It is a few years since I last reread parts of this book, having first read it when it originally came out in paperback in 2012. One of the things I had forgotten was how much of a rag-bag, a collection of scraps and tatters, shreds and threads, it is, very much like the edgelands themselves. Infinite in their variety, shifting, mutable, hard to pin down.
That is what I felt about the Wire chapter this time round. It is an entertaining and interesting read but at the end it does not really pull together into something I feel is fully coherent. That is by no means a bad thing and is perhaps a reflection of the variability of these spaces.
What I get in particular from this chapter, which is something that already interests me and is something that I have explored to a limited extent in earlier work is how a fence, an ostensible barrier, can actually be so much more complex. They are physical barriers to keep people out (or in, going back to Donovan Wylie’s Maze project) but also means of entry. I remember as child, as the chapter touches on, using the so-called barrier of the chain link perimeter fence to get inside the compound of a local factory (where I ended up working briefly as a summer job when I left school, but then I walked in through the front gate) which during the war had built armoured cars. The attraction, the irresistible pull, was a number of bunkers and air-raid shelters that were still there, scattered around the perimeter: damp and smelly but occasionally with interesting thirty year old scraps still to be found (this was in the 1970s).
It also got me thinking about a couple of more substantial barriers that I am familiar with that have multiple connotations. One is very old, Hadrian’s Wall, stretches of which are not far from where I live. This strikes me as not simply being physical barrier meant to impede movement: in some places it is nigh-on impenetrable because of the underlying topography on which it is built; in other it is not much of a physical barrier at all. Rather what this structure is about is power and control. It is a statement of ownership – everything south from here is ours! – a tangible, physical manifestation of an abstract concept. It is about control in so far as traffic passed both ways through the wall – there are various places where ancient roadways, paths and tracks, cross the line of the wall – so these became places where trade could be regulated, and more importantly, taxed.
The other, more recent and something that was contemporary with my own lifetime until it was breached in 1989, is the Berlin Wall. This was designed to keep people in, not out, though paradoxically by enclosing the small enclave of West Berlin. It also became over time a monument and memorial to those who tried, but failed and died in the attempt, to cross it – like Farley and Symmons Robert’s memorials attached to fences and barriers. Even before it was breached and even more so since 1989, it became a huge open-air gallery, much graffitied and painted on the “west” side, an extensive, not to mention potentially deadly, mural.
The Power chapter is also a bit mixed The focus on power generation stations, old fashioned ones burning coal, of which few now remain in this country following “dash for gas” – which are not actually much more ecologically friendly – says a lot about how we take so much of the infrastructure of modern life for granted, how so much of it is invisible, mysterious, banished to the exurbs where it can be seen from a distance but not encountered close up. Space, distance from the city, open ground around these sites, becomes almost as effective a barrier, physically and psychologically, as the wire fence.
The last couple of pages dealing with photography, particularly the typological work of the Bechers, and the “before and after”, post-industrial work of John Davies, are a bit of an abrupt change of pace, almost a non-sequitur if it was not for the common subject matter of industrial structures. Nevertheless, one thought that occurred to me is that this photographic work is important because it is typological, because it acts as a record, a remembrance of a recent past that is steadily being erased physically, but also mentally. It is important that these places, their functions, their societal importance and significant, be remembered.
Coincidentally, as I think I have mentioned elsewhere, I have recently been looking again at Davies’s work in his recent “Retraced” book (2019), showing industrial, rural and urban, scenes and their post-industrial appearance. Appropriately given my reference to the Berlin Wall above, he does the same out of thing in Berlin comparing and contrasting how the city looked before and after 1989.
Something else that came to mind reading this chapter was the work of Mitch Epstein and what I noticed was an interesting contrast. In this country these power stations are generally separate, if not actually remote, from places of habitation. In many of Epstein’s picture the power stations and industrial plants are cheek by jowl with and loom over suburbia.
Davies, J, (2019). Retraced 81/19. London: GOST
Epstein, M, (2011). American Power. Göttingen: Steidl
Farley, P & Symmons Roberts, M, (2012). Edgelands. London: Vintage
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