Standing on a windy corner of Ku'damm in Autumn

By Emily Richards:

It is six o'clock in the evening and I am waiting for a bus because I chose to miss the last one. Here at Olivaer Platz in Berlin, as the people run out of their offices to jump on buses, speed across lanes in their shiny black BMWs, or swerve on their bikes through traffic in their anxiety to be home, I am unable to move, mesmerised by this autumn evening.  I have passed through this place, one of the busiest in Berlin, at different times and for different reasons for twenty-five years now. Once it was strange to me. Then, it was home. Now it is strange again.

It is not yet dark but there is a haze upon the air, and some of the street-lamps are already glowing silvery-bright. The autumn light turns from gold to a translucent pallor, tinged with the colours of the red, gold and brown leaves swirling in the wind. The flowers on the corner of the Platz, planted in a gesture of beauty amidst noisy traffic, still grow in green profusion, though a dimness is settling over them as evening falls. They are the first to lose their outlines in the twilight; the first to be overlooked as our faces turn towards clocks, mobile phones, LED displays to see if it's hometime yet, so that the longing which has built in us all day can be released like the tension on a trigger.

But I won't be going home just yet. I'm kept here almost against my will by the fading light, by the faces of Berlin that pass me by one by one and look at me for longer than English faces would, on this evening, two days after the general election. In the election, a radical right-wing party gained over a quarter of the vote in parts of Germany, and thirteen percent overall. I look at each person who walks, ambles or hurries past, and their faces look different to me.

I never noticed how misshapen and worn a human face can look. Sagging skin, stooped shoulders, a grimacing mouth; orange blusher scarring the too-pale face of a middle-aged woman who plunges in uncomfortably high shoes to her next appointment. Her head's skewed around awkwardly to pin her mobile phone to her shoulder as she talks into it, gesturing vaguely, staring at nothing. A tall, elderly woman with thinning brown hair and feet too plump for her old black shoes walks as stiffly as if on stilts, slowly raising each foot high above the pavement before grinding it back down. A younger woman with half-shaved head, dressed entirely in black with wide Cossack-style trousers and Russian boots, walks boldly past, but her clothes are dusty, nearly grey in places. A young man ambles in front of me, dark hair closely gelled to his scalp, eyes glued on the tightly-clad bottom of the young, hard-faced woman ahead of him, whose heavy gait is disconcertingly masculine for someone with such a bleached-blonde ponytail and such conventional make-up. Her double chin sags and the lines around her eyes crease as she swings her head round, shouting into her phone. An old man – but surely he's not much older than I am! – with a loose mouth, a white fringe of hair and a red nose stands for minutes in front of a rubbish bin, staring into it, looking for bottles he can take away and turn into money; then he looks around swiftly, bends to the ground and snatches up a fag-end before swinging away, arms flopping wide and uncontrolled in his badly-fitting beige jacket.

There is a sense of dissolution in the air.

The summer dissolves; the outline of the Ku'damm, of its buildings, buses, lamp-posts and cars, seems to dissolve in the haze of this autumn evening, in the rustle and whisper of the leaves moved by the wind. Before my eyes, the safety I once found here dissolves too. The reassuring, orderly security of these middle-class Germans loses its outline in the dusk, their aspirational Wirtschaftswunderland revealing itself as the illusion I should have known it to be. I did know it, really. But the shared illusion was a comfort, and, as such, transcended its own illusory nature to demonstrate its greater truth: that security, beauty and order all matter, and that those who are denied them or have lost them or mistrust them will turn to more dangerous illusions of their own; for example, that rejecting everything outside your own culture and experience will keep you safe. In this way they remove safety for everyone, not least themselves. For what if one day their fellow voters turn to them and say, "But you had a foreign grandparent did you not? You were once kind to a refugee, we hear." Then you too will be cast out. This is what happens. But by then you'll have done your damage, and it will be too late to be sorry.

Yet nonetheless, on this autumn evening, the wind whispers to me that something is stirring, something is afoot, something is changing. And I prefer this in the end. I prefer it, though I don't know what it is, what it will demand of me, what it will do to me.

And now here is my bus. And like all Berliners I might be foolish enough to miss a bus once, but I won't miss it twice. For who knows when the next one will arrive? Who knows when I'll be home.

You can read more from Emily on her blogs The Castle Captures Me and Boring in Berlin.

Moor-haunting

By Elizabeth Wainwright:

I moved back to a place that I know; it tugged me in my sleep, seeped into my blood like wine and desire. Suddenly I am on Dartmoor, feeling myself dissolve into its shifting mist and separate from my body – like long ago when I was someone I am not, and being under the influence, I drifted away from myself when I hadn’t chosen to. But this time I choose to wander away from myself: not sure whether I am an individual or part of the churning mass of life.

I have become fixated by hares, those mythical and elusive creatures. Search them in spring, and if you’re lucky (I haven’t been so far), you’ll witness the ‘mad march hare’ boxing antics; elegant creatures transformed into tall, aggressive dancers; each one Odette and Odile, black and white swan, fighting for courtship rights. This time I hear them snorting nearby, calling the approaching solstice into being like a spell.

I’ve taken shortcuts that were the long way round. I’ve opted for easy routes that were the boggy, marshy, slow routes. I should know better. But Dartmoor is an ancient cauldron of reason and desire; and I am learning that I gain less from a level-headed caution than I do from imagination and intuition (whilst all the while feeling the edge of my compass in my pocket, safe in the knowledge that someone knows where I am). A stones-throw away in Exeter, where I live, I enjoy wandering and observing life in the city – as Virginia Woolf called it, ‘Street Haunting’. On Dartmoor, I do the altogether more consuming, wide-open-space version; I become a moor-haunter, a Gore-Texed Artemis, roaming; sometimes searching, sometimes found.

Joseph Campbell said, “What the myths are for is to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual.” Dartmoor is a place in Devon, but more than that, it is a myth. It strips me of any role, any context, any time, and takes me into the place behind the pause button. It is here I have heard God and myself. Where I’ve reacted to and interacted with nature. It’s here I’ve doubted myself, and then felt the most ecstatic, frenzied, deep but momentary understanding of absolutely everything. And also where I’ve simply watched a sunrise with a quieted mind and mug of tea.

Once, I saw the carcass of a dead moor pony and I stopped to look. It clutched a foal, half-born. Half in the world and half hidden. Dead before it was alive. The foal wouldn’t get to stagger on lanky legs; hunker down in winter snow; doze in a summer haze to the amusement of passing tourists. Dartmoor is barren, heartbreaking. But it is not cruel. It would rise up to meet the death with soft grazed pale grass, and with it, feed worms, ravens, plants. Nothing mourned, but nothing wasted either. Suffering without cruelty. We’re terrified of our own mortality – especially in the age of the self. But perhaps that pony had no sense of itself as a separate being. It was always connected to all the other creatures on the moor.  “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”, but these are not horses of instruction – they are wild and free, hardy and intuitive. Theirs is a third way inbetween Blake’s aphorism; inbetween wrath and instruction, desire and reason. I see myself there, feel it on Dartmoor – theirs is the here and now, the mysterious kingdom come, on Earth. Not fierce uncultivated energy, and not mindless robotic being either. Rather, free to roam and to congregate, to sense and respond.  

I flinch when someone asks a question to which I must respond by saying ‘I like walking on the moor’. It feels like Peter’s denial before the rooster crows, claiming I never knew it. I feel Dartmoor glance at me, granite eyebrow raised, hurt. I do like walking on the moor, but that’s the method, not the purpose. For me it is no hobby. It is essential, like touch, and I like to think it is essential for Dartmoor too. Because we need people who are happy to get lost and get found again; to sit on a rock and all-at-once smile and weep at the grandeur and beauty of a sight that contains scale and possibility; colour and tiny miracles; music. Not a ‘nice view’ that we do not really see, but rather a roaring, existence-shaking singularity where all that ever has and ever will exist is here in this one moment, and it’s all the more heightened because for some reason we get to experience it but the dead foal never will. We need to tap into the soul-aligned ecstasy of being out in non-human nature (rather than mind-aligned ‘pleasure’) because when that joy takes root and turns into astonishment, deep connection, essence, and understanding, it becomes so infinite that one person can’t possibly contain it and so all we’re able to do is give it away, maybe to a neighbour or a child, or to the world. We become protective of it; we lovingly work in a garden, or furiously work on the global sustainability agenda (knowing that ‘sustain’ is a pale shadow of what we really feel or want).

But it all starts with a place, a call of the wild, a call of the divine. And for me that place is Dartmoor – its purple heather that fills lines of folk songs; its yellow summer gorse that in winter, yellowless, shelters sheep; its gentle springs that swell into churning white water; its storied tors and ancient bronze-age traces; its space and howling peace; its smells and shape-shifting light and weather and mood.

Dartmoor is a grazed, razed, bleak and beautiful place. No, it’s more than a place – it’s an experience. But it reclaims the idea of ‘experience’ from those companies that two-dimensionally offer ‘great customer experience’ or a ‘really wild experience’. Dartmoor owns the real meaning of the experience – ‘to feel or undergo; observe as a source of knowledge; an event which has affected one’.

Dartmoor affects me; it reveals knowledge and wisdom that – in my broad travels –  has not disclosed itself elsewhere in quite the same way. So I will keep on moor-haunting. And if we meet, and we talk about pastimes – please know that Dartmoor is more to me than that. It is stopped time; truth-telling time; wonder-full, wild, sensual, transformative time. It is never just passed time.

About the author:

Elizabeth Wainwright is The Ecologist’s nature editor, and she co-leads the community development charity Arukah Network. She has lived, worked and travelled around the world but is now back in Devon, UK, where she is from. @LizWainwright www.elizabethjaynewainwright.com

Names of the Wind

 Photo: the Bora in full spate on the slopes of Mount Mosor, near Split, Croatia, by Nick Hunt

We are extremely pleased and proud to welcome Nick Hunt back to the Elsewhere blog. Nick wrote a piece for us about ‘walking into the world’ in Albania a couple of years ago, and he has returned to reflect on the names of the wind… or the names of the specific winds that inspired his journeys across Europe for his new book Where the Wild Winds Are, published this month:

Every traveller knows the thrill of falling in love with a name. Some might be stirred by the name of a city: Odessa, Buenos Aires, Timbuktu. For others it may be a route through a landscape: the Silk Road, the Via Francigena, the Camino de Santiago. For me it was the names of Europe’s great seasonal winds – the Mistral, the Tramontana, the Bora, the Meltemi, the Kosava, the Foehn, the Bise, the Sirocco, the Levanter – which I saw on a map one day, invisible pathways threading across the continent, connecting regions and cultures that seemed quite separate in my mind. They sounded like things from a fairytale, invitations to a quest.

Why are some winds given names, while others remain nameless? What distinguishes one current of air molecules from another? I set out to follow four, which seemed an appropriate number for winds, drawn by the romance of their names but also intrigued by their effects; Europe’s great aeolian forces are said to influence everything from architecture to mythology to psychology. The Helm – Britain’s only named wind – blows down the western slopes of Cross Fell, the highest point of the Pennines, with enough force to destroy stone barns in the nearby Eden Valley. According to local legend the summit was formerly known as Fiends Fell, until the air-dwelling demons – whose howling caused such terror in the parishes below – were exorcised by a wandering holy man. The Helm itself takes its name from a long white cloud called the Helm Bar (a helmet for the mountain’s head) which acts as a harbinger of this freezing north-easterly. I camped for four days and nights up there, scanning the desolate moorland and waiting for the cloud to form; when it did, the demons returned to haunt me with a vengeance.

My second wind was the Bora, which led me down the Adriatic coast from Trieste in north-east Italy through Slovenia and Croatia. Fierce enough to sink ships and hurl fish from the sea, the Bora is also credited with helping defeat the last major pagan army to oppose the Christianisation of Rome – turning the arrows of the troops back towards them in the air – despite the fact that it takes its name from the pagan god Boreas, ancient Greek avatar of the cold north wind. It is celebrated for bringing good health, in stark opposition to the southerly Jugo, which muddies the sky with a yellow haze (taking its name from the Slavic word for ‘south’, this is the local variant of the many-named Sirocco, whose other appellations include the Khamsin, the Ghibli, the Sharav, the Marin, the Leveche and the Xaloc). During my three-week walk I found myself in a tug-of-war between Jugo and Bora, north and south, clear skies and humid haze. At last I met my quarry on a snow-covered mountainside above the Croatian city of Split; appropriately enough for a god, Boreas froze the blood in my veins and knocked me off my feet.

The etymology of the Foehn, which I chased across the Swiss Alps, perhaps also stems from the divine – it may derive from Favonius, the Roman god of the west wind – but locally it has earthier names: Schneefresser, ‘Snow-eater’, Maisvergolder, ‘Corn-goldener’, and Traubenkocher, ‘Grape-cooker’, in tribute to its warming effects. Associated with clear skies, sunshine and the coming of spring, it is also blamed for causing headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia, anxiety, depression and a host of other ailments; antique maps depict the Foehn as a puff-cheeked face blowing out not air, but showers of human skulls. I tracked this ill-omened force for a fortnight from one deep valley to another, acting on meteorological tip-offs and snatches of local lore, until eventually catching it in the heart of Haslital. After experiencing three days of relentless roaring heat – incongrously thundering from snow-capped summits and glaciers – I woke one morning so depressed that I could hardly move. It felt as if everything in my life had gone disastrously wrong, and it took me most of the day to understand the cause and effect. The legends and old wives’ tales were true: I had fallen victim to Föhnkrankheit, the notorious Foehn-sickness. As soon as I escaped that valley, the symptoms disappeared.

My final wind was perhaps the best-known, being something of a household name far beyond its native range: the bitter breath of the Mistral, which blows, according to superstition, for three, five, seven or nine days southwards down the Rhone Valley from Valence to the Gulf of Lion. Its name comes from the Latin magistralis, which means ‘masterly’, and it certainly dominates the land; the farmhouses in its path are built with windowless north-facing walls to protect against its blast, and lines of closely-packed cypress trees are planted as living windbreaks from east to west. Like the Bora and the Foehn, the Mistral makes a clean sweep of the sky and helps create the vibrant light that has attracted generations of painters to the south of France. But there is a price to beauty; this ‘wind of madness’ is notorious for driving people crazy. Vincent Van Gogh, who lived in its path for two years in the town of Arles – during which time he cut off his ear and committed himself to the local asylum – referred to it in his letters as ‘a nagging malice’, ‘pestering’, ‘merciless’ and ‘the devil’, even as the conditions it brought inspired some of his greatest works. I followed its trail for ten days down an ancient pilgrims’ path on the western bank of the Rhone, ending my travels on the Plain of Crau, a little-known and desolate region classified as western Europe’s only steppe. Two thousand years ago the geographer Strabo travelled there, describing ‘an impetuous and terrible wind which displaces rocks, hurls men from their chariots, breaks their limbs and strips them of their clothes and weapons’. Apart from the chariots, nothing much has changed.

Nick Hunt’s Where the Wild Winds Are (Nicholas Brealey Publishing) was published in September 2017. Nick’s website can be found here.

End of the Line

By Catherine Marshall:

This is a story of a rather unusual bus journey to the end of the line in Edinburgh, a discovery of an industrial museum witness to centuries of change and my own transition in moving to a new city and country.

I have always been drawn to the theme of transition both in my private life – often moving flats, cities, countries – and in my photography – which often features urban spaces undergoing change. When I first moved to Edinburgh from Germany, I had a reverse culture shock. I had to relearn a British culture that I had left behind fifteen years ago. To be honest I was happy that I had washed up in Edinburgh and not South of the border. It felt closer to Europe, the tenement-style buildings also reminded me of Berlin. As an English person, it was also nice to still feel foreign, to learn Scots phrases, hear poems read in Gaelic and learn about Scottish culture through my sons' school education. 

When it came to taking photographs and negotiating the city I was less comfortable. I almost felt that as an English person I didn't have the authority to go out there and reframe the landscape through my camera. Apart from that, I had no idea of the geography of the city and didn't know where to start. Then I came across came across (g)Host City, a kind of sound-map of Edinburgh to download where you can hear a story or a poem set in a particular location of the city. I decided to take an 'unreliable bus tour' by Japan-dwelling Scot, artist and musician, Momus. It gave me the framework (and courage) to set off to those mysterious sounding destinations on the front of buses I had seen in town: Wallyford, Ocean Terminal, Hyvot's Bank and Bonally. I cannot really describe the surreal, dark and funny tours he gave, as that is something to discover for yourself.

On one journey I wasn't sure if the bus had actually reached the end of the line. It seemed to circle back so I just decided to get off. The audio tour had ended, my google maps app was not working and suddenly I found myself off map. Two bus stops stood baldly on opposite sides of the country road, the only punctuation marks in an otherwise unreadable flat landscape. Should I go left or right or take the bus back? I decided to follow my nose. Walking down a winding B-road I saw another marker in the landscape, an exclamation mark of an industrial chimney stack. I was alone, not having seen another pedestrian since I had left the bus, and was glad to see some sign of civilisation. A pit head winding-gear came into view. As I walked closer I saw a bricked wall with tiles with illustrations of former industries; fishing, pottery, coal, and brickworks. Through serendipity I had found the Prestongrange Industrial Heritage Museum located on the north-east coast of East Lothian. For centuries this area was the centre of intense industrial activity, with a busy harbour, Morrison's Haven. Now you can just see where the harbour used to be, a rectangular outline on the grassy bank, marked with a sign on the ‘bygone years’, the sign itself nearly faded away through the erosion from the sea air. 

At the museum I found myself donning my headphones again, this time to listen to an audio-tour of the outdoor exhibits narrated by the late artist John Bellany who grew up nearby, conjuring up, not so different from Momus, an alternative world to the one you see with your own eyes. From Bellany’s stories of Prestonpans you visualise a lost industry; the smoke billowing from the Beehive Kilns that once produced bricks for the buildings of the New Town. Or you find yourself at its mid-eighteenth century heyday with ships loaded with salt, oysters, ceramics, sulphuric acid and coal, or bringing silk, furs from Canada, whalebone and French brandy in return. In the nineteenth century, Irish workers, who first arrived in the West of Scotland, are brought with their families and their traditions to the East by new investors, Summerlee. These new owners also improved workers' conditions, installing indoor plumbing to the mining workers’ housing. Electric generators replaced the steam engines in the powerhouse and electric street lighting was brought to the area. Today the powerhouse houses art exhibitions. I was so taken with the museum, and the fact that I was free to wander with my camera making my own discoveries of an overgrown railway bridge and train tracks in the surrounding forest, that when I returned to the visitor centre the assistant said that she had been thinking of sending out a search party. 

As I left Prestonpans, walking west along the coastal path towards Musselburgh, I came across a quite alien landscape. This was not the Edinburgh that I could have imagined existed when I had set out on my 'unreliable bus tour' that morning. I had found, however, something equally strange. A vast cracked grey landscape stretched out before me towards the sea, made infinite by the fog that was closing in. These are called 'lagoons', a salubrious name for a place where Scottish Power deposited waste ash from the now closed Cockenzie power station. 

In these coastal areas, the delicate balance of man and nature is most apparent. The oysters that the Edinburgh population once enjoyed with their French Claret disappeared towards the end of the nineteenth century overfishing, new dredging methods and pollution from sewage and industrial waste. As industry disappears, nature reclaims, and also in this case offered opportunity for recreation. Bellany recounts several generations of Prestonpans children using the disused harbour as their own swimming pool after the 1930s, conveniently heated by the water dispersed from the pit boilers. Now this coastal area is a destination for walkers and bike enthusiasts. There are also plans to create a nature reserve on the site of the lagoons. Although the lagoons in themselves are dead, they have provided a sanctuary for both sea and wading birds and there are three hides for birdwatchers in the area. In the photographs I took that day, I was drawn to the themes of transition and change, nature reclaiming land itself. But I also wondered about the transitions that families had to go through in the passage of time when industries that had sustained them for so long, came to an end.  

About the author:

Catherine Marshall is an artist and writer based in Edinburgh. She studied photography at the London College of Communication and Glasgow School of Art. She has lived in different countries and cities including Berlin, which she made her home for a decade.

www.catherine-marshall.com

To Island Farm

By Tim Cooke:

On my fourteenth birthday, I was presented with a new bike, complete with front-fork suspension, and the freedom it brought saw a change in my attitude to rules and regulations, borders and boundaries: they became less concrete. As such, the local edgelands, many of which were totally off-limits – both geographically and by parental decree – became my choice stomping grounds. In tow with the more feral and exciting of my friends, I tore through sun-baked industrial estates, ploughed headfirst into monastic woods and derelict graveyards, took up with rogue youths hanging out in car parks beneath brutalist recreation centres and explored the grounds of water treatment plants hidden on the salty flanks of wild coastal scrublands.

One of the first of these potent and dynamic – but often, at a glance, unremarkable – landscapes that demanded our attention was the old POW camp at Island Farm. A close friend of mine, who lived around the corner and introduced me to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, second-wave punk music and Camel cigarettes, had visited with an older schoolmate and returned with beguiling tales of BMX tracks, booze and beautiful girls. It was a daunting prospect, particularly because this strange zone had attached to it many dark and mysterious mythologies that served to keep us clear – not least those concerning satanic rituals and predatory criminals. I’d lived less than half a mile from the site for fourteen years but had never before set foot on its hallowed ground. It was daunting, yes, but compelling, too.

It was midsummer and the sun was hot and high in the sky when the boys called at my door. We’d crossed the large, somewhat monstrous, graffitied sewage pipe in the field behind my house – over the River Ogmore and into Bluebells Woods – every day for the previous week and we needed somewhere new to explore and claim as our own. I fetched my bike from the padlocked shed in the back garden and we set off in single file. The road emanated that warm stench of scorched tarmac, released by a light morning shower that had failed to clear the thick humidity, and the beech trees sizzled with birdsong; we waved to our smiling neighbours, who had known two of us since birth, as we passed.

We rounded a blind bend at reckless speed, forcing the still air into a gentle flurry, and arrived at a treacherous junction that bled onto the A48, a fairly busy dual carriageway separating the town’s southern-most suburb from its surrounding countryside. This is still the point at which the suburban realm leaks into rural territory. The cars whooshed by one after another – red, yellow, black and blue – and we pedalled across to an inlet from where we could join a narrow track into a profusion of slim tress and overgrown shrubbery. A sign warned that trespassers would be prosecuted; we all turned our heads, hocked back our best phlegm and spat at it with embarrassing vigour.

I recall the journey up until this point with surprising clarity, but the next portion has slipped entirely from my mind, the topography obscured by a dark mist that simply won’t shift. I’ve created the right conditions: I’m sat in front of a window at the top of a hill, looking out onto the Black Mountains, the only noise is that of the tits, chaffinches and siskins pecking at the birdfeeder in the garden. I have a copy of an article I recently wrote, detailing some of the camp’s many fragmented histories via a walk I undertook earlier this year – in search of the one remaining hut that contained the prisoners – but still the memory refuses to take any discernible form. I do, however, remember that incomparable feeling of anticipation, a kind of excitement only teenagers on the cusp of something brand new can feel.

We must have weaved our way around the labyrinthine system of footpaths, tearing clouds of dust from the dry earth with our wheels, perhaps stopping momentarily to fill our mouths with sour blackberries, before emerging onto a wide expanse of grey land with no apparent purpose. When I revisited this spot a few months ago, it gave off an eerie sense of transition, as if something was happening. There were wooden stumps hammered into the soil, with rubber boots placed on top to serve as weird markers of some kind. Drinks cans hung from painted trees. Felled wood peppered the terrain and two sets of tattered blue overalls were cast nonchalantly over a stump, an empty bottle of homemade wine or cider resting in the crook of a nearby branch. It was ugly and beautiful, the same but different.

I imagine as youngsters we would have dragged our bikes in rapid, imperfect circles around this nondescript plot of pallid ground, unaware that we were riding on rubble formed during the destruction of nineteen of the twenty units that once constituted the POW camp; the debris was supposed to extend a runway at Cardiff Airport, but it was scattered instead to level the uneven surface. Grass has since grown over it in wild tufts that suit the landscape like an untamed hairstyle.

This is where it comes back to me: we dismounted under a cover of oak-tree foliage and wheeled our bikes along yet another passage surrounded by tight knots of bracken and bramble. First from below and then suddenly above the chirruping birdsong came the aggressive conversation and trigger-happy laughter of adolescents eager to prove something and impress, some relishing the challenge. We swept clear the final twigs and leaves and arrived at a sort of amphitheatre – a dome cut into the topsoil and layered with improvised obstacles to make a gnarly cycle track. Around its circumference were strewn three or four groups of boys and girls, smoking, drinking and flirting.

The air surrounding this congregation was hot and hormonal and laced with pollen. I scanned the faces for any I knew and spotted that of a lad I’d met in the schoolyard after hours, described to me by a friend as one of the best skaters in town. Today he was on a BMX, throwing himself at the final ramp, which was composed of a dented white washing machine turned on its side and a heavy layer of turf thrown over the top. He skidded to a halt at the foot of the banking we were descending and raised his chin: “Alright, boys?” We nodded in return and the chatter that had suddenly dissipated resumed.

For the next half-hour or so we sat alone about five metres from three girls I recognised from the year above. I knew one of them as mouthy and popular, prone to hurling abuse at unsuspecting victims she passed on the path between lessons, while the other two were, as far as I was concerned, beautiful and unobtainable. It was about this age that something chemical had rendered me incapable of talking to anyone I found attractive. The idea of spending any length of time in the company of good-looking older girls was totally outrageous, but before I knew it we were in a circle, sharing Super King cigarettes and swallowing gulps of cheap cider from a plastic flagon. I hardly said a word, which didn’t matter, because they carried me along with their jokes and small talk; it was bliss.

The rest of that first visit remains mainly as a kind of montage, or mosaic. I recall my longing for the brown-haired girl with faint freckles and braces on her teeth. The disproportionate ache I felt then makes me think now of the artwork produced by the prisoners once held at the camp: images of scantily-clad women – wives and girlfriends left behind, perhaps never to be seen again other than as memory-traces scratched into prefabricated concrete. I recollect, too, tumbling from the top of the repurposed washing machine, the pain that dug into my groin on impact and crawled into my stomach. Then there were the feelings of belonging and community that would stick with me right through my years on the darker edges of town.

Finally, we arrived at the far end of the zone and smoked in the shade of Hut 9, from which seventy prisoners escaped in November 1945 by tunnelling into an adjacent field. All of them were recaptured and later dispersed around the world, but I’ve no doubt their ghosts returned from wherever they perished – this landscape needs them somehow. The structure itself, its weathered brickwork and boarded-up windows, meant little to me then – I would even scrawl my name on the wall, adding inadvertently to the tangible palimpsest this site also requires. It feels now, divorced from any official history, like a monument to a significant moment in my life. Strangely, I can’t recall a single journey back from Island Farm, only getting there, staying awhile and, eventually, moving on.

About the author:

Tim Cooke is a teacher and freelance journalist. He writes about film, literature and place for various publications, including the Guardian, Little White Lies, the Quietus, Ernest Journal, the Nightwatchman and the Hackney Citizen. His creative work has appeared in the Lampeter Review, Drain Magazine, Foxhole Magazine, Stepz, Particulations and Litro Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2

The War Memorial in the Sea

By David Lewis:

On a grey summer’s afternoon the Crosby beach is busy with holidaymakers.  The waterfront of Liverpool follows the great curve of the Mersey as it pours into the Irish Sea, but at Crosby the urban sprawl runs out of enthusiasm and is broken with open spaces – playing fields, parks, farms.  At the end of the long promenade there is a Lifeboat station, an ice cream van, a car park.  Here the long beach starts, the hard sands that run along the coast to the Lune river estuary fifty kilometres or so north.  This is a raw coastline.  The Irish Sea is a cold expanse of water, emptier than it once was, although the slow container ships still slip quietly in and out of Liverpool.  There are cruise ships now as well, vast white hotels drawn by the renaissance of the city centre.  Haunted by the cries of gulls, the coastline sprawls beneath vast mutating cloudscapes and feels wary and unpredictable. 

Beyond the Lifeguard station a low flat field of broken stones runs for two hundred, maybe three hundred metres along the shore.  At the beach’s edge the stones are slippery with seaweed; pools form among the stones, limpets colonise the surfaces.  It looks like builders’ rubble and most visitors ignore it in favour of Antony Gormley’s famous Another Place sculptures and the great expanse of hard golden sand.  But there is deep history here, old stories in these stones, there is remembrance, and there is forgetting.

Close up, this is unusual rubble; Victorian bricks dissolved by the salt water into gritty, lumpy, mosaic sand, chunks of sea-glass worn pale-grey and smooth, ancient bleached china electrical fittings. But the clue to this landscape does not lie in the bricks.  There are larger pieces; not uncut stones, not quarry-refuse, not landfill.  They are architecture. 

Some of these pieces are small, a metre long, but others are quite large – the size of a sofa, say, or an upright piano.  Some are hand-carved sandstone, deep flowers fading into sand; others are granite, untouched by seaweeds or limpets, as sharp as the day they left the mason’s yard in the 1870s.  Some have letters carved into them, a teasing suggestion of names and landmarks.  I have often wanted to identify the buildings they came from, through old photographs and architects’ plans.  Would it be possible to separate these small piles of loss back into individual buildings and fit them together like a sea-worn jigsaw puzzle?  Ultimately they could be restored to the street; the cornices and friezes, words and titles once again seventy feet above the pavements.  But what would this achieve?  Standing on the shore, this dream no longer seems possible or even desirable. 

These ruins were taken from the cityscape of Liverpool and especially Bootle, cleared after the terrible blitzkrieg unleashed by the Germans in 1940 and 1941.  Once these fragments were parts of banks, insurance offices and hotels, buildings which added dignity and strength to the streets.  Every stone comes from a bombed building, every brick comes from a bombed house, perhaps from a house where people died.  And so this long field of stones and bricks is a war memorial.  Not a solemn classical monument at the heart of the city, but a war memorial nevertheless.  4000 people died in Liverpool in the Blitz, and Bootle alone lost over 400.  This is an informal war memorial open to the elements, a war memorial washed twice a day by the tides, a war memorial covered in seaweed. There is no forced solemnity, no guards, no flags, no eternal flame.  No Dulce, no Decorum.  Children scramble over these ruins, they hunt for shrimps in the pools among the weedy stones, sit on the warm sand with their backs to giant lumps of the city.  Adults take pieces of brick as souvenirs, perhaps to remember the dead, perhaps remembering the war itself.  Most do not know the history of these fragments, these splinters of city.  It is irrelevant.  Nothing can be done to them without heavy machinery, no amount of souvenir hunters can damage the integrity of these stones and bricks.  Three hundred metres long, but how deep?  Without massive human interference, only time will fade these ruins.

At dusk in the summer the beach is clear.  This is not the Mediterranean; the cool air from the Irish Sea means that on the warmest day the heat does not linger.  The lights come on in Wallasey three kilometres away across the Mersey, and the ruins fade into the dusk again, as they have done every night since the late 1940s.  I do not think that this memorial-landscape should be formalised, protected, solemnised; this should be a quiet place to remember our unknown dead in a very Liverpool way, informal but never unserious, to the lament of waves running across the evening sands and gulls crying in a grey sky. 

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Postcard from... Hyltenäs kulle

Image: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

The marketing material promised ‘West Sweden’s most beautiful lookout point’, the Hyltenäs kulle rising above the dense forests and lakes of the Mark municipality, but as we followed the narrow, winding road up the hill the mist was descending and a light rain had begun to fall. At the top, a solitary man stood with an umbrella against the drizzle, looking out into the gloom.

‘I’m supposed to be photographing a wedding up here,’ he said, glumly.

‘When?’ I replied.

‘In about an hour.’

I left him to his thoughts of where he could place the bride without getting too much water on her white dress, and began to explore the summit of the hill. In the early years of the 20th century, the merchant George Seaton built a huge hunting lodge on the hill, which at the time of construction had been cleared of all trees and other plant life in order to maximise the views for Seaton and his guests. Perhaps this was tempting fate. They barely had time to enjoy it – just a handful of hunting seasons – before the lodge was destroyed in a fire. Now all that remains are the stone foundations and the hill, declared a nature reserve in the 1970s, is once more overgrown with a forest of oak, birch, hazel and mountain ash.

But the views that brought George Seaton to the Hyltenäs kulle remain. However dreich the day.

Paul’s essay ‘Bordercrossing’ appears in Elsewhere No.05 – Transition. You can order the latest edition of the journal and all back issues directly with us, via our online shop.

Ruin Renewal: Manchester's Upper Brook Chapel

Photo: Mark Dyer

By Mark Dyer:

Nestled amongst the busy hum of traffic and surrounding car garages, I noticed the crumbling remnants of the Upper Brook Chapel when I first moved to Manchester in 2014.  Recalling a ruin from a Turner painting, the roofless Neo-Gothic church never failed to strike wonder in me. As unopposed vines and vegetation encroached upon the sandstone columns, the elements mounted a relentless assault upon the exposed innards of the building. The open husk of the nave, like the splayed ribcage of a fossilised whale, provided ideal nesting space for winged critters, whilst the intact rose window hinted at its former glory.

A fascination with ruined structures is nothing new. Like the above-mentioned painter, I never fail to recognise the poignancy of man’s futile attempts to defy nature and time. It is a sentiment that fascinated the early modern period when confronted with the remnants of antiquity, through to John Ruskin and the Romantics who contemplated man’s relationship with nature. It could be said that my reaction to the Upper Brook Chapel was commonplace, expected even, or, simply, inevitable.

Then, in early 2016, development work on the Chapel began. According to the aptly named website ‘Saving the Chapel,’ [1] Manchester City Council agreed a proposal from developer Church Converts to renovate the building into micro flats. This involved relocating the Manchester Islamic Academy, who were leasing the attached Sunday School from the Council. By mid-2016, the scaffolding that would support and surround the structure during these developments was erected.

However, the east-facing façade of the Chapel, which I frequently passed, was bedecked with a denser layer of intricate metal. This method of scaffolding is known as Double Scaffolding and is commonly adopted for stone masonry to avoid drilling into the walls. This criss-cross thicket, belted on like a muzzle, transformed the humble chapel ruin into an iron basilica. From the pavement, I was confronted by a fortified cathedral whose stockade loomed above passing pedestrians and would-be invaders. Indeed, the St George’s flag raised on top of the monolith in June 2016 cemented the image of a battle-weary and battered bastion.

We might liken the braced edifice to more modern trends in architecture. Consider Fritz Höger’s Chilehaus, Hamburg; or the Grundtvigs Church, Copenhagen, designed by Peder Jensen-Klint and Kaare Klint. The bare metal of the scaffolding in particular evoked in me a dystopian imagining of Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, Paris, as if the glass had melted away in some unknown catastrophe. Whether a fortified citadel, a fragment of expressionist architecture, or the future bones of one of our cultural houses, the Upper Brook Chapel had certainly been transformed from its Gothic origins.

So, through the preservation and development of one ruin, we are presented with another, very different, sort of ruin. Robert Smithson conceived the idea of ‘ruins in reverse’ [2] whereby the apparatus and detritus of construction work will grow out of ruin into the finished building. But Upper Brook Chapel was already a ruin and has been made more ruinous, so how might we articulate what is occurring here? Ruin regeneration? Ruin renewal? Ideologically, we might understand such an activity to be part of and run in parallel with urban renewal and cleansing. Aesthetically, however, it appears to work in contrary motion. Presented with such a dichotomy, my interpretation of the Chapel was more nuanced than before the development work began. The preservation of heritage has resulted in a temporary ruin that is somehow more commanding, more socially engaged, and more representative of how ruin can challenge us in the 21st Century.

Illustration: Mark Dyer

Then, one evening, during the full throws of development, I chanced upon a particular sight. In the wake of fading twilight, where the inky sky provided a fitting backdrop to the obsidian basilica, a lone construction site lamp warmly permeated through the vacant double lancet window and surrounding labyrinth of iron. This simple scene, serendipitously witnessed, instantly transformed the imposing ruined monolith into a tender and reverent sanctum.

The gentle glow amidst the darkness gave an air of solemnity that the Chapel had not hosted in years, though this prompted an image of private worship or individual spiritualism as opposed to the institutional congregation.  Consequently, I was reminded of those forced to worship in secret, away from persecution in its many guises. Post-Reformation? Post-Referendum. A sanctuary for the minority, the unwanted, the forgotten. The St George’s flag erected during the EU vote now cast a more sinister shadow across the windswept parapet.

This asylum buried in the stone masonry in turn reminded me of Lud’s Church, Staffordshire, England; a natural chasm in the rock that provided a safe place of worship for the Lollards in the 15th Century [3]. Similar to Upper Brook Chapel, this cleft in the Peak District features towering columns of Millstone Grit rock festooned in lichen, a dizzying open skylight and a quiet aura of solemnity. However, instead of being carved by and into nature, the Chapel has been formed as a result of additive manmade processes to form a composite structure whose social and contextual recollections are multifaceted and era-spanning.

When the development work of Upper Brook Chapel is complete, the church-cum-mosque will host plush apartments for students and young professionals, lining the pockets of shrewd property owners, if not the Council itself. Whilst I appreciate the importance of preserving our architectural heritage and history, as well as the financial viability of sustaining derelict buildings for non-commercial purposes, should stone and mortar be prioritised above existing religious and social networks and relationships? Where will these people now seek sanctuary?

About the author:
Mark is a composer of concert and installation music. His primary artistic focus is the ‘musical ruin’: the quotation and fragmentation of existing music, that might elicit a feeling in the listener analogous to that experienced when visiting an architectural ruin. Mark has worked with ensembles such as Psappha, OUT-TAKE Ensemble and Collective31, and has published in the new music journal Tempo. In September 2017, Mark will begin a PhD in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, supported by an AHRC scholarship awarded by the North West Consortium DTP. Listen to his music at http://www.markdyercomposer.com/

Notes:
[1] Czero Developments. (2017) Saving the Chapel. [Online] [Accessed 27th February 2017] http://www.savingchapel.com
[2] Smithson, R. (2011) ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,’ In Dillon, B. (ed.) Ruins. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, p.49.
[3] Cressbrook Multimedia. (2017) Lud’s Church. [Online] [Accessed 28th February 2017] https://www.peakdistrictinformation.com/visits/ludschurch.php