Thursday 30 January 2014

“Musing on primitiveness”: eerie presences within the British edgelands





“The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies.” (Robert McFarlane).

Edgelands were a prominent feature of 1970s public information films that appeared regularly on television. In ‘Dark and Lonely Water’, the spectre of a Grim Reaper voiced by Donald Pleasance warns unsuspecting children of the dangers of finding pleasure amongst the canals and rubbish dumps of a Britain still being rebuilt after the ravages of the second world war. Or else there is the threat of electricity pylons and sub-stations which loom on the borders of council estates and draw children towards them like skeletal sirens. Train lines in the ‘Finishing Line’, farmland in ‘Apache’ all spell out the dangers of the uninitiated and the innocent exploring the edges of their community. Children’s literature of the Cold War period was also drawn towards such liminal spaces: from Robert Swindells’ Z for Zachariah or Daz 4 Zoe to Stig of the Dump and the folk horror of Alan Garner, In literature, suburban concrete dystopias of J.G. Ballard inscribed a degree of eroticism onto the high rise flat, the underpass, the airport car park, a compulsion to both desire and repel these images of non-spaces. And of course, the fascination with other spaces continued throughout the late seventies and early eighties with the music of new-wave/post-punk bands such as Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire and Human League who all name-checked Ballardian dystopias in their songs, celebrating the ‘underpass’ (John Foxx) and urban wastelands. It seemed as if writers and film-makers engaged in a counter-response to the zeitgeist of annihilation and immersed us in both a nostalgia for a pagan past as well as preempting the anonymity of destruction by imagining narratives that resided within landscapes that effaced modernity.
And now the edgelands have become a focus for cultural interest once more. A plethora of web-sites that celebrate these heterotopias can be found in a quick search: www.derelictplaces.co.uk and www.abandoned-britain.com both offer images of run-down and neglected spaces, monuments, buildings that are decaying spectres of the past; elsewhere, gerryco23.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/the-edgelands-a-zone-of-wild-mysterious-beauty/ offers the juxtaposition of objects such as iconic red telephone boxes set against a backdrop of urban desolation offering what Farley and Roberts call the ‘overlooked ordinary’. A recent London Short Film Festival offered within its programme a body of short films that engaged with Britain’s liminal spaces; and Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book Edgelands appropriated Marion Shoard’s term and embarked on an exploration of Britain’s wastelands, abandoned buildings and non-spaces. Films such as Gallivant, The Selfish Giant, Byzantium and Eden Lake[1] engage with modern edgelands in ways that recall the desolate landscapes of Loach and Antonioni.
What is it about these liminal spaces that fascinates and lends itself to cultural investigation? Perhaps within the notion of psychogeography[2] we might be able to find some way of understanding our on-going discourse with these derelict spaces and unclaimed edgelands. As Alastair Bonnett writes:
“British psychogeography should be understood as a site of
struggle over the politics of loss within the radical imagination. …[It]
is an arena of conflict between two important strands within British radicalism: the use of the past to critique industrial modernity and the suppression of nostalgia.”[3]

Squeezed as we are for space in ‘this worryingly crowded isle’[4], the danger of Britain’s edgelands becoming subsumed beneath a narrative of progress and modernity has given way to an outpouring of nostalgia.

Folk horror and demonic presences
Folk horror encompasses a trend of films, television programmes and novels that appeared from the late sixties throughout the seventies that explored the demonic presences within Britain’s landscapes. Often rural, sometimes urban, they dealt with the unearthing of medieval relics or artefacts or the discovery of hidden sects, the landscape itself becoming a palimpsest of the uncanny. Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, the BBC’s adaptations of M.R. James’ ghost stories all explored the hidden demons that lay beneath the British countryside. Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tapes explored supernatural narratives captured within the very fabric of an abandoned building. 

There has been over the last few years a revival of the folk horror genre. In September 2014, Queen’s University Belfast is holding a symposium on the topic entitled A Fiend in the Furrows that according to one blogger “looks set to be an important milestone on the journey to establish Folk Horror as a defined genre”. Ben Wheatley’s ‘A Field in England’ (2013) is an exercise in psychogeography that examines the impact of the landscape on soldiers escaping the English Civil War whilst recent revivals of M.R. James by folk horror enthusiasts such as Mark Gatiss have brought the genre to the front of cultural consciousness.

“Primal images … are but so many invitations to start imagining again.”[5]
Britain is crumbling into the sea – literally. With recent floods, the harbingers of doom claim that this sceptered isle is being eroded by the elements. Yet it is not merely Nature itself that is laying waste to the landscape of modern Britain: the threat of immigration, a nation opening its borders to the ‘poor’ of Romania, Bulgaria and other former eastern Bloc countries brings with it the rhetoric of decay, and with it a retreat into itself. Demonic presences reside within the British landscape once more.

Perhaps the reason we are fascinated (obsessed?) with our edgelands and with our derelict symbols of a ruined modernity is precisely because the landscape echoes our uncertainty with our own identity. There is no such thing as a folk horror revival or a new psychogeography. Truth is, it was there all along.




[1] In Eden Lake, the encroachment of new ‘yuppie’ property onto a rural area bordered by a housing estate emphasizes the presence of opposing cultural forces within the landscape.
[2] PsychoGeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

[4] Headline in the Daily Mail, 27th December (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530125/This-worryingly-crowded-isle-England-officially-Europes-densely-packed-country.html)
[5] Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space p.33

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