The Invisible Ruins of Oil & Gas

“In the history of mankind the Industrial Revolution in Britain was a unique phenomenon whose repercussions have spread throughout the world. We live today in a society whose economy is essentially industrial, our prosperity is based on the fruits of industrial activity and our surroundings, both urban and rural, are largely the result of over two centuries of progressive industrialisation. Industrial archaeology is concerned largely with those surroundings. In simple terms it is the examination and analysis of the physical remains of the Industrial Revolution period.”

Neil Cossons (1975) The BP Book of Industrial Archeology, David & Charles: Newton Abbot, p.15

I have the BP Book of Industrial Archeology in my hands. It speaks of a different time, in at least two senses. It purports to speak of the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century, but it also speaks of the time when the book itself was written. With its confident talk of ‘mankind’, the uniqueness of Britain’s industrialisation and of a faith in industrial progress it is alien to the sensibilities of the early Twenty-first century.

But what strikes me most is the book’s association with BP, as the oil industry garners less than two pages of consideration in the works’ 500 pages of industry-by-industry exemplification. At that coverage is largely confined to the working of shale-oil deposits in West Lothian in the late 1800s. Meanwhile gas is addressed only in relation to municipal processing of coal at local gas works. The rise of crude oil importation and processing is not considered part of the book’s story, it is too contemporary. And the North Sea oil field – at the time of the book’s writing – was yet to send any oil and gas ashore.

All history-writing is selective, and reflects the preoccupations of the era in which the history is written. Industrial archaeology emerged first as a hobbyist pastime in the 1950s, and then reached a peak of popularity in the late 1960s / early 1970s. David & Charles (the publishers) had a lucrative business in publishing accessible ‘laymans’ guides to fuel this ‘serious-hobby’. And meanwhile BP (and Shell) were keen to support (to fuel in a literal sense) this ambulant pastime. The book has gazetteer sections: it is nudging the reader to get out and explore (and to consume petrol in the process).

The last decade, or so, has seen a boom in oil-related books, and whilst most take the form of an angry indictment, some are more concerned to summon a curious lament or nostalgia, and here I’m thinking of Marriott & Mccalister 2021’s Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation (Pluto Press). Both types of book seek to spotlight a phenomenon that we have lived along-side but have paid little heed to: the petrochemical estate, its shaping impact upon the UK (and global) landscape and its strange ability to lie unseen, in plain sight. But Marriott & Mccalister’s book, and the road-trip around the vanished footprint of the UK’s oil and gas industry that it presents, is not all that can be said (or noticed) about the oil and gas industry and its legacy. And I guess that’s the point that Just Stop Oil would make – that their protest actions at art galleries are about forcing oil and gas back into consciousness.

But for me the punctum moment was stumbling upon the ruins of the Rhosgoch oil terminal on Anglesey. Opened in 1974 the terminal stored pumped crude from the then-supersized oil tankers that were too big to navigate down the Mersey to Shell’s Stanlow refinery. So until 1990 their oil was stored and pipped from this rural site. But the site was closed in 1990 and lay vacant for many years. When came upon it, I wandered in and found the footings of multiple large tanks, and orderly lanes between them. With all tanks and pipes long gone the effect was of a strange embossing – a rural landscape faintly indented with hints of a previous super-ordered arrangement of space. But the site was completely open, isolated and context-less.  

(I acknowledge – of course – that oil and gas installations leave behind legacies of soil and groundwater contamination which are a much less wistful residues of former industrial activity.)

Last year my conscience was niggling me – I was feeling that I needed to address my knowledge gap around oil and gas, having been engrossed watching the Norwegian drama series State of Happiness (about their North Sea Oil era). So, I set out to read books that would bring me up to speed with the shaping impact of the Twentieth century’s dominant fuel (oil and gas): the petrochemical century and its’ hiddenness. In part there was a desire to knit make sense of time passing – for in the 1990s and early 2000s I’d had some association with BP facilities in South Wales, including its refineries and large petrochemical complexes spread along the Severn estuary.

Those places, when visited in the 1990s had felt a bit tired and speaking of an earlier optimism via their faded 1960’s design. But in their solidity I had assumed them to be eternal. I had no clear sense of what these locations must have been like before oil came, or that these mammoth complexes, with their gantries, pipes and tanks, might ever cease to exist. And yet, as an environmental lawyer I’d been a very small part of the creeping de-industrialisation process that would in due course (after I can left South Wales) culminate in the elimination of these sites.

Marriott & Mccalister chronicle this passing surprising well. I say surprising for two reasons. First, because I initially found their book too complicated by their attempt to weave reference to references to songs into their narrative. Secondly, because I thought that I would get a deeper insight and understanding from less psychogeographically inclined works. But how wrong I was. The histories of the oil industry that I found and read were dull, dull, dull. A succession of competitive commercial rivalries, imperial misadventures and mergers. My family laughed and me when I told them that I’d found these books boring. “Well, obviously”, came their reply.

But this begs a question, what makes the story of (for example) coal something that can be culturally embraced as an epic story of local and national identity, but oil and gas slithers into the shadows getting little purchase on consciousness?

Marriott & Mccalister suggest that the Oil and Gas industry likes this ability to have hid in the shadows, and that has served it well, largely. All the odder then that BP chose to sponsor an industrial archaeology book in the 1975s – I suspect that there is little chance that it would choose to do so now.

Picture credit: The embossed ruins of the Rhosgoch oil terminal https://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/site-former-shell-depot-anglesey-8462664

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Towards the within: a hospital psychogeography

“Browse a bookstore’s philosophy section and you will find hefty tomes devoted to the analysis of single concepts such as friendship, authenticity, guilt, power, morality, freedom, and evil. Scholars wrestle with the precise meaning of these concepts because they are inherently abstract. Unlike concepts that refer to categories of things that we experience with our sense, these concepts lack a concrete referent existing in the world outside ourselves.”

Landau, Robinson & Meier (2014) The Power of Metaphor: Examining its influence on social life. American Psychological Association: Washington DC, p. 3

Like intestines, UK hospital estates are a characteristic cramming together of a variety of eras, sizes and functions of buildings. Navigation through, along, between and into such an assortment of functional elements is a feat of achievement in and of itself. It calls for a unique culture of wayfinding instruction (by the institution) and active, ambulatory interpretation (by the visitor). What follows is an attempted psychogeographical account of one such navigation.

The hospital’s outer car park is quite a way from the destination, but it is convenient, familiar open space. It lacks that squeezed-in aspect of more proximate, characteristically inserted-feeling, hospital parking sites.

It is a cold, frosty morning. To get to my destination I must navigate the contorted labyrinth of paths, roads and buildings that make up this estate, its vital organs and its interwoven passages and dead-ends.

In leaving the bright, winter sunshine of the car park I must first enter and squeeze through the dark narrow lane that runs between the secure psychiatric ward and a high bank. The windows are bulbous at their base, their protruding metal caging preventing escape of the ward’s content, but allowing moments of controlled ventilation,

Next, I emerge onto a slippery path, set on a gentle (but today perilous-feeling) incline. The passageways have been carefully prepared over night with specialist salts in anticipation of my tentative passage. These surfaces are notably clear-looking and the crystals glisten in the early morning sunlight, reflected and magnified in the adjacent window screens.

Indeed, touring this estate is a constant dialogue with the myriad surfaces, screens and cameras that mediate this journey, by turns offering-up images of far away and (very) close at hand.

I step down into Central Lane. I turn South but soon find myself in a waste storage compound. Here, everything appears to have its place. There are laundry bays, clinical waste bays and a variety of refuse trolleys. But there are no people and no doors through which I think am invited (or permitted) to pass. So, I reverse from this dead end and head North, up the long straight channel of this service lane. To my left the otherwise smooth banking has been recently excavated. Mini-diggers sit abandoned there and fluffy brown earth billows out of the ground. This fibrous outbreak unmasks the two-dimensional appearance of this bank – reminding me that the bank has depth, substance beneath the surface that enables the surface to stay so, stable, taut, smooth and unremarkable-seeming.

Meanwhile to my right I’m passing endless apertures of workshops and stores, their windows and doors acting hour-by-hour as membranes receiving and emitting supplies and services vital to the life of this hospital-organism. And still I have seen no people.

Reaching the end of Central Lane, I’m conscious that I’ve now spent many minutes walking in the opposite direction to my destination. But there have been no opportunities to enter the hospital complex through these walls. So, I feel somewhat relieved when I at last reach a sharp bend, which will finally enable me to turn South. But the bend is awkward, and requires me to contort my body and step out into the road. Here I must suddenly make sense of the road markings that seem to invite me to walk amongst the traffic. The clarity of Central Lane’s singular routing has given way to shapelessness and uncertainly. As a clarification of sorts, a sudden blast of cold, sharp air hits flaccid flesh, causing my face to wince.

Ahead of me a delivery lorry is parked perpendicular to the pavement, jutting out into the road. A yellow box painted onto the road shows me that it undertakes this awkward insertion on a regular basis. Through the evolution of this estate this kink in the route has become normalised, accommodating to the growing-over-time functional needs of the blank building into which it is now a necessary daily attachment. To move forwards I must step blindly out into the opposite carriage, and hoping to find nothing speeding towards me.

Time is now marching on, the deviation of my journey has eaten away at what I had though was adequate journey time. I am now breathing heavily. My heart is starting to pound as anxiety starts to mount. What else lies unexpectedly ahead? How much longer is this going to take? This site’s internal anatomy is not what I was expecting. Things looked more simple on the estate plan that I’d casually glanced at before setting out (and which I now wish I’d studied more intently).

I pick up the pace. I only have 10 minutes left now. I hug the edge of cluster of new buildings which look like the Westward turning point I’m seeking to transpose the required route from the map onto this terrain. (With time now tight I have abandoned my improvisational drift, and I am now surrendered to my phone’s map). But in self-admonishment – noting the mistaken fit between the cluster and the map – I chide myself that “the map is not the territory”.

Hastening towards my destination I finally find the entrance to the cluster of buildings which will deliver me to my destination. Upon entering I am reunited with the realm of people – all moving at notably slower pace than my now running-out-of-time stride. I chide myself again: “be grateful that you can move swiftly still, these folk are not choosing to be slow or uncertain in their movement”.

Once inside a new form of disorientation takes over. I now have to work in three dimensions: to find the right level and direction of travel. I get it wrong at first try and hurtle up, and then back down a flight of stairs. I passed through doors that lead onward to other doors, and pass through rooms within rooms (each seemingly smaller than the last). Generally, I’m passing further and further inside, but occasionally a corridor spits me out into gaps between buildings, a third space of exterior interior (courtyards of sorts).

Then with one further turn I finally reach my destination: Caecum House. And the procedure is completed.

Image Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Central_Lane,_Northern_General_Hospital,_Sheffield_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1078902.jpg

Riding out the catastrophe: reflections from SHU SPG’s ‘Changing Places #3: Sport & physical activity in catastrophic environments’ session, 3-11-22

“There is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something”

Mark Fisher (2016) The Weird & The Eerie, p61.

Last night we held the final online session in Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place group’s ‘Changing Places’ series. The event took the form of an online book launch for the exciting and timely new collection, Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments, edited by Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Routledge, 2022). Featuring contributions from around the world, this collection looks at the ways in which sport and physical activity react to natural and man-made shocks to place, whether by armed conflict, natural disaster or socio-economic turmoil.

The event featured the following presentations:

Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)

Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments: Tuning to the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’

Dani Abulhawa (Leeds University)

Moving toward understanding through open and expressive physical activity: Findings from a preliminary study into the work of Skateboarding charity, SkatePal in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories

Kevin Bingham (Barnsley College)

An urban explorer’s experiences of meshwork, melding and the uncanny: invisible cities of the rubble

Kass Gibson (Plymouth Marjons University)

Informational Hazards and Moral Harm: Sport and Exercise Science Laboratories as Sites of Moral Catastrophes

Here’s the recording of the session, and my reflections on the event follow.

Jim and Jack opened the event by outlining their conceptualisation of ‘catastrophe’. They see catastrophe as more fundamental than disasters (which can be anticipated, and to an extent planned for). A catastrophe is a circumstance of rupture where we come to feel torn from familiar notions of being, doing, belonging and inhabiting. It engenders a feeling of ‘end times’ and forces us to acclimatise to a new, unsettling, environment and context. A catastrophe puts us in place where it is hard to dwell, and yet we still must strive to live there. So, we learn how to normalise the abnormal, whether that’s the climate emergency, war, socio-economic turmoil etc. In the face of catastrophe, we witness the end of what we were previously able to take as stable, familiar and grounding.

So (they then provocatively ask) what role does sport and physical activity play within these changed places and contexts of dwelling? It seems incongruous to ask: surely sport is for ‘the good times’? But being so deeply ‘of the body’, physical activity conducted within the context and environs of catastrophe melds two things: that heightened phenomenological sense of being alive that exercise can summon and that empirical confrontation with unsettled contexts and environments. In short, exercise and confrontation of catastrophe, both require physically and cognitive exertion in order to accommodate to altered capacities of body and place.

Now, that formula (which is my extrapolation from Jim and Jack’s comments, and they may not like the direction I’m taking this) sets up opportunity for their contributors to explore the presence and actions of moving, adaptive bodies and minds within catastrophic places. Thus, Dani Abulhawa introduced us to the role of skateboarding projects in the West Bank, and specifically of how the act of learning to skate instils a sense of agency, growth, accomplishment and resilience in the individual skater, and also summons that communally via the shared experience of developing these community projects. Meanwhile in his account of his urbex forays into post-earthquake Christchurch’s ruination, Kevin Bingham used Italo Calvino’s motif of ‘Invisible Cities’ to suggest how this destroyed cityscape offered up a site of open-reading, such that this was (but also no-longer was) New Zealand. Instead, the city had become a distorted (and or distortable) place in which (in his words) “our maps and memories are deceiving us”. Kevin detailed his body’s lines of flight, contortion and accommodation to new logics of movement across the rubble where “we were spared the boredom of following the building in the usual way” but instead had to invent your own path of movement across denatured streets and ruptured buildings. And as with movement, so with meaning-making – in this invisible city Kevin would forge new – personalised – frameworks for his aesthetic consumption of this terrain. Kevin is unapologetic about this appropriation of place, and tantalising holds together the eager to explain theoretical realm of his academic training and the reticence of the urbexer’s experiential consumption logics of ‘it is what it is, I do what I do, because I do it’ (that’s not a quote from Kevin). In his account Christchurch was an open-form playscape, evacuated of other humans. But he conceded in the Q&A that not everyone liked that he and his crew had come to the city to play (my word, not his). So, it was interesting that the final presenter, Kass Gibson, then placed moral considerations front and centre of his talk, examining fitness laboratories as sites of moral catastrophy and of how the origins of such lab’s measured and evaluated physical activity lie in the control sciences of prison regimes, military training, time and motion studies etc. In presenting this analysis, Kass presented the body as a changing place and a site of trauma, invoking the haunting title of Jean-Marie Brohm’s 1978 collection of essays: ‘Sport: a prison of measured time’.

Jim and Jack’s book is published on 8 November 2022, and this discount code FLA22 (or FLA23 in 2023) can be used for purchase at Routledge’s site: https://www.routledge.com/Sport-and-Physical-Activity-in-Catastrophic-Environments/Cherrington-Black/p/book/9781032125411

Image Credit: Kevin Bingham

Following old leads: exploring the cable-mountain, and why I can’t throw mine away

“Today we have made the common charger a reality in Europe! European consumers were frustrated long with multiple chargers piling up with every new device. Now they will be able to use a single charger for all their portable electronics. We are proud that laptops, e-readers, earbuds, keyboards, computer mice, and portable navigation devices are also included in addition to smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers. We have also added provisions on wireless charging being the next evolution in the charging technology and improved information and labelling for consumers”.

Alex Agius Saliba, European Parliament Rapporteur (European Parliament News, 2022)

The summer starts with a provocation in June: “You need to get rid of all of those cables”.

July then brings the above birthday card and its accusatory meme.

August then brings annual leave and a negotiated list of jobs to be done. Clearing out the cables is item 4.

I ruminate. I clear out other stuff, but can’t bring myself to tacking the cable mountain. I ponder the reasons for this.

1. Throwing these items away is a waste of rubber and copper.

The residue of illicit cable stripping or burning occasionally stumbled upon in dog walks reminds me of the value inherent within cabling, if sufficient metallic mass can be gathered together. My cables would not produce enough bounty to attract a scrap dealer. But this argument for inaction has become shaky. There’s a recycling site in my city that takes domestic cables, and sends them for reprocessing. So, Reason 1 is becoming untenable.

2. I might need them

Here we touch on something primal. Being a competent adult is about being able to solve things, and to have the right tools for the job. In the recent BBC drama series Marriage, the husband of the couple (played by Sean Bean) is a shuffling, somewhat emasculated figure. He is unemployed, slightly lost in the world, and presented to the audience as largely impotent in his interactions. But there’s scene in Episode 2 where the family home’s router is playing up, causing major productivity challenges for his more in-the-world and active wife. He is called upon to fix the problem. He shuffles into his hallway and opens the door below his stairs and reaches in. He pulls out a plastic basket, full of cables. It is clear that this is his solutions store. He finds and fits a replacement cable. The router starts working again. His wife is relieved, and appreciative of the arcane magic that he has just performed. The cable basket returns to its under the stairs lair. The husband’s cable-hoard has proven its worth. It has also vanquished threats to its existence; for a while there will be no talk of the useless, tangled nest of electric string. The husband seems less emasculated for the remainder of the episode. There is a subtle air of competence to his shuffling.

3. Throwing out a lead is a very final step

Sharing our lives with an ever-changing array of electronic equipment has empowered us but it has also shackled us. We are (or at least need to be) tethered to our devices, and their cables are those essential umbilical cords that feed power and data to our electric friends. To throw away cables is to alienate yourself from previous devices, to abandon the prospect of rebooting that outsourced memory unit from 10, 15, 20 years ago. It is a decision to kill, because it is a decision to not just unplug life-support but rather to pull the plug on a machine in suspended animation, to renounce its possibility of resurrection. Yes, I know that most of these devices will never be reactivated (giving little – if any – resumed companionship or glimpse-of-the-past if they were lead back to life). But the decision to thrown away a proprietary charger is a death knell, and thus a decision easier to defer indefinitely.

4. Each lead is a talisman, acquired via a quest

With the power to breathe life back into a device, the humble charge or data lead takes on the demeanour of a key or talisman. Only the correct lead will reanimate the device, and finding the correct lead has quest-like properties. The unboxing of the newly purchased device will have been the first glimpse of the devices lead-key. The view of that element will have been unremarkable, but essential. The first act (the act of digital birth) is to power up and/or connect the device. And then in later life of that device there will perhaps have been a moment when a replacement lead was needed – triggering and online or on-the-high-street search for a replicant. The box of leads is the end stage of this questing – and in the pile is invested the effort and urgencies of the circumstances in which each lead was originally acquired. That each once had to be urgently hunted and recruited into essential projects of machine-interaction, has left a resonance within this pile. The cable-pile is a the trophy mound of former questing: this stuff was once so very important, and that residue remains, like the smouldering embers of a once-roaring open fire.

5. The cable-pile is a material history of our industrial revolution

Azhar (2021) reminds us that the act of living through an industrial revolution looks very different to the contemporary participants than it does to historians looking back at it from a critical distance. To live through an Industrial Revolution is to live in a state of constant adaptation, and to habituate to that. To live through an Industrial Revolution is to be in the state of the slowly boiled frog – it takes effort to notice how far you (and your society) has travelled over recent years. The change is incremental, but adding those increments together leads to a big gap between the world and ways of ‘then’ and ‘now’. We can only cast off our acclimatisation – and notice change, by pausing to consider the accumulated, materialised debris of earlier increments; totems that mark out steps along the way and remind us of our journey. Old leads serve this function. Azhar also points out that a hallmark of our technological progression is a move towards interoperability. He illustrates this with text messaging on mobile phones – originally messages could only be sent within (rather than between) each provider’s network. The ability to send messages between networks was mandated by legislation and licensing. The cable-mound speaks of something similar: the oldest leads are fully proprietary – they are designed only to work with one originating device. The direction of travel has been towards common standards for cable design: USB mini, the micro, then ‘C’. In the case of mobile phones by 2009 there were 30 different chargers, but now most phones charge with one of three leads (USB micro, USB ‘C’ or Lightning). Already we see some devices being sold without cables, the expectation being that every household already has an ample supply of generic USB cables of the right type.

As Criddle (2021) notes the European Commission’s research estimates that disposed of and unused charging cables generate more than 11,000 tonnes of waste per year. As indicated by the epigram, there is now pressure for interoperability of cabling, with the European Parilament pressing for EU-wide legislation to mandate that all new mobile phones, tablets and cameras must only be designed to be powered and data-fed by a USB C cable, by 2024. Apple is presently fighting to preserve the existence of its proprietary ‘Firewire’ cable, but it seems only a matter of time before iPads and iPhones must themselves submit to the ubiquity of the USB C cable.

One day all leads will be USB C leads. One day I will throw away all of my other leads. But for now, I prefer to ruminate, rather than to eradicate.

References

Azhar, Azeem (2021) Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology Penguin.

Criddle, Cristina (2021) ‘EU rules to force USB-C chargers for all phones’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58665809, 23-9-22

European Parliament News (2022) ‘Deal on common charger: reducing hassle for consumers and curbing e-waste’, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220603IPR32196/deal-on-common-charger-reducing-hassle-for-consumers-and-curbing-e-waste, 7-6-22

What’s behind the fence? – exploring dead land and empty buildings at the RGS-IBG 2021 Annual Conference (online session, Weds 1st Sept 2021)

“They came from everywhere… I fixed the fence, over and over I fixed the fence, but they kept on coming.”

– A lone, vulnerable security guard, 2017

As part of next week’s Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual international conference (which this year is running online: details here) I’m convening a double-session next Wednesday morning (1st September), comprising eight presentations, each considering the quiet and only-noticed-if-you-look human ecology of seemingly empty sites.

Contemporary cultural geographies of wastelands and ruin-sites tend to celebrate vacant spaces as a break from the ordering impulses of everyday normativities (Edensor 2005; DeSilvey & Edensor 2012). Keen to chronicle the ways in which wider human and more-than-human agencies are enabled in such sites, only incidental attention is ever given in these works to the continuation of a quiet custodianship of these sites by those who own, or who otherwise consider themselves responsible for them. Yet in a fleeting glimpse of a passing security guard patrol, coming across a patched perimeter fence or in the flickering of lighting served by a still-active electrical power supply, seemingly abandoned sites reveal themselves to be not quite as abandoned as they at first seemed.

This conference session will open-up an attentiveness to the subtle, ongoing ordering and management of such sites, and whether by their owners or by opportunistic appropriators. Taking a life-cycle approach, presenters will explore the stories and structures that have caused abandonment at both remote sites and those within the heart of otherwise active and occupied urban centres. They will tease out the logics of opportunistic appropriators (urban explorers, rough sleepers, ravers, artists, scrappers and scavengers), their notions of territoriality and of their own emergent normative codings devised for the shared use of abandoned places. The role of professional cultures and logics of urban set-aside and vacant site management will also be explored. In each case these readings of the motives, modes and meanings of vacancy will be attentive to the wider ecologies in which these sites and their actors are imbricated and of the important role of (positive or negative) place attachment in determining the speed at which a site is withdrawn from vacancy, or how it is maintained purposively in that state.

Here are the abstracts for our international array of presenters:

Session 1 – Experiencing and managing dead places (9.00 – 10.40 AM BST)

Ruins of (Post)Soviet Arctic: perceiving, coping with and commemorating abandoned sites

Maria GUNKO Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences / National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) [presenting]

Alla BOLOTOVA Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (Helsinki, Finland); Elena BATUNOVA Politecnico di Milano (Milano, Italy) [non-presenting]

The Arctic is passing through different economic and political development stages which result in changing economic and social settings, as well as shifts in the cityscape dynamics (Sellheim et al., 2019). During state socialism in Russia, large-scale development of northern territories was due to the need for natural resources extraction with the establishment of control over a vast sparsely populated area (Josephson, 2014). The collapse of the system has led to a reduction of state support for industries, science and military activities causing a structural crisis in many Arctic cities outside oil and gas provinces. Abandoned and dilapidated buildings, industrial ruins, idle infrastructures, and marginalized spaces here remain “monuments” to the Soviet period indicating the changing trends. At the same time, these cities remain home to people with community bonds, sharing values, and place attachment (Bolotova, 2018). The aims of the current research are two-fold. First, we explore the perception of and strategies to cope with abandonment in the Russian Arctic. Second, we look at the examples of abandoned sites commemoration by their former residents. The empirical evidence for the study is drawn from Vorkuta – a conglomerate of urban settlements in the Komi republic. At its peak, it comprised 16 settlements built around 13 coal mines, currently less than a half of these settlements are still habitable having severely shrunk in size. The data were obtained from a comprehensive analysis of various sources, such as planning documents, archival materials, expert and in-depth interviews (in person and via Skype), as well as non-participant observations carried out in January 2019.

What’s the use? Rethinking urban vacancy amidst Dublin’s housing crisis

Kathleen STOKES & Cian O’CALLAGHAN, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)

The results of the 2016 census found 183,312 vacant homes in Ireland, a figure that included around 30,000 vacant homes across the four Dublin local authorities. While the Central Statistics Office indicated that this figure was a static rather than long-term measure, the ensuing political storm equated vacant properties with empty homes that could be used to solve Dublin’s burgeoning homelessness crisis. Amidst Dublin’s housing and homeless crisis, calls for affordable housing and fairer property markets have paralleled growing attention in urban housing and land vacancy. A spate of policy measures targeting vacancy have testified to the increased visibility of the ‘problem’ of urban vacancy in the post-crisis period. However, policy objectives construct vacancy within a simple dichotomy between space either ‘in use’ or ‘not in use’, therefore reproducing normative understandings that fail to acknowledge that such sites are always active, in property market formation and subject to ongoing ordering and management. As a riposte to these conceptualisations, this paper puts policy objectives and key measurements of urban vacancy in Dublin into dialogue with the critical literature on vacancy in urban and cultural geography (Ferreri & Vasudevan, 2019; Kitchin et al., 2014). We reflect on the limitations of normative understandings of urban vacant space in revealing the role of vacancy in capitalist cities and suggest that more critical assessments can unearth a multitude of urban processes pertaining to the ordering and management of such sites. This paper draws upon ongoing research in Dublin, which investigates underlying factors contributing to urban vacancy and questions how urban vacancy is identified, categorised and measured.

Empty buildings in the re-making: The case of the Hochhausscheiben A-E in Halle-Neustadt, Germany

Hendrikje ALPERMANN, Université de Lausanne (Switzerland)

Four of the five high-rise slabs Hochhausscheiben A-E in the centre of Halle-Neustadt are empty. And this for over 20 years. Between 2003 and 2016, the shrinking city of Halle reduced vacancy in Halle-Neustadt by half through demolition, enabled through the national program Stadtumbau Ost (Stadt Halle (Saale) 2017). In contrast to many other buildings in Halle-Neustadt in the beginning of the 2000s, the high-rise slabs were not chosen for demolition, but for endurance. But how can their endurance be ensured in the context of a shrinking city? While the buildings have been increasingly dilapidated since they have been abandoned in the late 1990s, a number of practices and relationships have prevented them from being demolished or renovated and contributed to their continuous life between life and death. Against what has been written on ruins in recent academic literature, the high-rises do not stand for a site of disruption (Buchli, 2013; DeSilvey; Endensor, 2012) or “the end of the world” (Pohl, 2020), but rather for a series of promised of renovations and postponed renovations. This turn towards practices and endurance allows us to reflect on techno-political modes of organizing urban change and emptiness. It will lead us to ask how agency and responsibility are distributed and enacted.

In Praise of Shutters: Hidden activity within Neepsend, Sheffield

Charlene Cross, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)

This presentation takes inspiration from the 1933 Japanese aesthetic essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’ by Junichiro Tanizaki, who made a case for accepting transience, flaws, patina, and shadows within in the built environment. ‘In Praise of Shutters’ draws attention to the shutters and fences of several ’empty’ buildings in Neepsend, Sheffield, to challenge the preconception that these are inert spaces. The images presented form part of a land use study that initially focused upon inert urban spaces, such as wastelands or seemingly empty buildings. However, as the study has progressed, no truly inert spaces have been found to date. Using narratology and a series of photographs taken in Neepsend between July 2020 and the present day, these images of physical boundaries entice curiosity within the onlooker. If the building is not derelict, what’s behind the fence? Walking past a warehouse, the shutters are up and metal work is underway. People heading to the food court across the road, which is made of shipping containers, pause to peep in. The next day, the shutters are down. To those not in the know, will they view the patina of the signage as an aesthetic remnant of the long forgotten past, rather than a marker that provides testament to their long established presence in the area?

Session 2 – Empty sites, re-use, utopia and other potentiality (11.00 – 12.40PM BST)

Rethinking Utopia: The Search for ‘Topias’ in the Paris Catacombs

Kevin BINGHAM, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)

Although the idea once had great influence, utopias have proven themselves to be unattainable. Therefore, rather than viewing utopia as an actual destination this paper will argue that belief in the existence of special places of perfection has been replaced by a faith in leisure. As it will be argued, it is the activity of ‘urbex’ that can turn ruins, abandoned places and vacant sites into something similar, albeit temporarily. With this is mind, the paper continues by drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk and Tony Blackshaw to accentuate the point that the good life is about inventing oneself through a process of self-creation that has been referred to as anthropotechnics. To unpack this standpoint, the paper examines how a group of urban explorers – people who explore man-made spaces that are generally inaccessible to the wider public – find various substitutes for utopia in the subterranean space of the Paris catacombs. As it is argued, forms of leisure such as ‘urbex’ emerge as ‘primary spheres’ of anthropotechnics that instigate the formation of intertwining and interpenetrating ‘topias’ which have been referred to here as ‘reterotopia’, ‘heterotopia’ and ‘scotopia’. Viewed independently of one another, these ‘topias’ refer to the way urban explorers’ experiment with space nostalgically, compensatorily and in a way that incites the five basic senses. As the paper reveals, each ‘topia’ plays an important part in allowing people to discover performativity, locate a sense of collective consciousness, feel intense pleasures and pains, and, above all, experience the euphoria of freedom.

“The dead are tugging at our backs”: exploring migrant life among the headstones of an abandoned cemetery in Tangier

Maria HAGAN, University of Cambridge (UK)

Renewed and intensified criminalisation of sub-Saharan Africans in the northern Moroccan borderlands since 2018 has made their spaces of shelter precarious and their access to accommodation, particularly in cities of the north, a perpetual struggle. Those seeking passage to Europe increasingly resort to life in concealed, abandoned urban spaces. This paper explores the socio-material ecologies of an abandoned Muslim graveyard in Tangier overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar and serving as a primary space of life for a group of young Cameroonian men. Drawing on 5 months of ethnographic fieldwork with the community in 2019 & 2020, this paper discusses how, concealed and lawless, this abandoned and decaying urban space operated as a rare negotiated space of presence and sociability for the community. Detailing practices of shelter construction between the headstones, the routine destruction of that shelter by authorities, and processes of camp reconstruction and renegotiation attempted by the graveyard’s inhabitants, the paper proposes an analysis of the liveliness of a deathscape in a context of urban hostility against the migrant body. It traces how the appropriation of this undesirable territory affected the men’s self-perception and influenced their space-claiming practices elsewhere; namely the establishment of a cemetery camp in another Moroccan city.

Fortifying the empty ruin: the nightwatchman, the artists, the trespassers and their antagonisms

Luke BENNETT Sheffield Hallam University (UK) [presenting];
Hayden LORIMER, Edward HOLLIS and Ruth OLDEN of University of Edinburgh (UK) [non-presenting]

The cabin is for use by the nightwatchman,
…who is employed by the security firm,
…that is contracted by the small arts company,
…to protect the now fortified ruin of the former seminary,
…which it hopes to take off the hands of the church,
…who desperately want shot of the whole damned place themselves,
…because of recreational trespass and the liabilities arising,
if only a viable model for transferring ownership can ever be found.

This is the premise for an illustrated piece of performed storytelling, and the predicament that it explores. The modern architectural ruin at its centre is a place of competing claims, and complex social dynamics created by the securitization of property. Lately, it has operated antagonistically, existing as an aggressive milieu. The presentation delves into the ruin’s complex relational ecology, introducing its protagonists, affects, spaces, encounters and events. Ultimately, its chief concern is with the architecture of lives as much as it is the lives of architecture. In particular, the presentation will focus upon how the precarious minimum-wage lifeworld of the nightwatchman, and his embodied relationship to this abandoned site, is both more elaborate and more sculpted by the active concerns of others who rarely appear in person on-site, than we might readily assume. The presentation reports on part of the collaborators’ 2017-2019 Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland funded study of attempts to manage and reactivate the modernist ruins of St Peter’s Seminary, Kilmahew, a few miles west of Glasgow. Bennett will present drawing upon Olden’s fieldwork, Lorimer and Hollis’ writings upon the site and Bennett’s reflections on the pressure of anxieties about vacant site ownership.

The elephant in the room?: a facilitated discussion about absent owners

Carolyn GIBBESON, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)

To what extent does scholarship on vacancy include an exploration of the motives and meaning-making of owners and their professional agents? Where mentioned do site owners only ever appear as cyphers for capital, striped of any attentiveness to their emotional labour? Does attempting to give analytical space or voice to owners and their motivations for vacancy risk loss of a Critical and/or progressive edge? This contribution will facilitate a discussion of these questions, by reflecting on the Session’s nine papers. It will open with a short presentation in which I will draw on my former experiences of working in the real estate sector as a property manager responsible for a variety of property types including vacant sites, and on my more recent doctoral research into the awkward interaction of developers’ and heritage professionals’ differing world-views and practice-logics. Through this I will consider how different groups of people within the built environment and academic sectors view each other to ask why owners are usually ignored despite their control over a site. I will then invite discussion on whether (and if so, how) a greater attentiveness to owner perspectives could augment studies of vacancy, and also tease out the particular difficulties that lie ahead for anyone trying to research owners’ creation and/or toleration of vacancy, whether as profit-maximising landbanking or for more prosaic reasons.

Image credit: Author’s photograph, St Peter’s Seminary, Kilmahew, Cardross, Scotland, Oct 2017.

Quiet bubbling: observing the silent co-existence of co-workers on building sites

“The ways in which bodies move through, inhabit and occupy space on a construction site (and elsewhere) rely on both conscious and deliberate acts and on an array of taken-for-granted, unintentional modes of being.”

Dawn Lyon (2013) ‘The labour of refurbishment: the building and body in space and time’ in Pink, Tutt & Dainty (eds) Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry. Abingdon: Routledge, p35.

This photograph is a rarity. Other than a certain quirkiness (the doubling, of the doubled-over faceless pose) there is nothing of aesthetic value about this image, but it has got me hooked because it depicts a type of working that is actually very hard to find in visual depictions of building sites. Try it: a Google of ‘construction site’ finds either:

– a site devoid of people;

– a site populated by a group of workers or visitors who are all clearly engaged in a collective task; or

– a site view in which only one, task-absorbed, worker is visible

What captivates me about this picture is that it almost depicts a reality that hardly ever appears in published construction site photographs, but yet which is likely to be the glimpsed experience of any passer-by as they encounter their local building site. The under-acknowledged reality is that of the co-existence of multiple-but-separate activities.

Now, I say ‘almost’ above because these two workers seem to both be working on setting out the reinforcement shell for a concrete slab that is about to be poured. In that sense they have a common purpose – they are both acting upon the same task. Ultimately, it could be argued that all co-workers on a construction site are engaged in the same overarching task (the making of the building) even if one is doing brickwork, one is tiling, and another is laying cables. But as that sentence suggests, at the sub-project level each of those three workers is working on a separate task, one that has its own rhythms, reasons and ways of doing.

Wandering through a live building site (particularly after the structural work has been done) is to walk through a hive of individual projects, and to step awkwardly in and out of individual territorial bubbles of temporarily claimed space. Here, each worker has set themselves up in their part of the partly-formed place, in order to then set to work.  And in doing so they have formed their own little sphere of activity – a micro-territory of which they have possession, and they signal that territorial claim in subtle but clear ways, via the spreading out of tools, the playing of music or the laying out of signage. This way of taking a temporary claim to space is picked up ‘on the job’. At college there was no ‘how to claim space’ lecture aimed at cultivating proficiency in individual bubble-making. Yes, there would have been some sessions on how a contractor’s organisation acting as a multi-person organism might ‘take possession’ of a site, and in infrastructure (for instance rail transport) there are complex rules of taking possession of tracks, pipes or cables, but nothing at the level of the individual.

In such situations – where safety risks are otherwise high – the rules of temporary space-possession are made explicit. Thus, to enter the railway line or to descend the mineshaft a unique physical token must be presented. Failure to offer-up that token means that possession of that space cannot be claimed, because possession of the token ‘proves’ an entitlement to enter and the space’s presently unoccupied status. Meanwhile permission to enter confined spaces or to carry out hazardous operations in a particular area may be governed by a paper-trail, the ‘permit-to-work’: no permit, no entry and no work. But in the vast majority of circumstances there is no token, there is no permit, there is no negotiation. Instead, by convention and subtle cues, individual task-bubbles form and fade, and the individuals within them quietly work out how to co-exist alongside others.

This silent space-possession activity is also evident (in everyday experience, but not in photographs) in domestic environments. Think about the last time you “had the builders in” – what did they do to mark out your territory as temporarily theirs? How did they subdivide your space down into an array of individual bubbles of occupancy? And how they negotiate the interaction between these individual bubbles with you, and with their workmates?

I had the experience of co-habiting with a plasterer and his ‘mate’ in my own home last week: and it got me thinking about the above, because the way that the mate set up for his ceiling pulling-down task was so different to that of the plasterer who came a few days later. Where one focussed on simply taking space and keeping to himself (thereby emphasising the separation of his work bubble from the rest of the house), the other was far more deliberative and verbal, frequently asking permission and informing me of his intentions in order to check and define the way that his and my bubbles would interact during his residency. In the end it was the over-elaboration of these normally silent territorial co-habitational rituals that brought the whole thing into focus, making me think of the verbal and visual silence that usually cloaks the proximity of separate co-habitation.

Image source: commercialconcretedenver.com

Here and hear: reflections on SHU SPG’s Haunts#4: atmospheres of social haunting online event, 17 June 2021

“The psychologist of visual perception speaks of ‘figure’ and ‘ground’, the figure being that which is looked at while the ground exists only to give the figure its outline and mass. But the figure cannot exist without its ground; subtract it and the figure becomes shapeless, nonexistent. Even though the keynote sounds [of a soundscape] may not always be heard consciously, the fact that they are ubiquitous there suggests the possibility of a deep and pervasive influence on our behaviour and moods. The keynote sounds of a given place are important because they help outline the character of men living among them”.

R. Murray Schafer (1977) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Destiny Books: Rochester, Vermont. p.9.

Yesterday we held our final event in our ‘Haunts’ series, Haunts#4 was focused on “atmospheres of social haunting“. Introducing the session I tabled a definition of Social Haunting thus:

“The ways in which aspects of the past are somehow mobilised – whether as ‘heritage’, ‘community’, ‘nostalgia’ or ‘trauma’ – so as to impose a strong affective (or atmospheric) charge upon a site of present action.”

But I left ‘atmosphere’ undefined, thinking that that would remain a background, unexplored element. But as it turned out (for me at least) it was the mechanisms of atmospheric engineering – and in particular sound (and silence) as key techniques for that – that seemed to resonate across (and connect together) the five papers. Looking back on it there was a trajectory – from silence through to loudness which I’m now going to try and account for.

Other linkings and cross-readings are possible, and the event recording is presented below.

The quote from Schafer above, reflects the importance of the un- or under-acknowledged role of sound and silence in composing a sense of place, and of how ever if seemingly present only as ‘background’, this environmental quality is vital to the formation of the sense of place, and of the grounding of human living (and dwelling).

The focus on sound and its contribution to the affective weight and endurance of memorial rituals (like the annual Cenotaph ‘Remembrance Day’ and its summoning of a sense of previous generations’ loss in the name of a passed-on ‘remembering’) was introduced by John Land’s presentation. John dissected the elements of the ritual and material arrangement that embedded the sense that each iteration of the Remembrance Day was acknowledging and connecting to a past. As John pointed out, sound is used to orchestrate that intentional social haunting, for example the lone bugle playing the ‘Last Post’, or orchestrated cannon fire. But it is also used in order to frame silence: a feature of these rituals that is perhaps even more potent: in silence the world is marked as stopped in its tracks. Symbolically, a portal opens up, a space of reflection in to which the social ghosts are invited to fill our thoughts.

John suggested that sound connects us to sense of a past precisely because it is ephemeral and incomplete. It leaves room for the mind to wander and (seem to) make its own novel connections (though – of course – working within received cultural schema).

This ‘summoning power’ of sound and silence followed on through into Max Munday’s performative reflections on his use of activity and movement to connect with the traumatic experiences of his Jewish ancestors. In a moving clip (not included in the recording below for copyright reasons) Max inhabited a space, spinning and contorting his body in relation to empty chairs around him as the recording of a mournful lament sung by an elderly Cantor grew louder and louder.

Esther Johnson’s short film A Role to Play summoned the intertwined features that compose the atmospheric essence of Bolsover, a small hillside town in Derbyshire, with a dual claim to fame: an Industrial-era association with coal mining and a long pre-industrial association with aristocracy though its castle. Yet, the town is now post-industrial, a fate sealed by the death of coal and the rise and rise of the logistic sector. Esther gave voice to a selection of residents, giving them space to speak of the highs and lows of their dwelling there. Woven alongside these voices, and the visual depiction of Bolsover’s heterogeneous landscape elements, were ‘local’ sounds buried in the background but giving that sense – as Schafer suggests above – that this ambient soundscape is key because it is constitutive: the sound is binding the the place together. In addition to ambient sounds in the mix, Esther subtly features a brass band’s recording of John Dowland’s 1600 lute song Flow My Tears, which rendered in modern transcription laments:

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled for ever, let me mourn;
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

Down vain lights, shine you no more!
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their last fortunes deplore.
Light doth but shame disclose.

Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days, my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.

From the highest spire of contentment
My fortune is thrown;
And fear and grief and pain for my deserts, for my deserts
Are my hopes, since hope is gone.

Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to contemn light
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world’s despite.

But this elegiac reference is truly backgrounded – because the band is performing the instrumental version. And Esther’s foregrounding of her interviewee’s voices is more more positive: yes speaking to adversity, but also to community, individual and collective agency and mutual aid. Whilst not included in the above recording, a copy of Esther’s film can be viewed separately below:

My own presentation – which considered the erection in the early 1830s of a stone memorial to commemorate a mass burial site for Sheffield’s Cholera victims – spoke of the power of voice in terms of the powerful co-option of poetry and civic engagement by James Montgomery to aspire to embed a lasting sense of lament upon the hillside site at which the burial ground had been hastily created. I then – perhaps moving away from a focus on sound – showed how difficult it is to sustain an atmosphere of loss at a particular site. I charted the rise, fall and recreation of the monument, and questioned whether much of the affective intensity originally intended by Montgomery to be seared into the landscape remained: in short whether his vision expressed in the final stanza of his poem The Cholera Mount (1832) had been met for long:

With statelier honours still, in time’s slow round,

Shall this sepulchral eminence be crown’d,

Where generations long to come shall hail

The growth of centuries waving in the gale,

A forest landmark on the mountain’s head,

Standing betwixt the living and the dead;

Nor while your language lasts, shall traveller cease

To say, at sight of your Memorial, “Peace!”

Your voice of silence answering from the sod,

“Whoe’er thou art, prepare to meet thy God!”

Meanwhile, Charlene Cross sought to give voice to a stranger – a Mrs Violet Murphy – piecing together fragments of a life story for a lady who now existed only through the assortment of momentos and official documents found secreted in a box, in a cupboard, in the basement of Charlene’s childhood home. The dogged application of family history techniques – and the affectionate intensity of Charlene’s searching to try to establish who Violet was, and why her archival remains were lodged in her Blackpool home – was all the more poignant for how those documentary fragments took us around the world, but never managed to reveal a connection to the home (or the town) in which her documents were found. Presented as though a detective story, the reveal – that the question of connection could not be answered – provocatively disrupted and denied assumptions that (even with the Internet) all of the past, and the people and places that may be partially recallable from it, can be neatly fitted back together.

But, as with Max’s summoning of his ancestors life-defining moments, and as with Esther’s giving voice to her interviewees, so Charlene’s act of generous, inquisitive care offered to a stranger in summoning Violet’s life by narrating to us what she had found out brings new pertinence to a popular quoted fragment of Schafer’s key 1977 text: that “hearing is a way of touching at a distance,” (p.11). Although (of course) – and to echo a closing theme of my own talk – this assumes that Violet Murphy actually wanted to be remembered and also raises the question of whether the urge to remember a stranger, just as the urge to renovate a derelict proto-Victorian monument, is an act of care-for-the-past or more a sign of our own contemporary magpie (selective appropriation) tendencies. As the Ghost Lab folk would put it (as ably summarised by Max), remembering the past and its social ghosts can have positive effects in the present and aid action towards future-making, but (as Esther’s film also suggests) to overly dwell on (for example) the loss of past collective identity (e.g. valiant coal mining labouring) could blind us to the (actual or latent) agency of the living.

Image Credit: Road workers and pedestrians fall silent and bare their heads in a mark of respect during the “Great Silence”; the two minutes silence held at 11.00am on the 11th November, 1919, a year on from the end of The Great War at TH2epuq.png (1002×711) (imgur.com)

‘Haunts #4: atmospheres of social haunting’ – announcing the final SHU Space & Place Group ‘Haunts’ session: Thursday, 17 June 2021, 7-9.30pm (online)

“To understand the social power of the ghost and of the dead to emancipate or captivate we have to understand how they become part of corporeal entities and human frames. It is also important to understand how they come to inhabit territories, landscapes and cross borders. Further, what are their intentions and the intentions of those who summon them to their aid?”

Martyn Hudson (2017) Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory. Routledge, p.10

The final instalment in Sheffield Hallam University’s Space and Place Group’s season of ‘Haunts’ related online events will be taking place on 17 June 2021, and you’ll find details of our panel of speakers below, along with a link to the Eventbrite booking site.

Across the preceding three ‘Haunts’ themed events we’ve surveyed haunted homes, battlegrounds and wider landscapes, and from an array of disciplinary perspectives. Recordings of our previous sessions are available here. We started our journey six months ago, looking at the ways in which folk beliefs and practices create a haunting of sorts and we return to this ‘social’ aspect of haunting for our final event. Here we are less concerned with ghosts themselves than with the ways in which aspects of the past are somehow mobilised – whether as ‘heritage’, ‘community, ‘nostalgia’ or ‘trauma’ – so as to impose a strong affective (or atmospheric) charge upon a site of action. In short, how do we come to feel collectively haunted by certain moods, affinities or sentiments?

In particular, our presenters will be looking at how these atmospheres of social haunting are constructed. They will consider what techniques of affective engineering are used to summon a sense of hauntedness, and for what purpose? And how effective are such stratagems? Do they always succeed, and if so for how long do they endure? And can they be harnessed for good (to help – for example – to revive a sense of class consciousness, through a sense of connection to a sense of past labour and community)? Alternatively, how can they conspire to destabilise social bonds?

Our presenters at Haunts #4 will be:

Luke Bennett, Associate Professor, Department of the Natural & Built Environment, SHU

Building an intentional social haunting?: The Sheffield Cholera Monument

This presentation will introduce the theme of ‘social haunting’ by exploring the origins of Sheffield’s Cholera Monument. Commissioned in 1833, the founders’ aim was that this monument would carry lament and sorrow through into future generations. The subsequent fate of the monument suggests that intentional affective engineering, whether composed with stone and mortar, and elegiac text, both struggle to impose stable meaning and intense affect upon the future generations who may come into proximity with these beacons of intended poignancy. 

Charlene Cross, PhD Student, Department of the Natural & Built Environment, SHU

On finding traces of another’s past: Assembling an affective biographical narrative from found items and the Internet 

Upon moving into a new house in Blackpool in 1995, my family discovered a box of black and white photographs and yellowing paperwork in the basement. Keen to learn more about the story hidden in plain sight, this presentation shares the original photographs and official documents belonging to Mrs Violet Daisy Murphy (nee Hard) as a springboard into her life story.  The visual clues present in the artefacts takes the observer on Violet’s journey from marriage, to employment in 1930s Hong Kong, and back to England, where she served in the women’s branch of the British Army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), during WWII. Who did she meet along the way, and how did these items end up in Blackpool when her last known destination was Australia? Alongside unfurling Daisy’s story, this presentation will also be an account of my family’s efforts to find a sense of acquaintance with the lingering traces of a stranger that this box at first presented. 

John Land, PhD Student, Department of Psychology, Sociology & Politics, SHU

Rituals: How perception of the disembodied establishes identity

Each year, people across the United Kingdom observe two ceremonies, Armistice Day, and Remembrance Sunday, which define not only Britain’s memory landscape, but its identity as a nation. These ceremonies should not be gazed upon idly by academics or the general public. This is because rituals like these inform our understandings of how and why we relate to those absent, and further still, how this process of relating sustains broader social and national identities. In this presentation, I will explore the mechanisms at work during these rituals which allow onlookers to interact with their perceptions of the absent and disembodied to produce national identity. Attention will be paid to how the sonic aspects of these ceremonies create a symbolic space within which connection to the absent, and the creation of national identity, is engendered.

Max Munday, PhD Student, Department of Media & Communications, SHU

Becoming-Jewish among the social ghosts 

This paper reflects on my developing art practice-based PhD which brings together notions of haunting and Deleuzean process philosophy. (Manning, 2010; Massumi, 2017). From making lemonade for marauding Russian Cossacks to finding the Western Wall in a Sheffield scout hall, I seek to attune my body to the experience of social haunting and its insistence, in Avery Gordon’s words, that something must be done. (Gordon, 2008). Inspired by my involvement in Geoff Bright’s Social Haunting projects (Bright, 2015, 2016, 2017) and by the ethos and theory behind Erin Manning’s SenseLab in Montreal, the practice is moving from solitary experimentation to a series of improvised movement-based workshops with other young Jews living in Sheffield. Gordon’s hauntings destabilise and defamiliarise our environment, and this project aims to move our bodies into this generative and open field and to animate the entanglement of what, in Deleuzean terms, becoming-Jewish might feel and move like. 

Esther Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Arts, Sheffield Hallam University 

A role to play?: showing social haunting through collaborative filmmaking

Esther will introduce and screen her short film a ROLE to PLAY, research supported by WORK Animate Projects, funded by Jerwood Arts and Arts Council England. Working with Freedom Community Project adult reading group members, (former miner and local MP) Dennis Skinner, and food bank users and volunteers, a ROLE to PLAY illuminates experiences of contemporary working life in post-industrial Bolsover, a Derbyshire constituency where coal was once king. The film experiments with methods of co-creation, radical documentary theatre and oral testimony, with project participants storytelling privileged over the questioning/answering scenario of traditional documentary. The title echoes the participatory film process, and also the roles everyone takes in their working and non-working lives. Made in direct response to the increasing numbers of unemployment and zero hour contracts across the UK, the film explores the realities and struggles that some residents of Bolsover have encountered in gaining and sustaining employment amidst the town’s post-mining legacy of deindustrialisation.  

http://blanchepictures.com/a-role-to-play/  

And we’ll have some time at the end to discuss the journey we’ve been on across Haunts#1-4.

Attendance at Haunts #4 is free – but you must book a place here:

Register on Eventbrite

Picture credit: Sheffield Cholera Monument & grounds, photographed at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, 25 February 2020 by Luke Bennett.

The sap is rising: the vibrant force of this noisy spring

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

Rachel Carson (1956/1998) The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents & Children, HarperCollins: p. 100

Rachel Carson is – of course – more famous for summoning a sense of a silent spring. In her 1962 masterwork, The Silent Spring, Carson gave us the cautionary image of the cessation of the eternal return that should be spring’s noisy bursting back into life. And the agent of silencing was chemical – liquid death seeping into a vulnerable nature, suffocating and snuffing out life and its sounds. For Carson pesticides were invader substances, alien chemicals surging through innocent and vulnerable capillaries.

But a couple of events have got me thinking this week about how the springtime ‘springing to life’ is itself a product of surging, swelling, insistent chemicals.

Like everyone (I suspect) I’ve particularly noticed the spring this year. Maybe, like me you’ve yearned for it as a target point that will be the end of Lockdown 3, you’ve seen parks and countryside heaving with human bodies as the new agora. But whilst observing spring’s return more intently this year I’ve found it becoming more complex too. Those Easter cards with their cute bunnies and neat daffodils just don’t capture the sheer vibrant throb of life, and of its non-cuddliness. My failing to find cute comfort in the spring is partly wrapped up in the intensity of my watching it this year – those young birds are fighting, that bumble bee emerging from hibernation is struggling to adjust to its living – if it continues to deny the reality of the window pane it will soon be a dried up husk (a bit like that young toad lying like a strip of biltong on my patio). Spring is raw, vibrant but not cute.

There’s also the problem that spring, and my garden’s blossoming back to life, brings forth strong memories of this time last year – of spring 2020, warming air, flowers and the anxious uncertainties of ‘the first wave’. It also reminds me of a sunny lunchtime sitting outside in my yard, listening to the US President suggesting that I shoot up with disinfectant, or shine a really strong light into my body to kill off the nasty bugs. Contaminated with these memories, spring is more complicated now, it has lost its innocent connotations.

And so I find myself looking at spring differently. And I find myself thinking about the vibrant force of rising sap. Why? Well, let’s now unpack the two events that have led me to this.

Event one. I’m sat at my work desk earlier this week. I’m bleeding. Intentionally. I’m struggling to ‘milk’ my finger (as the instructional notes so delicately put it). I’m trying to bleed into a sample vial, so that I can complete a covid antibody test. My fingers are tacky with glutinous blood, but little of it wants to drip into the vial. I have to make repeated pin pricks. I wage war upon my fingers, with increasing desperation. I’m trying to harvest my own recalcitrant sap, in order that a lab can confirm to me that I have the right kind of human-made contamination within me, so that I can withstand the ambivalent life force of the covid virus were it to come upon me as a future host.

Event two. A random chain of events bring me to Nick Zinner’s 41 Strings (2014) performance piece, it’s a rock musician’s modern take on a ‘four seasons’ concerto. I listened to the ‘spring’ movement first via the YouTube recording of its live performance and it blew me away. The other three movements (the other three season pieces) are ok but counter intuitively it is ‘spring’ that has the noise, the force, the vibrancy. The ‘spring’ movement has a ascending motif woven through it – which to my mind wonderfully summons the force of sap rising. In contrast the ‘autumn’ movement (fitting titled ‘fall’ – in line with the US convention) has a descending motif. ‘Summer’ is pastoral and not driven like spring. Winter is somewhat frozen: this also not driven. But spring rocks, and has the surprisingly – but now-fitting seeming – violent edge to it.

Clearly there’s nothing new in seeing spring as a time of heady – and beyond our control and rational comprehension – life-force. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring culminates with a young maid dancing herself to death. Here the conjured Russian folk rites echo the Dionysus / Bacchus cults of ancient Greece and Rome. Euripides’ play The Bacchae depicts the frolicking of the god of fertility’s maidens – the maenads (in Greek – Bacchae in Roman) who – according to Plato ‘milk’ the environment – releasing its fecund liquids, thus:

“…the god-intoxicated celebrants draw milk and honey from the streams. they strike rocks with the thyrsus [a vaguely phallic vine adorned stick], and water gushes forth. They lower the thyrsus to the earth and a spring of wine bubbles up. If they want milk, they scratch up the ground with their fingers and draw up the milky fluid…” (Otto, 1965, p.96)

In short, spring is wet, sticky and slightly out of control. It is also ‘many’ not ‘one’. Multiple rhythms – only somewhat and incidentally harmonious. This – for me – is all there in Zinner’s ‘spring’, watch the musicians – a loose, dense crowd (like a flower bed) all almost acting as a single entity but not quite, each struggling to be an individual component and make sense of what they are doing. Like saplings they jostling for space, light and moisture. And that jostling all the stranger to our current eyes because we’ve almost forgotten what densely packed crowds and/or group endeavours look like.

References and links:

Otto, Walter, F. (1965) Dionysus: Myth and Cult. Indiana University Press.

Mp3 recordings of each part of ’41 strings’ can be downloaded for free here:

And recordings of the performance of each of the four movements can be found on YouTube.

Image Reference:

Loxley Common, Sheffield: Luke Bennett, 2020.

The ghosts we summon from the battlefield: reflections and event recording for SHU SPG’s Haunts #3 event

“To the uninitiated, the landscape is flat and unremarkable, punctured only by the bulk of the Lion’s Mound amid miles of grassland and the occasional thicket of trees or a charming barn conversion. To others it is the final stop on an eerie pilgrimage of devastation and loss.”

Rebecca L. Hearne (2020) ‘The Weight of the Past’

Rebecca was due to be one of our presenters at yesterday’s online Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group event, ‘Haunts #3: The Haunted Battlefield’. Sadly, she wasn’t able to be with us, but I read extracts from her paper at the start of our event, and these set us up nicely for our collective ruminations around how battlegrounds have haunted qualities.

Rebecca’s paper gave a vivid account of her experience of conducting an archaeological dig at the Waterloo battleground, in the vicinity of the Lion’s Mound, a monumental landform commissioned by King William I of the Netherlands to commemorate the dead of the 1815 battle there. I read the following passage, which reminded us of the materiality and mortality not just of battlegrounds per se, but of this mound as a particular place, and of this mound as a testimony to the disruption of particular lives:

“The Lion’s Mound is powerful, its impact on visitors visceral. Standing atop the monumental pedestal, it is difficult to visualise the thousands of tons of soil collected to form the mound beneath one’s feet. This soil, drawn from the battlefields, contains bone fragments, lost teeth with historical fillings, clay pipe bowls blackened from anxious chain-smoking, and tatters of cloth punctured by bayonet blades, sometimes decayed and sometimes stained with young men’s blood. Musket balls, unfired but flattened on one side, preserve the moment when a young man jammed his ramrod too hard down the barrel of his gun while loading it in panic, causing it to misfire, injuring or — most likely — killing him. Shreds of family photographs, letters, memorandum books, tokens and talismans imbued with meaning and significance and intended to ensure a safe passage home were instead swallowed by thousands of tonnes of blood-soaked soil. As one project participant mused, standing atop the monument on that searing July day, ‘You just feel that… that weight. All the weight of the past is here.’”

Rebecca’s fellow excavators were 21^st century military veterans with PTSD, who found the act of digging and being at anothers’ battleground a powerful and helpful way of working through their own trauma.

Thinking back on the five presented papers that then followed, it has struck me that all of them – each in different ways – were concerned with the summoned nature of ghosts at battlefields. The presentations (which are all available to watch in the session recording below) each showed how, just as ‘place’ is ‘space’ infused with meaning projected onto it, so each battleground’s sense of haunting is at least in part (created or sustained) by present generations’ orientations towards these sites.

Thus, in the event’s keynote presentation, conflict archaeologist and post-conflict heritage specialist Gilly Carr from the University of Cambridge looked at how in the Channel Islands the material remains of the Atlantic Wall defences (Nazi bunker complexes) have been appropriated by successive generations of post-war islanders, sometimes playfully, sometimes as ‘heritage’, sometimes as emblems of islander spirit. And within that, the islanders openly share stories of encounters with the ghosts of these places. Gilly contrasted this with the awkwardness that arises within most academic circles when talk turns to ghosts. Gilly was keen to portray this local attachment to these bunkers and their ghosts as a potent mix of tangible and intangible heritage. Just as there has been growing attentiveness to the need to identify and preserve cultural practices and ideas in indigenous cultures, so can the logics of this be brought closer to home. The significance of these bunkers is – at least in part – because of the importance attached to them by the visiting, re-appropriation and story-telling projected upon them as part of the islanders’ local culture. Perhaps, by extension, these ghosts (or at least the practices enacted by the living in relation to them) should be protected as intangible heritage.

Later in the session, David Cotterrell (SHU – fine art), showed how his experiences as a war artist in Afghanistan in the early 2000s had been driven by a self-confrontation, when – as a pacifist – he was offered the chance to document a warzone. He felt the need to challenge himself, and to see this other (or alter-) reality for himself. His experiences showed him the complexities of ‘seeing’ war, that in 21^st century warfare the view is often distant, totalising (as epitomised in the remote view of the drone pilot). This influenced David’s 2012 installation work, The Monsters of Id, which works across three different visual domains and degrees of proximity to other people (whether enemies, bystanders or otherwise others). The following video shows the three installation pieces comprising that work. As David explains in his contribution to Haunts #3, the presence of inhabitants in the artworks is directly influenced by the presence of spectators. Thus, no one looking results in no-one appearing in the artwork. The flip-side of this is that if spectators lingered in the gallery they would be visited by curious others – people visiting them from within the artwork. This uncanny device activated two important complexities. First, the notion that we summon that which we fear – we call it forth – and perhaps it only exists because we summon it. Secondly, the notion of various degrees of distance of spectatorship, and in particular the detachment that military views of desert-like landscapes engender, with targets as anonymous – ghost like – others glimpsed only vaguely or in aggregate.

Another presenter, Andrew Robinson (SHU – photography) looked at the history of battlefield photography as pioneered at Gettysburg during the American Civil War. With a near-forensic close attention to detail, Andrew showed how iconic photographs showing the aftermath of that battle were somewhat composed, through rearrangement of the placing of corpses. Andrew showed how a style of war photography had been forged there – by commercial photographers who were taking pictures for sale to the general public, and seemingly meeting a ‘need’ (prurient or otherwise) for the viewer to feel that they had (virtually) been there / seen the reality of conflict. Andrew then showed how as the battlefield morphed in successive generations into a totem of heritage and national identity, the site itself having become a visually choreographed object.

David Clarke (SHU – Journalism) presented an equally thorough investigation of the origins of the ‘Angels of Mons’ legend, showing how what came to be a widespread belief in spectral intercession in an early First World War battle had been triggered by fiction that then slid into assumed fact, embedding itself in enduring folk memory. The assumption of fact was a product of its time and context: a heady mix of patriotism, pre-existing national myths and spiritualism. Such myths take hold where there is a widespread desire for such things to be true. Once again, we summon the ghosts.

Rob Hindle (Sheffield based poet), shared this concern with the power of myth, and blended in his concern with the alter-reality of war and also his family history or ancestors caught up in the carnage of the Western Front. Rob read from his published collection The Grail Roads (Longbarrow Press, 2018), an evocative mix of his poetry and extracts from his interpretative essay “Iron Harvest: An archaeology of sources”. The following quote – describing Rob’s search with his father for the location at which his great-grandfather fell in 1917 – neatly returns us to the theme of ‘summoning’ (Rob is searching for a ghost) and adds a sense of the chilling ambivalence of place:

“His body wasn’t found. The buzzing pylon and surrounding scrub don’t feel like markers: we’ve just run out of track. We stand freezing for a few seconds, my dad and me; then go back to the car.

The villages are ancient and they aren’t; Aerial photographs from 1981 show nothing but dark weals; yet here are hedgerows, huge trees, honey-stoned cottages and walls. Graves cluster along the lanes, the same stone cut into trim slabs and lined up, almost touching. Everything is small and close: 100 graves in a garden plot; six villages in a ten-minute drive. A dozen fields run down to the Ancre. I look at the maps from 1914, 1916, 1971. The villages disappeared but the red lines were more or less the same. The men came up that road, year after year, and were killed. When it was finished people came back, rebuilt their houses, planted trees, ploughed the land again.” (p.137)

Image Source: Belgique_Butte_du_Lion_dit_de_Waterloo_cropped.jpg (2646×1577) (wikimedia.org)