Off the map: “edgelands” like this one in Greenwich lie at the margins of our cities, abandoned by people and partly reclaimed by nature
Edgelands: Journeys Into England’s True Wildernessby Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)
It is commonly said, in this age of Google Maps, that our planet has now been fully explored. Satellites survey the remotest jungle, while sonar equipment probes each ocean trench. Gone are the days of Dr Livingstone, when hardy souls revealed landscapes unknown to the wider world. Now—so popular wisdom has it—discovery is the job of the specialist. The final frontier is to be found at far ends of the globe and is the preserve only of zoologists, climatologists, ecologists and other boffins.
In fact, it turns out that even today there are places that remain steadfastly off the map, resisting all attempts to chart them. Some of this terra incognita is right on our doorstep. Landfill sites, railway cuttings, abandoned warehouses and disused canals are all such places. Unloved and unkempt, they occupy the forgotten margins of our urban lives; these are the “edgelands” explored by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.
Most of us have had occasion to visit them—perhaps taking an old fridge to the dump, or straying on a dog walk. We have all seen them on the telly. This is the realm of the TV car-chase; suggesting to the viewer both menace and isolation, where hoodlums are meant to gather; it’s the venue of choice for gangsters needing to plan their heist or count their loot.
However readily we might understand what the authors mean by edgelands, reading this book you quickly get the sense that you can never truly know them; inhospitable, very often out-of-bounds, ever changing, they remain our very own Lost Worlds. Discarded by man, reclaimed by other pioneers—the columbine, the ragwort—they are neither civilisation nor nature but born of a tension between the two. Out of the way, out of mind, they are unwatched and unrestrained; they evoke mystery and danger quite as much as any jungle—they are, in a word, edgy. It is here that humans have abandoned their endeavours, here that we chose to dump our waste, our problems. Golgotha was one such place.
The authors do not find much of beauty on their explorations; nor is beauty what they seem to be seeking. What they do find is texture. They are constantly rewarded by the unexpected—the witty graffito under the bridge, the bedstead in the nettles. As Farley and Symmons Roberts point out, edgelands show up our official wilderness, making a great deal of it seem like the “enshrined, ecologically arrested, controlled garden space it really is.”
What is so good, they ask, about wild animals and flowers, each species pursuing its allotted genetic task? They have a point. Here by contrast, things run riot; the species you encounter are often escapees—not so much wild as feral. In the edgelands, things become rather more interesting; it’s where cats forget their pet names.
In one sense, this book is a challenge to Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, in which the author threaded his way through our more conventional notions of wilderness. Edgelands is also a homage, and stylistically it too is something of a mediation. It differs, of course, in that it is a joint enterprise. However—and this takes a bit of getting your head around—the text is written with just one voice. “As boys growing up in the seventies, we remember the thrill…” they write. Or, “We wait for the starlings to come…” You are left wondering which bit is penned by the Mancunian poet and which by the Liverpudlian one.
There’s no narrative arc; indeed, rarely any narrative at all. We are left with the combined musings of two men unified by the poetic instinct and the industrial northwest. “Cars, Paths, Dens, Containers…” reads the contents page. It’s all very eclectic.
The effect is slightly strange, but rather suited to the subject matter. These edgelands come over as nothing if not shadowlands; through the book there’s a perennial sense of abandonment. Humans for the most part take on a ghostly quality; they make an appearance to deposit detritus or else are just eternally passing by. As for the two protagonists, you are left to imagine them for yourself. One of them wears a leather jacket, you suppose, the other is perhaps in a duffle coat. Hands in pockets, they walk side by side. They stop, they ponder in silence. One kicks a tin can, the other tries to shift an abandoned Tesco trolley. They move on. Later, they sit on a pile of illicit builders’ rubble. They notice a broken TV tilted on its side, a buddleia growing out of it. They sip their tea, sharing it from the plastic lid of their thermos flask.
I wasn’t far into the book before I too shared their devotion to these overlooked and somehow triumphant scraps of our overcrowded island. We live in the most mapped, most signposted country on Earth; we are also the most observed nation on the planet. But in these edgelands no one seems to care. There are no street lights, no road sign to tell you this is “Shakespeare County”; no one has bothered to erect a CCTV camera. Here, at last, you might lose yourself.
Farley and Symmons Roberts end their odyssey at Brighton’s abandoned West Pier. Our poets are in hard hats, the rain is pattering down. The decaying shell of Laughterland, once the realm of one-armed bandits and “teddy grabbers,” still has admission prices painted on the wall in old money. The pier expresses the very essence of the edgeland: neglected, haunted, evoking stray memories of childhood escape, and always leading nowhere. There is no conclusion to the book and this too is fitting. The edgelands remain as they should be, gloriously undefined.
Edgelands: Journeys Into England’s True Wildernessby Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)
It is commonly said, in this age of Google Maps, that our planet has now been fully explored. Satellites survey the remotest jungle, while sonar equipment probes each ocean trench. Gone are the days of Dr Livingstone, when hardy souls revealed landscapes unknown to the wider world. Now—so popular wisdom has it—discovery is the job of the specialist. The final frontier is to be found at far ends of the globe and is the preserve only of zoologists, climatologists, ecologists and other boffins.
In fact, it turns out that even today there are places that remain steadfastly off the map, resisting all attempts to chart them. Some of this terra incognita is right on our doorstep. Landfill sites, railway cuttings, abandoned warehouses and disused canals are all such places. Unloved and unkempt, they occupy the forgotten margins of our urban lives; these are the “edgelands” explored by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.
Most of us have had occasion to visit them—perhaps taking an old fridge to the dump, or straying on a dog walk. We have all seen them on the telly. This is the realm of the TV car-chase; suggesting to the viewer both menace and isolation, where hoodlums are meant to gather; it’s the venue of choice for gangsters needing to plan their heist or count their loot.
However readily we might understand what the authors mean by edgelands, reading this book you quickly get the sense that you can never truly know them; inhospitable, very often out-of-bounds, ever changing, they remain our very own Lost Worlds. Discarded by man, reclaimed by other pioneers—the columbine, the ragwort—they are neither civilisation nor nature but born of a tension between the two. Out of the way, out of mind, they are unwatched and unrestrained; they evoke mystery and danger quite as much as any jungle—they are, in a word, edgy. It is here that humans have abandoned their endeavours, here that we chose to dump our waste, our problems. Golgotha was one such place.
The authors do not find much of beauty on their explorations; nor is beauty what they seem to be seeking. What they do find is texture. They are constantly rewarded by the unexpected—the witty graffito under the bridge, the bedstead in the nettles. As Farley and Symmons Roberts point out, edgelands show up our official wilderness, making a great deal of it seem like the “enshrined, ecologically arrested, controlled garden space it really is.”
What is so good, they ask, about wild animals and flowers, each species pursuing its allotted genetic task? They have a point. Here by contrast, things run riot; the species you encounter are often escapees—not so much wild as feral. In the edgelands, things become rather more interesting; it’s where cats forget their pet names.
In one sense, this book is a challenge to Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, in which the author threaded his way through our more conventional notions of wilderness. Edgelands is also a homage, and stylistically it too is something of a mediation. It differs, of course, in that it is a joint enterprise. However—and this takes a bit of getting your head around—the text is written with just one voice. “As boys growing up in the seventies, we remember the thrill…” they write. Or, “We wait for the starlings to come…” You are left wondering which bit is penned by the Mancunian poet and which by the Liverpudlian one.
There’s no narrative arc; indeed, rarely any narrative at all. We are left with the combined musings of two men unified by the poetic instinct and the industrial northwest. “Cars, Paths, Dens, Containers…” reads the contents page. It’s all very eclectic.
The effect is slightly strange, but rather suited to the subject matter. These edgelands come over as nothing if not shadowlands; through the book there’s a perennial sense of abandonment. Humans for the most part take on a ghostly quality; they make an appearance to deposit detritus or else are just eternally passing by. As for the two protagonists, you are left to imagine them for yourself. One of them wears a leather jacket, you suppose, the other is perhaps in a duffle coat. Hands in pockets, they walk side by side. They stop, they ponder in silence. One kicks a tin can, the other tries to shift an abandoned Tesco trolley. They move on. Later, they sit on a pile of illicit builders’ rubble. They notice a broken TV tilted on its side, a buddleia growing out of it. They sip their tea, sharing it from the plastic lid of their thermos flask.
I wasn’t far into the book before I too shared their devotion to these overlooked and somehow triumphant scraps of our overcrowded island. We live in the most mapped, most signposted country on Earth; we are also the most observed nation on the planet. But in these edgelands no one seems to care. There are no street lights, no road sign to tell you this is “Shakespeare County”; no one has bothered to erect a CCTV camera. Here, at last, you might lose yourself.
Farley and Symmons Roberts end their odyssey at Brighton’s abandoned West Pier. Our poets are in hard hats, the rain is pattering down. The decaying shell of Laughterland, once the realm of one-armed bandits and “teddy grabbers,” still has admission prices painted on the wall in old money. The pier expresses the very essence of the edgeland: neglected, haunted, evoking stray memories of childhood escape, and always leading nowhere. There is no conclusion to the book and this too is fitting. The edgelands remain as they should be, gloriously undefined.
