In the late 1960s I grew up in the London borough of Greenwich, which in those days had a shabby, post-industrial edge. Behind our house on Crooms Hill stood a disused London Electricity Board sub-station. Broken glass crunched underfoot and buddleia grew amid the fly-tipped junk. I went there chiefly to shoot at pigeons and set fire to things. Tea chests went up in a satisfying orange whoosh; I was mesmerised. One day, dreadfully, the LEB building burned down after I neglected to extinguish embers. The fire-fighters flashed a spectral white and blue, I remember, from the fire-engine’s beacon. I could no longer go there unnoticed.
I was reminded of that episode while reading Edgelands, by the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. The book celebrates the scrublands, sewage works, brownfield sites and silted canals where urban meets pastoral in contemporary England. These ‘drosscapes’ have been insufficiently chronicled in our literature today, object the authors. Iain Sinclair, whose novels and travelogues chart the industrial sumplands and riverscapes of London, is too ‘misanthropic’ a spirit for Farley and Roberts, who hope to find beauty (rather than a jagged ugliness) in our urban hinterlands.
The boondocks of Liverpool and Manchester, where the authors grew up in the 1970s, form the book’s core. Among the Mancunian ‘edgelands’ dearest to them are the viaducts and disused silk mills along the Macclesfield Canal. In such places one can still find the ‘overlooked England’ they cherish. Along the way, the authors dilate knowledgeably on the English bands and singers who have apostrophised these edgelands, chief among them Manchester’s proto-punk collective The Fall (one might add the Sheffield-born Jarvis Cocker, whose hymns to burned-out Trebor mint factories and detergent-tainted waterways exude a dour melancholy).
The literary travelogue, with elements of history, anthropology, personal experience and quest, is nevertheless a difficult genre.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in