What are Places?

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 which life takes place. As a child, there is a magic to places, but it is always inflected by the fantasy of being elsewhere; parks become battlefields, the floor is lava. But whilst these fantasies dull as you grow up, so too does the magic fade. Living in this place becomes an ever-repeating series of processes, everything becomes tedium, and elsewhere is never here. The peculiarities become secondary to the spatial routines of modern life; walking down high streets, waiting in queues, driving around roundabouts, crossing crossings, going through the procedures to get elsewhere. 

But, you are always here. It seems obvious but, for me, the realisation was gradual. The elsewhere I found in books, particularly the likes of Kerouac and Burroughs, weren’t the only places one could dwell imaginatively. The rich tapestry of English literature brought the elsewheres much closer to home, as too did the British film and music. Suddenly, places that I already knew well became imbued with a sort of magic once again. One of my first experiences of this was reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For a brief moment the distinctions between home and foreign land are blurred as the Thames Estuary becomes colonial territory, uncannily resembling the "darkness" of the Congo. The protagonist Marlow imagines a Roman settler:

“Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.”  

Perhaps not a favourable elsewhere to be, but nonetheless this passage radically reshaped my understanding of places which had often been a mundane backdrop. The more I read, the more I discovered, the more impelled I felt to be in these places; I was already elsewhere. Wordsworth’s Lake District, Dickens’ London, Hardy’s Wessex, these compound terms blur the distinction between author and environment, fiction and reality, person and place, such that they are almost one and the same. The places are built by the people, they are kept alive by stories. When we engage with these stories, we also engage with that place. But this isn’t specific to literature, nor is it limited to film, music or artwork, it is there in the practices of everyday life. 

Returning to sites along the Thames Estuary, I found that my perspective hadn’t just been changed by its various cultural representations; Heart of Darkness, Great Expectations, Fish Tank, the paintings of both Constable and Turner, but it was also modified by episodes from my own life that had taken place there. I remembered being taken to Southend when I was younger. Wandering through it once again, the familiarity of the sights, smells and sounds created an inward resonance. The patchwork of cars parked in the middle of the road, the secretive, cosy delight of the narrow stairway disappearing between the kiosks of the Three Shells cafe, the murky uninviting waters sloshing against the sun baked stones. Aware of a vast expanse of absence, I thought of the manifold ways that the place had changed, and stayed the same. I wondered about the countless other stories which noted these same features, I wondered what feelings were attached to them. Passing through Adventure Island, I felt vaguely melancholic, a sort of misery contorted and distilled by the downpour of time, the shadow of a memory about being upset about something mingled with the strange apathy of involuntary nostalgia. Then a dropped ice cream made me smile.

How much can this place be detached from these processes? There was the Southend I knew, and then the same for everyone else who had ever interacted with it, accumulating into something sublime and unknowable, but definite. I couldn’t ever hope to know this place fully, and even my memories of it seemed to slip away into an oblivion of unthought. We never know a place fully enough to call it “ours”, but neither do we belong to it; its simple, pure being speaks to a primitive interdependence of life and landscape. 

I sought to get away from my ghosts and travel beyond the horizons of memory, proceeding up the promenade towards Shoeburyness. Once a garrison town, and still hosting a Ministry of Defence base, Shoeburyness is alive with stories. Like the primitive surreal forms of a Paul Nash painting, the ruinous defense architecture are markers for a post-war Wordsworthian reverie: gun emplacements, concrete piers, batteries and ramparts. Their eerie silence betrays their original purpose. Moulded into even cruder shapes by the battering of coastal time, they are somehow elegant in their bland, savage utility. Tales proliferate here; the two great guardian giants of London, Gog and Magog, here lent their names to two barges which carried artillery up the Thames from Woolwich, settling at Gog’s Berth. A long wooden pike protrudes out of a mysteriously purposeful gathering of stones and kelp nearby on the MoD-prohibited beach; a seaside burial or primitive art? There are many more reminders of this dark history along both the Essex and Kent sides of the coast. The recent exhibition of “The Wave”, formed from the 80,000 clay poppies memorialising the Great War at the Tower of London, is testament to this troubling past. 

We are all travellers, even in our homelands. When we move through familiar places, we are in communion with the countless other lives which move through those places. Our feet press against its ground, we breathe into its air, we keep this place alive simply by being here. This simple fact can inform a politics of place.

Places are products of mutuality, formed on an inclusive rather than exclusive basis. Borderlands need not be negative, exclusionary boundaries but the outer limits of a positive presence, a meeting of two places, constantly shifting edgelands which throw into question the fixity of the centre. The past has passed, and will continue to do so, but we need not bury it. These are vital points in an age where this forgetting of places, on a political, social and cultural level, all too often results in a hollow, xenophobic nationalism built on fear and ignorance. Together with the twee aesthetic ideology of the heritage industry, this has created the conditions for the absurdist atmosphere of Brexit Britain. In this blog, I seek to re-assert the power of people to shape the places in which they live by listening to the stories of others and contributing their own. This is essentially an anarchist practice, a bottom-up form of co-existence which undoes the coercive forms of power by asserting the creative presences of life. It manifests itself it innumerable ways; community organisations, local festivals and gatherings, graffiti, desire paths, artwork both site-specific or representative of an elsewhere etc. This isn’t utopian, nor is it revolutionary in itself, but it is the vital condition of our existence within a place, and our means of exercising a degree of control over it.

I will not focus purely on “place” in this blog; but it does form the basis of a broader thematic framework which intersects a lot of my other interests.  Neither will I limit the scope of my writing to place-writing, history, films, books or art. All of these things contribute to place-making and are therefore relevant. I will also be sharing some of my photography, which focuses on the interactions of people and places, finding traces of stories and micro forms of resistance in the everyday. Some of my immediate influences are the works of Colin Ward, Jonathan Meades, the situationists and later urban theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, social documentarians and the study of Social History beginning with E. P. Thompson. But there have been countless other influences, many of which have only emerged more recently; the films of Patrick Keiller and Andrew Kötting, the revival of folk horror and “New Weird Britain”, Tim Bird’s Grey Area comics, Gary Budden’s call for a“re-weirding” of the landscape, and plenty of other organisations, collectives, writers, artists, musicians and journalists dedicated to excavating the darker side of the landscape and re-situating peoples’ stories at the heart of places.