radically-situated

by Oliver Rimmer @youngollie94 One wouldn’t generally associate Basildon with the term “utopia”. Having once worked there myself, I didn’t then consider it a place to be . Getting off the train I’d go straight to the bus station and get a bus to the Burnt Mills industrial estate, bypassing as much of the town as possible. Never once did I consider that bus station to be part of architectural history, or the industrial estate to perhaps be part of the reason the town was originally built without a train station. Basildon was one in the first wave of post-war New Towns. Instigated by the New Towns Act of 1946 and dubbed “an essay in civilisation” by the chair of the commission, Lord Reith, the New Towns were a major part of British post-war redevelopment. They sought to rehouse many of the displaced and urban poor by providing modern, rationally-planned urban spaces complete with houses, jobs and all a community needed to flourish. Being there today one can only ask: w

When we occupy a place, we are also in congruence with the past of that place. History, rather than a bland facsimile of a faraway land, thrives beneath the surface of every place with countless voices; conversations, songs, murmurs, whispers, cries and screams. They are all woven into the fabric of the here and now, they are that place. We bring the dead back to life through our dwelling in place through the multiplicity of interactions which situate us. The past haunts the present, and the present cannot exorcise this spirit, no matter how much it attempts to wipe the slate clean and start again. The silencing of these voices, the attempted exorcism of ghosts, is tantamount to a kind of violence, it can only create more voices which scream louder.   Growing up, I never thought of the Thames Estuary as a place where people would want to be, as a place with its own history. Your everyday environment is taken for granted, it seems to be merely a backdrop in front of whi