Exercise 2.6 Edgelands

The exercise is to read and record responses to two chapters from Farley, P. and Roberts, M.S. (2011)  Edgelands; Journeys into England's True Wilderness. London: Vintage Books

Power

"There are no signposts leading to the edgelands, no motorway signs with speed-legible Transport font and preordained background colour pointing us towards their fastnesses. Edgelands aren’t sites. They don’t behave like castles or bird reserves or historic market towns. Nobody asks, “Are we there yet?”

But there ‘are other kinds of signs, and none truer or more emphatic than the sight of cooling towers in the distance. Looming grey elephantine hulks, they designate the in-betweenness of the landscape you are passing through. Inland cooling towers declare our coal-fired stations. They are part of the edgelands, but in a sense atypical of them; in the great interfacial zones, so much goes unnoticed, but a power station is difficult to miss or even to take for granted as part of a familiar journey"

Thus, Farley and Roberts open the chapter. They continue with an almost poetic description of cooling towers:

"Cooling towers distort our sense of scale in the English landscape. They also introduce a new spectrum of available visible effects to this thing called the countryside."

They discuss the conflicting emotions that cooling towers adduce: 'brutal, dirty, ugly', yet up close one can admire the hyperberloid structure; architectural beauty disguises functional ugliness:

"They do bear one of the hallmarks of edgelands buildings — a function we can’t live without, but don’t want to live with."

We want the benefits of proximity in terms of the services, but want the physical entity to be out of sight. This is, of course the root of all nimbyism: no-one denies the need for a new school, hospital, railway line, mobile phone mast, electricity transmission, wind turbine airport but they don't want them near them, thank you. It is the paradox of developmental planning. I shall examine this concept in respect of Port Talbot steelworks; a dominating yet curiously attractive site that pollutes the local town and is out of kilter with the surrounding landscape - if it were not here no-one would invent it - yet has become the stuff of national identity, strategic need, and pride in historical heritage.

Wire

In this chapter, the authors  reflect on the nature of chain link and similar fences - the iconic sight of people camped outside Greenham Common. They tell of people being shadowed by vehicles on the inside of the fence while they walk outside. Deterrence is the aim. I had an identical experience while walking around Hinkley Point.

They move on to the habit of leaving flowers by roadside, and the reaction of Councils to move the memorial after wards, as there are memorial sites. As the authors point out:

"But for those grieving relatives, a memorial is not the point. The place is the point."

The chapters are written monotonically, almost deadbeat style; there is something rather resigned, doleful, about the musings; a sense of inevitability that should not really be an inevitability but unclear as to what the solutions might be. They have given me some ideas of how to discuss Port Talbot steelworks in the Assignment.