EDGY WALKING

 I admit that I’d never heard the term ‘edgeland’ until I read Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book Edgelands, published in 2011, and subtitled ‘Journeys into England’s true wilderness.’

A look at the contents page tells you what kind of journeys to expect: Wasteland, Landfill, Sewage, Pallets, Ranges, Dens and 20 or so others.  As man who has a taste for ruins and deserts I’ve found myself walking in quite a few of these places.  And even if I didn’t know the word edgeland, I was certainly was familiar with the concept.

Farley and Roberts are poets, which gives rise to passages like this, ‘On a summer evening, stepping through a gap in the rusty corrugated iron and entering a well-established wasteland is to enter and arbour of scents.’  Or this: ‘Why is there always an abandoned TV in the rubble?  They are so ubiquitous in life that their bodies in death litter our wastelands.  And why does a dead TV’s blank face resonate  so much with us?  Is this our image of oblivion?’  I’d say not, but I understand how a man can get philosophical while walking in the wasteland.

Now, if I’d been paying more attention to trends in urban planning, I’d have known that the word edgelands was used, and possibly devised by Marion Shoard in 2000 or so, in an essay titled ‘Edgelands of Promise’ and revised before its appearance a couple of years later in the collection Remaking the Landscape simply as ‘Edgelands’.  This is Marion Shoard.

The essay is long and at first Shoard seems a bit sniffy about edgelands, which she also refers as ‘interfaces’ or ‘interfacial landscapes.   She writes, ‘The interface remains a dumping ground for activities considered unprepossessing and a frontier land in which private sector development rages unchecked by noticeable standards of design.'

         

Then she asks, ‘Should we have public parks in the interface?  Should we have cycleways and routes for pedestrians or continue to give these areas over to car use?  Should we encourage the development of cinemas, nightclubs and restaurants in the edgelands?’  To which the obvious answer is, I suppose ‘we’ could but then they’d no longer be edgelands.

 

She also reckons, ‘Guidebooks and guided walks should open up this new world.’  Look, some of my best friends are walking guides but the idea of them guiding me, or anyone, around abandoned factories and scrapyards (for instance) seems rather to miss the point. 

 

Finally Shoard concludes, ‘It is time for the edgelands to get the recognition that Emily Bronte and William Wordsworth brought to the moors and mountains and John Betjeman to the suburbs.  They too have their story.  It is the more cogent and urgent for being the story of our age.’  Sounds good to me.

 

Shoard also directs us to the work of Alice Coleman ‘who was taking part in a land utilization survey, (and) uncovered the existence of a large amount of frine land that did not fall neatly into the land-use pattern of either farmscape or townscape.  She called this land-type “the rurban fringe.” It’s a name that might have gained more currency if it had been more pronounceable.  This is Alice Coleman:

 

And now I discover (thanks to fellow edgelander Anthony Miller) that my finger is even further off the pulse than I thought it was.  I discover the existence of the term ‘terrain vague’ generally credited to Ignasi Sola de Morales, an architect and critic, and certainly he’s the author an essay titled ‘Terrain Vague’ published in 1995. The French term seems appropriate - both words having overtones that would be absent in a direct English translation.  This is Ignasi Sola de Morales:

 

The essay is good stuff.  ‘The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues.  Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible of expectation.’

And I was especially taken by the line, ‘The main characteristic of the contemporary individual is anxiety regarding all that protects him from anxiety.’  I’m not sure that wandering around edgelands is an absolute cure for anxiety but I think it does no harm.

 

         In all this I was reminded of the opening of Reyner Banham’s Scenes in America Deserta.   He’s asked by someone from the Bureau of Land Management who’s studying desert utilization, ‘What is it you actually do in the desert?’

         Banham replies, ‘Oh! Well, I ... er… stop the car and have a look at the scenery!”

The BLM person replies, ‘Hm?  I don’t think we have a category for that.’

 

Nobody has ever stopped me while I was walking in the edgelands and asked me what I was doing, but it they did I’d say I was wandering about  and taking a few photographs.  I imagine they probably do have a category for that these days.  Actually it looks as though Reyner Banham did some walking and taking photographs too.

 

FERAL FURNITURE

As I was walking through the Corralitas Red Car Property I spotted the above chair, not very close to and apparently not belonging to any house.  I wasn’t sure whether it had been deliberately put there by someone who thought this was a perfect place to sit, or whether it had simply been dumped and tossed down the hill.

And it struck me, not exactly for the first time, that as I go walking I often see abandoned chairs or sofas, and once in a while I photograph them, though not always.  It hasn’t quite turned into an art project as yet, though one day it may do.

In fact when I went to walk around the chapel that features in the Cabarat Voltaire video of Sensoria, with my pals Steve and Julia, we found a complete three piece suite left on the forecourt of an empty workshop that was up for rent.  It struck all of us as pretty funny.  How did it get here?  It certainly didn’t look like the kind of thing that would ever have been inside the workshop.  So had somebody gone to the trouble of loading the thing into a van, transporting it here and there placing it on the forecourt?  Would it have been any more trouble to take it to the dump?

In Edgelands, a book which I’m still gamely poking around in, the authors (Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts) write, “The feral car seat is another emblem of edgelands.  Every childhood should have one.  In an age before computer games, sitting in one of these, making engine noises was as close as a child could get to the open road.  Or you could strap the seat to a go-cart and find a slope.  And you can rock them on their metal runners, survey your empire of feral knotweed, balsam poppies and willow herb like an old hillbilly on a wooden veranda.”

Well yes indeed, though as I’ve observed before many of the phenomena the boys identify as features of edgelands are present right in the middle of cities.  That car seat above was located just off Hollywood Boulevard, outside a marijuana dispensary.  The sofa below was on Los Feliz Boulevard, a fairly swanky LA street.

I also see plenty of abandoned televisions and computer monitors when I’m out walking.  This is more understandable in many ways: you can’t just put them in the trash – the garbage men won’t take them.   They need to be “recycled.” When we bought our new TV the delivery men said they’d gladly take the old one away if we paid them fifty dollars.  We decided to save the money and the old TV sits in the junk room and every now and again we think we should do something about it but we never do.  Although the “something” thus far has never involved thinking about taking it out into the street and leaving at the side of the road.

As a man who does a certain amount of walking in the desert, I do of course come across lots of human jetsom, including this TV.

The TV here has been used for target practice, and as an Englishman I find the whole idea of hauling things into the middle of nowhere in order to shoot at them pretty alien, although the evidence is that it strikes many Americans as perfectly standard behavior.

There’s a passage in Rayner Banham’s “Scenes in America Deserta” where he reckons that people in the desert only shoot manmade things.  His observation is that they shoot the hell out of chairs and TVs and road signs, and certainly out of cars, but the things that are native and natural to the desert tend to be left alone.  I’m sure this isn’t literally true, the odd cactus surely gets shot up, but I do suspect he’s on to something.

I don’t think Banham was much of a walker.  All the images I’ve ever see of him, show him in a car or on one those very cool sixties bikes. These days however there are various “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” tours run by Esotouric, that involve walking as well as bus riding.  “Please be prepared to talk a stroll,” the website says rather gently and plaintively: they’re dealing with Angelinos after all.

WALKING THE EDGE

If I have a reservation about Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry,” (discussed elsewhere on this blog) it’s that he, or his cinematographer, makes the desert look a little too picturesque.  Of course, I’m not going to deny that the desert is visually beautiful, that’s what first attracted me to it, and of course I love a broad stretch of unspoiled, pristine desert as much as the next man, and I’m very glad indeed that Death Valley or Joshua Tree survive as preserved patches of territory that are as close to “virgin” as we’re ever likely to see, and of course they are meticulously “managed.”.  But the fact is, I also love a spoiled, less than pristine stretch of desert.

And when it comes to on-screen depictions of the desert I’m drawn to Werner Herzog’s “Fata Morgana,” his early “documentary” that traces an inscrutable journey down through the Sahara desert.  Certainly the film does have some gorgeous desert imagery, including this shot of a little boy walking his fennec fox on a leash across the sand dunes.

But “Fata Morgana” also shows the desolate edges, the areas scarred by human activity, not least military and industrial.  Herzog is smart enough not to simply revel in the beauty of ugliness, and I think he’s not indulging in the pleasure of ruins either, but he does show us that the wrecked and the damaged may be every bit as compelling as the pristine.

My own attitudes have changed over time.  When I first started visiting deserts I wanted them clean and empty and devoid of human presence (well, any human presence except mine, naturally).  And of course I still like those grand vistas of Joshua Tree and Death Valley, and I regularly go and walk in them, but on the way there I know I’ll pass through some scrubby, frayed bits of desert, the outskirts of towns like Barstow, Boron or Baker, and I’ll be drawn to deserted motels, abandoned houses, evidence of human presence as well as absence.

This has been on my mind a lot recently.  I’ve been reading a book titled Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, a couple of British poets who go wandering around what the subtitle calls “England’s true wilderness,” the non-spaces that fail to appear either on topographical or mental maps: sewage works, parking lots, airports, scrap yards, and so on.

They write, “Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully managed wilderness and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists … complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard.”

This is great stuff and certainly it doesn’t apply only to England.  And I don’t the guys are just being perverse, like going to the Sistine chapel and admiring the floor.  One of the most basic functions of writing is to point out things that otherwise might have been missed, and these guys do it royally.  

The book also it made me realize that I have spent large chunks of my life walking in and admiring edgelands.  For instance I love great Victorian railway architecture, the stations, the bridges, the engine sheds, but I’m actually more at home wandering along disused railway lines admiring those strange little shacks and huts that grow up alongside them.

And one of the things I’ve realized is that not all edgelands are at the edge.  Sometimes there can be junk spaces right in the middle of things.  My favorite non-space in that sense is shown in the picture above, an alley right in the heart of Hollywood, that runs off Las Palmas Avenue, just below Hollywood Boulevard.  It may have a name but I can’t find it on any of the maps I’ve got.  It goes down the side of Miceli’s Italian restaurant, but as the sign indicates, it belongs to somebody else “Supply Sergeant” which is an army surplus store nearby.  And of course the absolute joy of it is the precision with which somebody has measured, recorded, and sign-painted the dimensions of this otherwise thoroughly nondescript space.