How Wide Can An Edge Be Before It

Bends Back To The Centre?

Pulp

In the last ten years a number of books have

seen publication that address a resistant,
ambulatory exploration of cities and their
hinterlands. The quality has been variable
and uneven. Some of the best examples
have had their blindspots and biases;
Rebecca Solnit’s otherwise illuminating
Wanderlust eventually tumbles too hard into
the literary camp, Geoff Nicholson is far too
quick to hit the contempt button when faced
with experiments he feels nothing for in The
Lost Art of Walking. But the objects of my
objections – aestheticism, intolerance, comic
point-scoring - may be what attracts and
satisfies other readers.

So, I will attempt to identity a different kind

of criterion here.

Were the writers ever really there? How

much walking (and of what kind) did the
authors of these publications actually do,
and how did that feed their writing? These
thoughts are prompted by a new publication
– Edgelands: Journeys Into England’s True
Wilderness - written by two English poets,
Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.

Authenticity

Before getting to the application of my

criterion, it may be worth reflecting on that
last paragraph – I have used the words
“really” and “actually” and quoted a subtitle
with the word “True” prominent in it. Clearly,
authenticity is an issue here. And is an issue
in itself. But there is an arid path ahead of
us if we begin with some normative model
for what good walking or efficacious urban
exploration is, or what is really an edgeland
and what is not. More fruitful, I would
suggest, is a comparison of the approaches
of the different walker-writers, and some
tentative observations about connections
between their ambulatory research and their
published output.
I’ll begin with the work of Farley and Roberts
and build out from there.

Goodness

There are good things to say about their

book. The fact that it takes on the idea of
the ‘edgelands’ is a boon. It opens up the
possibilities of recognising the shadowy
spaces between suburbs and green
countryside, of walking beyond that final
street, of climbing through the gap in the
rusted metal fencing.

And in its
fragments it
contains sparkling
gems: the man
who has come to
the edgeland to
watch out for an
Iridium flare, the
TV crew filming a
knight in armour, Geoffrey Hill’s sandlorry
called “Albion”, memetic storage containers,
turns of phrase like “the barley sugar of
broken indicator glass” or “a magic carpet
with rigor mortis” (a pallet), pens swinging
on their chains in an abandoned bank, the
scarlet funnels of a liner rusting in the long
grass of a defunct holiday camp, the No
Parking Whitebeam, and corporate events in
a grounded Concorde.

Shoard

However, the treatment by Farley and

Roberts of Marion Shoard who coined the
term ‘edgelands’ is nigh unforgiveable. “We
might have come up with it ourselves, but
geographer Marion Shoard got there first”,
they claim. But Shoard did far more than
‘get there first’; her essay in Jennifer Jenkins’
Remaking The Landscape articulates both a
description and a kind of manifesto for the
edgelands, neither of which the poets seem
to recognise – it’s available online at:
http://www.marionshoard.co.uk/Documents/Articles/Environment/Edgelands-Remaking-the-
Landscape.pdf
At times Farley and Roberts seem to be
drawing on too wide a geography (canals,
woodlands) or too accommodated a culture
(site-specific performances and the
Ashington Group of painters); the edginess
of the edgelands is flattened and smoothed.
Their comment, “Swindon is rightly proud of
this resource” could have come from a
tourist brochure. When Shoard described the
edgelands as “the only theatre in which the
real desires of real people can be
expressed”, she articulates a
psychogeographical intensity that Farley and
Roberts never quite seem to grasp. Theirs is
a rather too polite version of Shoard’s
landscape of desire. When they ask at the
start of a short final chapter, “How far can
the idea take us?”, they have left the
enquiry too late and ignore their own
question.

Psycho

Perhaps (sadly) predictable is their joining,

with Massey, Nicholson, Solnit and even
Coverley (who, like, Solnit cannot distinguish
dérive from flâneurie) in the general cat-
calling against “so-called
psychogeographers… using the edgelands
as a short cut to misanthropy”. They are
equally dismissive of any academic
discourse, snootily pronouncing on “what a
PhD student somewhere is probably
referring to as ‘narratives of eco-
catastrophe’”.

Perhaps, with the paranoid sensitivity of

psychogeographers or deep topgraphers
they might have explored the ritual
significance of pylons, the CMB in the
“shash” of untuned TVs, or found the
Knights Hospitaller under the cocktail
lounge’s carpet at The George in Stamford

Perhaps, with a little more academic rigour,

a little more sense of the ambience and
narratives of the edgelands, they might
have resisted the drag to the centre, the
dilution to the average.
Perhaps they might just have acted out
‘embodiment’ or ‘reflexivity’ if they’d been a
little more respectfully sceptical of these
academic discourses.

Burden

For their biggest self-made obstacle is that

unlike Francesco Careri or Tom Nielsen, or,
indeed, Rebecca Solnit, there is a sense
from their quotation-laden writings that
Farley and Roberts have spent more time in
their armchairs than in the edgelands. They
speculate on what a “hunt in the
postmodern forest” might be like, but they
do not seem to been on, or to have
witnessed, one. Their proposal of an
“edgopticon” suggests that they did not
escaped as far from the cameras as they
might.

Indeed, they seem to be orienting

themselves in relation to surveillance and
media, to the mediated idea of edgelands as
a commodity and of themselves as ‘straight
to camera’.

‘Up Your Bum’

Their method is not unlike BBC Radio’s long

defunct ‘Down Your Way’, snapping up
choice titbits from a place, but without any
deep or paranoid enquiry or any subsequent
re-weaving of their gathered fragments (for
a moment a meta-narrative of ‘progressive
detachment’ rears and then flops back
down). The result is reminiscent of Nicholas
Crane’s Two Degrees West: An English
Journey’. These similarities may be
accidental, but they are not insignificant.
They are part of a ‘popularisation’ of a
resistant exploration, a form of
‘popularisation’ that undoes the very margin
that it seeks to invite others to. The
commonsense, ‘writers-of-the-people’ tone
of Edgelands de-guts these places of their
absurd, excessive, ugly, violent and lusting
beauties. Farley and Roberts, whatever their
intentions, fudge the void, they average it
out, sanitise its harmful chemicals. Their
only corpse turns out be two thousand years
old. They imagine crimes, but they don’t
appear to have committed any.
When they confess that “even though our
forays into fields and waste ground were
hardly scientific and exhaustive, we didn’t
once find anything we could call an active
den”, they call into question just how serious
their research has been.

They tell us that we might see will-o-the-

wisps, but they presumably have not.

Nothingness
There’s no W. G. Sebald, no Nick
Papadimitriou, no Keiller, no Stephen Gill’s
Archaeology In Reverse … but there are
plenty of Googlish snacks. And there is Tim
Edensor. The authors don’t seem to have
managed to walk with this “connoisseur of
industrial ruins”, but they quote (and then
ignore) something key from his work: that
edgelands “often exist in a hiatus between
the end of one industrial era and potential
future redevelopment”. If Farley and Roberts
had bothered with the academic world they
might have stumbled upon Tom Nielsen’s
‘excessive spaces’ or Francesco Carreri’s
‘voids’, even Bataille’s ‘accursed share’, and
that might have helped them to grasp that
what Edensor is describing are not spaces
with “an apparently ‘blank’ status” with
potential for a half-hearted, theatrical
rebelliousness (“licit and illicit pastimes…
sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Well, okay,
sex-and-drugs-and-rock-‘n’-roll photo
shoots”), but in-between spaces that still
carry the potency of their former utility,
where you can die if you don’t watch your
step, where
you may need
to retreat,
where
producing a
camera will
send men
scrambling for
their cars or
assembling to
be videoed
from the waist
down.

Boom

These are also places of imagining and

imagination, where kids can wreck whole
worlds, enact apocalypses on a single shed,
enjoy a kind of wildness that they would not
look at twice in a council flower bed.

But despite their wasted states these are not

apocalyptic sites. Their power is the
potential to become integrated once more,
to become capital producing, to become
part of the matrix again. By dulling their
edginess, the poets miss the most exciting
‘bit’ of the story – that these are not so
much bleak and sublime places, as
abandoned sweet shops and laboratories,
where we can rehearse taking over the real
things.

Crabman
(who also took the photos)