded accounts of chasing pests, pipe and wire routes through these alien zones. We would be able to sit, read and marvel at the ingenuity and accumulated place-reading skills of those liminal technicians. We would hear tales of strange items, sensations, sounds and smells encountered in the deepest recesses of our homes. But sadly these technicians do not (to my knowledge at least) commit these thoughts to paper.

Going backstage – thoughts on searching for a small room

This is one of those essay ideas that springs to mind and meets an immediate voice of caution. No one else does it, so neither should you. No one writes essays about the expeditionary practices of navigating your way ‘backstage’ in a search for a cafe or pub’s toilets. But I’m afraid the temptation to venture into this barren zone was too great to bear. So, here it is. A reflective journey on half-remembered searches for the sanctuary spaces buried deep in someone else’s private territory. It is also about why these islands of public convenience exist and why it feels odd to venture in search of them. Rest assured that, in what follows I don’t dwell on the toilet. The piece is largely about the liminal space encountered in the search. The journey is the interesting bit, not the arrival.

‘I may be some time’

For me the best part of a trip out to a pub, cafe or restaurant is the opportunity to sneak off to the toilet. No, this is not a confession of cottaging or drug dependency, rather a celebration of the opportunity to pass beyond the public face of a commercial establishment that searching the bowels of a building for its loos presents.

Often the journey starts with a 360 degree survey of the scene, trying not to be too obvious or to intrude into the private jollity of other parties in the room. Then, hopefully, a sign or a pattern will emerge in the way that occasionally people walk off stage into areas that are not the entrance/exit. If lucky there will be someone else in your party who has already made the trek. Ask them in a whisper if they will point you onward. But before asking them, or the staff here, first perhaps a conscious pause for thought about which of the many words you carry around for ‘the bog’ is suitable for this establishment.

Then, with a route set, you are off and walking increasingly purposefully across the room, gliding between others’ tables, trying to make it all seem perfectly natural (which it is). But – still – on the way there and on the way back you can’t help but feel that everyone is watching. Everyone knows what you are up to.

After an eternity of room-gaze crossing you are there, at a turn, a doorway, some other change of scene that announces that you are at the threshold, at the brink of ‘backstage’. The transition is signalled by a narrowing of passage, a sudden chaotic density of space-use: watch out for the buckets, the stores, the equipment occupying this narrow indoor lane. And in contrast to the room you were just in – the commercial space – the here you are now in is empty of people. Sounds echo out from the kitchen, a clatter of pots, the hum of an extractor fan, tinny fragments of voices or music from a rusty radio drift towards you – but no-one ever comes out into the passage. And for that you are glad, because you don’t feel entirely sure that you have the right to be here. This anxiety spurs another rapid visual survey, a reflex anticipated by the more considerate establishments, who will have posted some ‘onward’ instructional signage. Although often this may have more of a feel of telling you which turns not to take: the ‘private – staff only’ commands on every door you are not meant to stray through.

The best loo-hunting journeys require a tour of long winding corridors, with bends and puzzling junctions, then stairs – an up or a down – some more winding walking and eventually (at the moment you are about to doubt either your own navigation or the sincerity of the signage that you have been putting your faith in) the destination is upon you.

Soon the realisation hits you, that you have strayed deep into the backstage area. Visits to Berlin from the West must have felt this way (sort of). Here you are, in a public enclave deep in foreign private territory. Perhaps you are no longer even in the same building. Did those stairs and winding passages take you out of the pub? Have you, Alice-like, been lured into some parallel universe, one like an earnest early 1970s sci-fi film where all the humans have disappeared and you will spend you remaining days solely in the company of the rusty radio, catering sized tins of baked beans and dull polished metal surfaces?

Within the loo cubicle there is some womb-like comfort born of universal functionality (all loo china-wear looks the same even if there is marked diversity in states of cleanliness). But there will also be varieties and ages of hand dryer, paper towel dispenser and ventilation ducts. How many decades have these things been this way? Time moves more slowly out the back. Surfaces are more approximate. This a world of ‘make do’, in contrast to the annual upgrade and daily wipe clean of the commercial space that you have now strayed from.

Looking at these devices you may try to date their designs. You may linger over the manufacturer plate riveted onto the dryer as it blows water from your hands. ‘World Dryer Corp’, and their HQ in a mid-west  industrial US city that you’ve never heard of, where they seem to  breed dryers at a world dominating rate. A whole city devoted to producing a clone dryer army. Maybe.

Then perhaps the window catches your eye, slightly ajar. Is that because of the thick layers of paint on the metal frame now prevent it from closing, or is this an attempt at ventilation? If sufficiently open, there may be a chance to peek though it and glimpse a yard area beyond. A private little, tumble down world that is not designed to be viewed by patrons, and yet if glimpsed tells you so much about the manner of this place.

For me the best images glimpsed from these window slits are of delivered piles of stores: bulk and boxed legion of ingredients. A catering supply delivery, a surfeit of stuff, more than a life-time’s horde of ketchup sachets. That abundance, stripped of any presentational flair, is naked commerce. What you are glimpsing is the reception point where everything is tipped into this building, this business, and will eventually appear heated, portioned and presented in the eating zone. Things are instigated here and from this point forward value is ‘added’.

But hey, you can’t stay here all day. So thoughts turn to the return, and its uncertainty. Why do these places often have less directional signage on the return journey?  Is one stumbling trek really sufficient to have done away with the need for return-ward pointers? In the worst cases there will be doors, identical in colour. One will be the way back into the living, commercial realm, the others will lead who knows where (the kitchen probably). In moments like that you may wish for an Ariadne’s thread. Or maybe you could have sprinkled bread crumbs. But either would be very hard to explain if you did encounter some backstage staff.

The origins of these reluctant spaces

The experience of delving into an alien territory – of going backstage – doesn’t arise with purpose built venues. There are no winding corridors, no intriguing staircases, no over-painted window frames. In short, there is no journey. The toilet zones of multiplex cinemas (for example) are close to hand, designed into the building from the start. They are not an afterthought that requires an expedition.

No, it is older buildings and their provision of their sanitary conveniences in areas other than the core commercial zone that have these enticing effects of taking you ‘backstage’. In these places these toilets were once private, this area was never designed or intended for public gaze. And yet a requirement came along and had to be accommodated. Backstage had to be opened up because loos had to be provided for the patrons. Access was therefore reluctantly inserted into the static layout of the building, and the public permitted to pass into the backstage solely for the purpose of  reaching them.

And the origin of those requirements? Well, there is a widely held view that cafes and bars must provide WCs for their patrons. Digging in, to try to find the root of this requirement, I find earnest parliamentary debate about public toilet provision, I find legislation and I find British Standards. The best picture I can glean is that the (splendidly titled) Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 empowers local councils to take action against owners of establishments at which food and drink is served if they fail to provide sanitary conveniences. But the 1976 Act does not compel this, local authorities do not have to crusade in favour of such provision, and therefore (according to the British Toilet Association [yes there really is one]) local enforcement practice varies wildly between different local authority areas. Some care strongly about enforcing this, others don’t. Public toilets in such places therefore exist either in vague rumour based anticipation of possible council requirements or as a result of actual intervention.

Whatever the specifics of the origins of this optional legislative control, it is (for me at least) instructive to think that the oddness felt when venturing backstage in search of the toilet is actually a liminal experience for all concerned. For the environmental health officer ‘it depends’ on local practices and policies, for the owner he’s left unsure, for the patron he feels uneasy as he steps backstage.

A trip into backstage areas in search of the loo is thus an opportunity to savour the materialities of these public/private, voluntary/mandatory, welcoming/reluctant, old/new  ambiguities in regulators’, owners’ and users’ engagements with place.

Wandering invisible ruins – radiation, steel, photographs and footprints

Earlier today I attended the ‘Ruins and Radiation’ workshop at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. The event opened with Jane & Louise Wilson talking about their film The Toxic Camera inspired by Vladimir Shevchenko’s documentary film Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks. The Wilson’s explained that their own journey to the Ukraine was in the footsteps of the now deceased Shevchenko, to meet the few remaining living members of his film crew. They also visited the lead lined repository into which his film camera was thrown once (too late for Shevchenko) it became clear that that film camera itself had become a poisoned thing, a toxic reservoir for the radiation emitted by the ruins whilst the crew filmed.

The other speakers – Paul Dobraszczyk, Tim Edensor, Bradley Garrett and Dylan Trigg followed in the Wilson’s wake with thoughts upon ruins, urban exploration and the culture of broken places and their buildings. It was all very interesting, but it is the material reverberation of radioactive contamination that caught my attention. Ruins have had more than enough thought lately. Contamination needs the attention.

Therefore what follows is not a summary of the talks or even anything beyond the briefest second hand account of the ruins of Chernobyl and its associated model-town, Pripyat. For I can’t better Paul Mullins’ (2012) recent blog-essay on the resonance of Chernobyl’s ruinscape through popular culture or Paul Dobraszczyk’s own (2010) published account of his visit to these ruins.

No, my contribution will ultimately take a different walk, and in a different city. And that walk will be more concerned with the circulation of invisible contamination than with immobile visible ruins.

Visible ruins and radiation: Chernobyl / Pripyat

The Chernobyl/Pripyat ruins are testimony to a state-scale techno-fall, they resonate with sublime import, they reveal the post-human and the ‘survive without us’ face of the natural world. This is radiation as damage to civilisation, rather than eco-catastrophe. Dobraszczyk situated the roots of ruin aesthetics within notions of the uncanny – the ‘world turned upside down aspect’. He described how at first he found the ruinscape of Pripyat stimulating through its juxtaposition of heterogeneous items and foregrounding of processes normally unobserved in the background. But ultimately this gave way to a feeling that a city composed solely of ruin and disordered assemblages of artefacts presented a place of ubiquitous abnormality – resulting in a monotonous normality of its own.

So – I was left thinking – if a tour through a visibly ruined city can suffer experientially from an excess of disorder, perhaps a more subtly contaminated - more distributed –  ruin would have greater uncanny possibilities?

Chernobyl/Pripyat’s dust, abandoned playgrounds and empty street scenes are proxies for what cannot be seen, for radiation has no taste, colour, physical presence. It is ‘visible’ only through its effects on living organisms, its absorption in things and the knock-on effects of human response to contamination, the ruins of hasty abandonment.

Radiation was a haunting background presence in both the Wilsons’ and Dobraszczyk’s presentations. Each foregrounded the seen (ruined people, buildings, scenes) and presented their visits as safe, managed, almost incidental. But in the Q & A sessions each acknowledged that visit to those places, amidst the conscious ‘ruin gazing’, involved a sublimated, haunted awareness of the presence of the radiation (glimpsed indirectly through the mediating technology of the dose meter and instruction from guides on ground friability and where not to tread). Dobraszczyk confessed that after his trip to Pripyat  – despite the assurances of safety – he had thrown his shoes away upon returning to the safety of his hotel. These presenters revealed that being in the presence of an invisible contaminant required an untrusting, cautious orientation towards clothing and the dust, dirt and matter walked amidst during their tours. There was a concern about what they might bring back.

In his presentation Bradley Garrett reminded us of the standard urbex mantra of ‘take nothing but photographs, and leave nothing but footprints’ (and noted that this is not as straightforward a dictum as ‘the community’ might contend). But what if we invert that, what if the act of walking the ruins has material effects upon the explorer? What if the radiation enters the photographs? What if the feet taking the footprints take up and carry onward contamination? In short, what if the place bites back, and leaves with the visitor?

The Wilson’s described the radioactive particles’ damage to the film stock used by Shevchenko as an instance of material as a witness to events, and then paused to consider. No, perhaps in such processes of contamination, material itself becomes the event.

What I therefore want to look at is radiation as material traces of a journey. Let’s vicariously walk the invisible ruins of a bustling irradiated city.

Invisible ruins and radiation: central London, 2006

The walk I have in mind is a wander around the high-class international haunts of central London and its polyglot hubbub of hotels, restaurants, bars and lap-dance clubs. This is a walk in the footprints of Alexander Litvinenko in the autumn of 2006.

After unwittingly consuming a polonium infused pot of green leaf tea, Litvinenko lived his final days touring the high end real estate of central London, mapping out a network of sophisticated places, leaving a chemical ghost trail image of his journeys, at the very moment that life itself was leaving his body. On 23 November 2006, at University College Hospital, Litvinenko finally succumbed to his horrific poisoning, a dose 200 times larger than a lethal measure.

But it is the aftermath that takes my attention. For Litvinenko acted as a vector, spreading the polonium amidst this world, by touch, sweat and excretion a trail of contamination was laid in his wake. A trail which has received remarkably little attention – perhaps because of the fear that allowing words like ‘luxury hotel’ and ‘radioactive contamination’ to associate is to bring about a blight that would corrode the sheen of this world of premier property investment.

Buried away in technical journals are fragments of the steps taken to eradicate the contamination, tales of floor to wall tiled bathrooms ripped out of high class hotels, of decontaminated taxis, sushi bars, restaurants, aeroplanes and a cushion at a lap dancing club (BBC 2007 – from which the above image is reproduced). This trail mapped out Litvinenko’s affairs, his business and it’s venues. Like thousands of businesspeople before (and since) Litvinenko instrumentally (and incidentally) used the city, and his use would have passed without record were it not for the alien substance poisoning his body.

Once discovered, a quiet hunt was launched for the polonium traces scattered across the city, a glow visible only to the initiated.  A small cadre of the serious and concerned searching amidst the hubristic and carefree throng of the pre credit crunch city, a cadre of environmental health officers and specialists from the Health Protection Agency and the Government Decontamination Service – a unit quietly established in 2005 as an executive agency of DEFRA. They found, and dealt with, 50 locations around London. And according to Gill (2007) much of the contamination was dealt with by sealing it, in situ, beneath layers of paint or varnish. The contamination was literally brushed over, left immobilised within the fabric of these establishments. Other items like furniture were taken into storage, from which they will be retrieved and destroyed once polonium’s short half life (138 days) has achieved sufficient decay.

And thereafter? Well, life will go on as normal. Few will know what happened there, and there and there: in these invisible ruins. The stations of Litvinenko’s final days and hours will leave no evident traces. Nor would the owners of those places wish there to be any traces. For here lies fear of two invisibles: radiation and blight. Value is a type of desire, it can dissipate if the mood swings away. These sites are prime real estate, and much of prime sites value is desire based. The harder they come, the harder they fall. Sites like this have most to lose from public association of the words ‘radiation’ and ‘[add here name of a hotel]’. Blight is such a potent factor that even I don’t want to start naming names. They have all been certified as decontaminated and safe to occupy.  They are named in others’ publications (e.g. BBC 2007). And yet.

Our anxieties about radioactive contamination are so primal. The words themselves cause harm.

The ubiquitous world of radioactive sources

The map of Litvinenko’s final journeys, marks out points of radioactivity within mundane cityscapes, just like the environmental data maps that I used to use when in practice as an environmental lawyer. These maps, purchased for a fee, would show me the location of every photographic developer, every density gauge, every conveyor belt flow meter in the city. For all these (and smoke detectors too) can contain licensed radioactive sources. These maps would present a nodal array of atomic sources, sleeper cells awaiting discovery by an unsuspecting public.

Confronted with such data, I learnt to screen it out. These things were ubiquitous. But if anyone ever mislaid them there was hell to pay. The words ‘radioactive’ were enough to trigger a large fine, regardless of the size of the source, or of its strength. No one wants to lose a radioactive source. And the court records show that occasionally these small capsules did get lost. Small items with big anxieties attached.

We inhabit a world where matter circulates to the rhythm of money and consequently many lost radioactive sources gravitate towards scrap yards. A recent report by the International Atomic Energy Authority (2012) calls for greater vigilance by metal reprocessors, and lists incidents and their clean up costs from around the world, notably the contamination of consignments of structural steel due to inadvertent crushing of a radioactive source in a scrap reprocessing yard in Juarez, Mexico in the 1980s. As a result 814 new homes in the US were condemned and demolished due to the use of the contaminated steel.

Discarded Chernobyl/Pripyat footware, Alexander Litvinenko and the Juarez steel each show us radiation’s ability to hitch a ride on matter, travelling with it on everyday journeys that tell us much about who we are and how we live. And if we become aware of those fellow travellers, it is at the brink of an urge-to-blight that we fleetingly glimpse invisible ruins.

References

BBC News (2007) ‘The polonium trail: key locations’, website feature, 17 August http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/6267373.stm

Dobraszczyk, P. (2010) ‘Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city’, CITY 14: 4 pp. 370-89

Gill, V (2007) ‘Polonium clean up leaves trail of destruction’ Chemistry World http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2007/August/Poloniumcleanupleavestrailofdestruction.asp

IAEA (2012) Control of Orphan Sources and Other Radioactive Material in the Metal Recycling

and Production Industries – Specific Safety Guide SSG-17 http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1509_web.pdf

Mullins, P. (2012) Negotiating disaster and apprehension: representing Chernobyl  at http://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/negotiating-disaster-and-apprehension-representing-chernobyl/