Gareth E. Rees's Blog

LOCATION: Bristol, England

WORDS & PICTURES: Andy Thatcher

Eastern Bristol is speckled with commons. Go way, way back and this whole area was part of the Kingswood Forest, a royal Anglo Saxon hunting forest. This means that all the little verges, scrappy bits of wasteland and neat greens that I am about to find around the Bristol Ring Road are relics of hard-won ancient rights and custom.

The day is getting on and I leave the car in the first car park I come to, promising the all-seeing gods of the Gallagher Retail Park that, when I return, I’ll placate them with something from the M&S food hall. This pilgrimage has been months in the making. Across the arterial road, a public footpath flows innocuously through the loud hulks of DFS and Buildbase. Its old walled hedgerows are still intact, and the blackthorn is exploding in slow motion with blossom, its dainty sparks the brightest objects on this drab afternoon. A few hundred yards on, the track opens out abruptly onto a clearing which is mostly fenced off with fat iron palings. They bristle with spikes ready to rip clothes and flesh.

I’ve twice got lost looking for this place. Now I’m here, it doesn’t disappoint. This is Longwell Green BMX Track. But I know it by a much older name. This 0.79-acre patch of common land was once registered as Hinton Green. Its triangular shape, the peach and tangerine of Open Access Land on my Ordnance Survey map, also gives the game away: greens are generally at the intersection of old tracks. You find this shape surprisingly often – even Golders Green is there somewhere beneath its triangle of bus routes. But Hinton Green’s retail park location made it a must-see the first time I came across it, a splash of blue amongst the grey on Natural England’s sci-fi-sounding Open Data Geoportal. 

The BMX track is deserted except for a dad and his son, with his little helmet and scooter. They seem to have reached a lull in things. The dad is having a rollie and checking his phone. He spots me as I enter the track through an opening in the fence and we nod. I’ve been poking around with my conspicuous black Sony with its telephoto lens, and this is not a transparently Instagram-able place. The dad asks me what I’m taking pictures of. Not aggressive. Just checking me out. I explain I’m here because this is a common. He mulls that over. It’s not an answer he could have expected, but he takes it on board and relaxes a little.

‘It used to be a mess here,’ he tells me. ‘Motorbikes, mountain bikes, fly tipping. No one else was using it. Then someone came in and did all this.’

‘Probably the council,’ I say.

‘Can’t see the council doing that,’ the dad tells me.

‘Probably got some funding from somewhere.’

The dad still seems unconvinced, but the signage behind us tells me this is indeed what happened. And out of all the commons I visit today, I can’t think of any other which embodies more exactly what a common is about – a patch of land used for something fundamental, by people who don’t own it, and their casual, customary use in some way then becoming formalised as either a legal right or, as here, in the very fabric of a place.

The locals of Hinton Green might no longer need to graze sheep here, or cattle, horses, or geese. They don’t need it to collect gorse, firewood, mushrooms, seaweed or peat. It’s not being quarried, nor can you fish here. But kids need it to try out tricks on a scooter, meet up with mates, or get really fucking good at something that matters.

The dad and I wish one another well and I’m off to find Stephen’s Green and The Duck Pond, my final destination. The former is a pretty and remote green dotted with centuries-old lime trees and spotted with snowdrops. The latter, even more remote , caused an intensive but ultimately fruitless legal battle to get it deregistered, the main argument of which revolved around drains. Patches of blue are starting to appear amongst the grey clouds which loom heavy as car wash rollers. I think back to the places I’ve already visited and wonder how sunshine might have enlivened them.

I’d started my day at Charlton Common and ‘Land Bordering Fishpool Hill’ (commons are often registered under such prosaic titles). Charlton Common is just over four acres of largely bramble thicket, with one quadrant recently strimmed to the ground, then populated with a traffic cone, a rotted football, and partially decayed odds and ends of plastic. There are rights here for dog walking, which the people of a neighbouring estate make good use of along its metalled road, whether or not such rights are theirs. There are also rights for grazing horses and collecting the final mow of grass of the year (also known as the aftermath, the first and superior mow of grass being known as the foremath). It seemed a bit of a sad place on this gloomy day, though close to railway fencing, a flowering of filled plastic bin bags marked ‘Volunteer Litter Picking Waste’ suggests that some in the local community are determined to do what they can.

‘Land Bordering Fishpool Hill’ is a couple of fields to the west, half a mile of verges, scrub woodland, even an overgrown pond, running alongside decaying barns on Charlton Lane. Like a surprising number of commons, neither have a known owner; blank spots on old tythe maps.

Charlton Lane and the road leading through Charlton Common both terminate in a tall security fence, beyond which lies Filton Airfield. It’s been over a decade since planes last took off from here, and much of its air strip currently homes unloved busses and other large, superfluous vehicles. The airfield was once one of Britain’s most important aviation sites, when our air industry was in its imperial phase. Concorde was developed here, as was the ground-breakingly huge, but commercially unviable, Brabazon airliner. Originally a relatively modest affair, the airfield was vastly expanded during WWI when requisitioned by the War Office, who also requisitioned and partly demolished the little hamlet of Charlton, to which both roads once led. The site was never given back, and the last of Charlton, pub and all, was sacrificed to the ill-starred Brabazon’s exorbitant runway demands.

The popular narrative of enclosure is of greedy capitalists and aristocrats gobbling up and hoarding all the land. While this undoubtedly is true up to a point, and has been given a new lease of life by hedge fund manager Alexander Darwall’s recent expulsion of wild campers in favour of animals you are actually allowed to shoot, the history of enclosure is far more complex, sometimes much less dramatic, occasionally even rather dull. The massive state land grab of the mid c.20th, however, is often left out of the picture; millions of acres requisitioned in wartime for forestry, crops and the military, much of it common land, and which was never, or never entirely given back. Charlton Common, it turns out, was once much larger, extending into what is now unused airfield, and I can’t help but wonder how much of this high, flat plateau was once common heathland. Certainly, a few tell-tale clumps of gorse were waggling in the breeze at the security fence.

I struggled to find Lyde Green Common, further around the ring road and also with no known owner. I struggled first because my map’s landscape of fields, farm buildings and footpaths has sprouted a crop of newbuild homes and distribution centres – and because Lyde Green Common is neither signposted nor even exists on any usable, up-to-date online street map. For the hell of it, I turned onto a road beside the DPD depot because the development of apartment blocks down that way is called Howsmoor Common. Beyond the blocks I could make out the fiercely bristling line of bramble and willow which runs on, past and beyond the charmingly literal Logistical Support Services depot. I decided this must be the place, parked up the car at a road which terminates in concrete blocks and shattered glass, and joined Westerleigh Road, the one recognisable road on my out-of-date map. Twenty-acre Lyde Green Common is a few meters on, the largest common of my day.

The common is largely unkempt grassland, but bisected by a little wooded brook across which some thoughtful soul has placed logs so I could totter across. Lyde Green is, alas, not in great nick, and the signage at the entrance seems rather apologetic when it insists on the all this wonderful nature a stone’s throw from the M4’s relentless HGVs. There’s litter everywhere, and pink styrofoam dumped in one corner had started to break up and blow across the site, the dystopian cherry blossom of an Anthropocene hellscape. At the far end is the crumbling black shell of Whitehouse Farm, its white farm gates laid to rest against the walls fronting it. There are dumped mattresses, gas cylinders and serpentine vehicle tracks in the grass leading to where someone has been practicing doing donuts.

But for all this, I warmed to the place. Sure, it’s a tatty bit of edgeland right now, but once the houses are finished and inhabited, once the community starts to cohere, doubtless a Friends of… group will form, and all the future litter-pickers, pond-diggers, bird-box erectors, fund-raisers, organisers and campaigners will find one another. Maybe someone will work out who has rights of pasture and will take their pick from the legally-protected options for grazing animals – sheep, cattle, horses, goats, geese, donkeys, ‘animals’. A petting zoo seems entirely doable. Then maybe fresh signage will take more pride in this place which has held back the tide of development, leaving a place for play, reflection and nature thanks to the bestowal of ancient rights.

Before the light goes, I make time for one last visit. This time it’s to the parish of Mangotsfield, through which runs a semi-circle of council-owned common verges, greens and tracks. Mangotsfield became thoroughly suburbanised from the 1950s onwards and its commons are trimly kept. There’s a pond at Vinney’s Green, fenced in and with strict notices forbidding the use of nets and the taking frogspawn. A separate notice threatens a twenty quid fine for anyone reckless enough to ‘beat, shake, sweep, brush or cleanse any carpet, drugget, rug or mat, or any other fabric retaining dust and grit’ amongst other equally heinous crimes.

There’s Emerson’s Green, another perfect triangle, whose signage proudly boasts of its annual conversion into wildflower meadow by eager volunteers, and nearby the ancient drove road known locally as Muddy Lane (stones placed long ago for crossing the really treacherous spots). These are the spaces where generations of kids have learned to play footie, billions of dog walks have taken place, trees have been climbed, birds have nested, bees have pollinated and traffic emissions removed from the air. And about which the people of Mangotsfield can sleep easy in the knowledge that developers will never be given permission to shoe-horn in a few more houses. Unremarkable spaces, perhaps – you’d drive past almost without noticing them – but as protected in law as Grade I listed buildings or the habitats of vanishingly rare damselflies.

Mangotsfield – and Bristol – are all the richer for these unexpected, ancient places.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Andy Thatcher is a post-graduate researcher at the University of Bristol where he is exploring ways of making films about common land. His films have screened internationally at conferences and festivals and his photography has appeared in The Guardian. He was born in an old workhouse on Farnborough Common (this is actually true) and now lives in Exeter where he is writing a book about common land.

WORDS: Gareth E. Rees

I’ve had an insanely busy year. It began with me finalising my debut short story collection, Terminal Zones, which eventually came out in October and features weird topographic tales about climate change and the effects of neoliberalism on ordinary people in everyday places. You can read about it here.

I also made music with my numerous bands, including a psychedelic disco track about the M6 with Pett Level Sounds, a punk song about Insulate Britain’s motorway protests with Black Arches and a bunch of raucous garage rock tunes with The Dirty Contacts thrashed out on stage in Hastings, Taunton and London.

During the summer I made some short films with Martin Fuller, including this one on Hackney Marshes , this one in the eerie Pevensey Levels and this one beneath a crumbling cliff edge in Fairlight, East Sussex.

The rest of my time was spent working for money, looking after my kids, and writing my next book of non-fiction, Sunken Lands, for Elliot and Thompson. It’s about flooded towns, submerged kingdoms and drowned forests, both real and mythic, and what they might teach us about how we cope with the effects of runaway global warming.

Somehow, with all that going on, I also managed to read some books. So I thought I’d list those which may be of interest to Unofficial Britain readers who share my fascination with landscape, architecture, weird fiction, horror, psychedelia, surrealism, indie publishing and cultural history.

As I say every year, not all these books are about Britain, nor were they all published this year. They’re just things that I’ve read in the past twelve months and liked a lot. My website, my rules. Anyway, I hope you find something inspiring in here to check out in 2023.

NON-FICTION

Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain – John Grindrod  (Faber, 2022)

This would make a great companion piece for anyone who has read Unofficial Britain. John looks at the country’s contemporary architecture with a keen critical eye, but also a lot of wit and heart, focussing on the people who actually dwell in these buildings as much as he does the architects who built them. In this book you’ll encounter business parks and ‘Tescobethan Sheds’, housing estates, hip suburban pop-ups and post-modernist shopping malls, along with contemporary icons (love them or hate them) like the Cheesegrater, Gherkin and Shard. Excellent stuff, as always,

The Living Stones: Cornwall – Ithell Colquhoun (Peter Owen Publishers, 2017)

Originally published in 1957, this is a newish edition with a foreword by Stewart Lee. The Living Stones is surrealist painter, Ithell Colquhoun’s account of her time spent in Lamorna, a picturesque valley near Penzance in Cornwall. A member of numerous occult organisations, including the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O), The Order of the Celtic Cross and the Order of the Pyramid and Sphinx, she was fascinated by sacred landscapes and picked up local legends from her magically minded friends. The Living Stones brims with folklore, where traces of Atlantean survivors can be found among Arthurian relics in an enchanted Cornwall.

Souvenir – Michael Bracewell (White Rabbit, 2021)

I had the pleasure of listening to Michael read from this strange and lyrical book at a White Rabbit event in St Leonards. I bought a copy and quickly devoured it in a sitting. It’s a haunting tour of post-punk London in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, portraying the transition from one era to another in tightly pared down prose that has the ever-shifting, tangential qualities of a dream. I particularly love the descriptions of the old Tottenham Court Road tube station and the Virgin Megastore that once stood outside it, ‘part like a factory and in part like a nightclub, presaging the Deep Space Industrialism to come, yet still quite crude; the theatricality of the retail design on a frequency with emerging technologies.’

Heavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage – Sonia Overall (Penned in the Margins, 2021)

Sonia is another writer I’ve had the privilege of meeting, back at a psychogeography event in Huddersfield where she led an improvisational, imaginative walk through the town. Her book, Heavy Time, portrays a pilgrimage from Canterbury to her hometown of Ely, full of observations, digressions and frustrations as the route took its physical and mental toll. Eventually she finds that pilgrimage is a cure – “a shockwave through the futility of busyness’.

Borderland: Identity and belonging at the edge of England – Phil Hubbard (Manchester University, 2022)

A geopolitical study of the southern English coastline, from Whitstable to Dover to Dungeness.  For Phil Hubbard, the Kentish borderland is an ever-shifting space, rife with contradictions, culture clashes, and eco-anxiety. It is a timely interrogation of the connection between place and identity in the post-Brexit era.

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds – Thomas Halliday (Allen Lane, 2022)

This impressive natural prehistory book paints lyrical portraits of ancient landscapes. It begins 20,000 years ago in Alaska, then each subsequent chapter leaps back in time… Kenya 4 millions years ago… China 125 millions years ago… South Africa 444 million years ago… culminating in Australia, 550 million years ago. Halliday describes increasingly bizarre fauna and flora in landscapes that are so alien, it feels like a journey through distant planets in far flung galaxies. Take the Tully Monster, which lived in the sea 309 million years ago: “They have a segmented torpedo of a body, and at the rear, two rippling tail fins that look a little like the wings of a squid. At the front, a long, thin feature, something like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, wiggles, with a tiny, tooth filled-grabbing claw at its end.”

Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World – Jonathan Crary (Verso 2022)

We are all totally fucked and digital technologies are a large part of that fuckedness. That’s the gist of Crary’s brutally frank essay. He argues that the internet has accelerated the plunder of finite resources to supply the demand for constant electrical power. “The many digital devices and services we use now are made possible through unending exacerbation of the earth’s biosphere by resource extraction and needless energy consumption”, he writes. “The internet complex has become inseparable from the immense incalculable scope of 24/7 capitalism and its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, transport, and construction, on a global scale.” The upshot is, if we continue like this, we face ecological disaster.

What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy – Matt Cardin (Hippocampus Press, 2022)

I was turned onto this book by the Weird Studies podcast (do check that out, it’s brilliant). It includes analyses of works by Thomas Ligotti, along with essays on the philosophical implications of cosmic horror and weird fiction. There’s a good essay on the history of Angels and Demons; how they were influenced by ancient religious texts; and how they manifest in modern horror cinema. And in a sideways take on George Romero’s Living Dead films, Cardin argues that they can be seen as a tool to enhance the realisation that “the human self” is a “helpless, groundless phantom lost in a vortex of body flesh”. This might be a good thing to do, in spiritual terms, much like Buddhists monks meditate in the presence of decomposing corpses. The films also have an apocalyptic Christian dimension.  As one characters points out, the dead are coming back to life because heaven is full. Therefore at the heart of the trilogy’s spiritual message, writes Cardin, is that “we must face this nightmarish world of ravenous walking corpses, without the possibility of being saved.” HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

ART / ILLUSTRATION

Felt Events – Ilana Halperin (Strange Attractor 2022)

This is a collection of essays about the work of Edinburgh-based American artist, Ilana Halperin, interlaced with photos, illustrations and interviews, concluding with a series of written pieces and images by Ilana herself. Her art blurs lines between the organic and inorganic; between the personal and the geological. In the deep time processes of geology, lava is spewed from the volcanos to create new crust, and tectonic plates smash into each other, producing mountains that erode and compress into new forms of rock. Organic life decays into layers of matter, slowly turning to stone that will one day become the solid ground upon which new life grows, before it too is turned to stone. We all become rock, eventually. Halperin intimates wonderful, poetic connections between humans and geology- for instance, her relationship with an Icelandic volcano that was born in 1973, the same year as she came into being.

England on Fire: A Visual Journey Through Albion’s Psychic Landscape – Stephen Ellcock, Mat Osman (Watkins 2022)

This is a selection of obscure works, outsider art and vintage photographs curated by Stephen Ellcock with accompanying text by writer and former Suede member, Mat Osman. The aim is to scour “England’s dark corners for the nation’s true nature”, which turns out to be something strange and magical. The collection goes from paintings of biblical floods, through Victorian survey maps and stereographs of folkloric topographical features, to supernatural photography, images of Neolithic monuments and sacred landscapes, all the way to Hogarthian cityscapes, shabby English seasides and riots in Hackney. I was pleased to see that the book includes a photograph by the excellent Jeff Pitcher, who took the cover shot for my book Car Park Life.

Where? – Simon Moreton (Little Toller, 2021)

This blend of illustration, photography and text brings together the author’s memories of his late father with the Shropshire landscape.  As the narrator recounts stories from his childhood past, fragments of strange local history and fascinating topographical details seep into the memoir. The lines between memory and imagination, fact and fiction, become blurred, forming something powerful and mythic. That’s where the magic happens, Moreton writes, for it is in the “gaps between memories, where stories – fallible, imaginative, confabulatory – take root.”

Field Notes – Maxim Peter Griffin (Unbound 2022)

Maxim Griffin is one of my favourite landscape artists and I featured him several times in the early days of Unofficial Britain. So I was delighted when Field Notes was finally published this year after a long and valiant kick-starter campaign. Maxim’s vivid Lincolnshire landscapes are moody and psychedelic, emblazoned with colour, suggestive of sentient energies lurking in the fields and hedgerows. Other pieces capture the alluring dread of recently ploughed flatlands, flown over by flocks of birds and fighter jets. The telegraphic prose that accompanies the art is punchy, elemental and poignant. As Maxim puts it: “the language is concrete – fallen off the edge of the academic into deep poetry”.

Explosive Sweet Freezer Razors – Gareth A. Hopkins (self-published, 2022)

Gareth A Hopkins abstract and surreal comic book deftly fuses the mundane with the fantastical. Fragments of life in car parks, supermarkets and bathrooms are interwoven with otherworldly landscapes, ancient geological events and ghostly presences. As the sardonic protagonists of these stories attempt to navigate the ups and downs of the everyday, they are haunted by the spectre of deep time.

In the Pines – Paul Scraton & Eymelt Sehmer (Influx Press, 2021)

This beautiful novella by Berlin-based writer Paul Scraton is accompanied by the visual experiments of Eymelt Sehmer, who uses a 170-year-old technique of collodion wet plate photography to create timeless monochrome images of trees. In a similarly haunted fashion, Paul’s narrator travels deep into his own past, fusing his recollections with the folklore of woodlands. Traditionally, forests are the lair of wolves, witches and malevolent spirits. This has continued into modern times, where woodlands continue to inspire rumours of buried bodies and disappeared children. Even so, the narrator finds solace in the depths of a forest: “Plenty of life. Plenty of company. A good place to rest.”

FICTION

Blind Owl – Sadeq Hedayat (Penguin, 2022)

First published 1936, this is a new translation of a classic Iranian novel. I picked it up not knowing much about it, and was blown away. This is dark, nightmarish stuff. High on opium and drunk on booze, its isolated narrator recounts visions of an old man in a cape and turban, sitting by a stream, watching a woman dance. This same motif appears on a vase, excavated from the site of a lost city, and also on the scenes he obsessively draws on pen cases. The plot is labyrinthine, surreal and cryptic, shot through with a desperate nihilism. Reading it is like inhabiting a tortured mind. It consumes you. The author eventually took his own life and in the decades that have passed, this novel has attained a folkloric reputation for inspiring self-destructive urges in its readers. Tread carefully.

They: A Sequence of Unease – Kay Dick (Faber, 2022)

Continuing my trend for reading weird, overlooked classics, I picked up this dystopian novel on a whim this year. Kay Dick was a London based author who became the first female director of an English publishing house, aged 25. They was published in 1977 but became a bit of an obscurity until it was pulled back into the grim, harsh light of modern day by Faber & Faber. In a series of enigmatic vignettes we encounter artistic characters living on an unnamed English coastline. They live under threat of mutilation, brainwashing and death by an undisclosed group described only as ‘they’. It’s an acute satire on censorship with the essence of classic English folk horror.

The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon (Penguin 2006)

First published in 1956, this is a very funny novel about the Windrush generation, in which the London is rendered strange, confusing and hostile through the eyes of recently arrived emigres who must quickly come to terms with their adopted home city. Sam Sevlon based this story on his own experience coming from Trinidad to England in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, then, the eccentric characters are believable and beautifully drawn, while the prose is sharp, with hilarious anecdotes following each other in quick succession.

I’m going to round off this fiction bit with four novels from Influx Press, who have published four of my books in the past ten years (the damned fools!) They’re going on hiatus for the foreseeable future, sadly, but they finished their decade-long run with some great books, including these…

The Service – Frankie Miren (Influx Press, 2021)

This fast-paced novel about British sex workers was educational, eye-opening and a very good read at the same time. Author Frankie Miren has drawn upon her own experiences to create a complex, nuanced portrayal of an oft-misunderstood world. The book is narrated by a variety of characters, including a mother who lives in fear of losing her income, a student with mental health issues trying sex work for the first time, and a journalist who is campaigning to ban sexbots.  This is novel that everyone should read before they begin tossing around their opinions on the sex industry.

The Witnesses Are Gone / From Blue to Black– Lane, Joel (influx Press, 2022)

There are hints of Cronenberg’s Videodrome in The Witnesses Are Gone, a novella by the late Joel Lane, republished this year by Influx Press, along with From Blue to Black, Lane’s novel about a post-punk band.  Both books (indeed all of his books) are worth a read. Joel Lane is masterful in his descriptions of Birmingham’s industrial edgelands, and those fringe cultures who inhabit them. In The Witnesses Are Gone a man discovers a box of video cassettes by an obscure French director, sparking an obsessive quest to find more of his works, which leads him to strange realms. From Blue to Black details a love story between two men in a cult band named Triangle, set in the early ’90s.

In the Shadow of the Phosphorous Dawn – Rob True (Influx Press, 2021)

If the weird urban fiction of Joel Lane floats your boat, then Rob True is the closest thing to his successor that I’ve read – well, based on this debut novel anyway. Tormented by disturbing visions, the protagonist is drawn into a murky criminal underworld. In this violent and hallucinatory London, horror seeps into the everyday, finding its place in the shadows of a troubled mind.

Our Struggle – Wayne Holloway (Influx Press, 2022)

Wayne’s brilliant second novel details the radical political life of ‘Tall Paul’, a former tube driver, seen through the eyes of his former student friend, now a filmmaker who shoots advertising commercials. Told in exuberant, high octane prose, the story revels in tales of drugs, booze, sex, strikes and protests, from the ’80s and ’90s right through to our own deeply troubled present. It’s a book about hope, struggle and regret. What happens when you have to abandon your ideals as you get older and deal with the demands of work and family? “Was any of it worth it?” wonders the narrator. But it’s also about the semi-fictitious nature of memory and the stories we tell about our lives.

MUSIC

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground – Joe Banks (Strange Attractor, 2021)

This comprehensive primer, covering the life and times of Hawkwind in the ’70s and early ’80s, includes illuminating interviews, album cover art, photographs and newspaper clippings. It’s more than simply the story of a band, it’s a portrayal of a British countercultural movement that offered ‘radical escapism in the age of paranoia’ through Hawkwind’s mind-bending free live gigs, blending prog, psychedelia, electronica and proto-punk with science fiction and the visionary work of Michael Moorcock.

Medical Grade Music – Steve Davis & Kavus Torabi (White Rabbit, 2021)

The fabulous tale of how a world champion snooker player and a British-Iranian prog guitarist came together to create music, told with the assistance of Ben Thompson. The narrative switches between the protagonists’ points of view to relate their separate origin stories. For Davis, it began with a Magma record, purchased on Plumstead High Street. For Kavus, it was watching Strays Cats on Top of the Pops, aged nine. The book details the development of their respective music obsessions, including Kavus’s adventures in Gong, Cardiacs and Knfeworld. I’ve had the unusual privilege of hearing Steve Davis DJ in a military compound on Salisbury plain while on magic mushrooms (me being on the mushrooms, I’m not sure about Davis), and watching him perform analogue synthesiser live with Kavus in their band The Utopia Strong. It’s a funny old world.

Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall – Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley (Faber 2021)

A collection of essays about The Fall, interspersed with album art and ephemera. It includes plenty of stuff that would interest Unofficial Britain readers – Paul Wilson’s essay ‘The Law of Optics: The Fall, the Northern Working Men’s Club and the Refining Powers of Rational Recreation’; Elain Harwood’s ‘Jerusalem to Prestwich’, Tessa Norton’s ‘Paperback Shamanism’ ; Owen Hatherley’s ‘Let Me Tell You About Scientific Management: The Fall, the Factory and the Disciplined Worker’; and Adelle Stripe’s ‘Luxury Complex: New Faces in Hell’.

That’s it from me. If you’re read any great books that might interest Unofficial Britain folk, then please do leave details in the comments below. Have a happy Christmas and all the best for 2023.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gareth E. Rees is the editor of Unofficial Britain and author of Terminal Zones (Influx Press, 2022) Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013).

LOCATION: Southern England

WORDS: Gareth E. Rees, author of Unofficial Britain

“Global warming had gone past the tipping point, the reporter said. Melissa kept hearing this over and over, that the catastrophe was already under way. But at B&Q, everything looked the same as it always had. It was the end of the world and she was totally bored.” [From ‘Meet on the Edge’ (Terminal Zones, Influx Press, 2022)

My new book of short fiction, Terminal Zones, is set in the near future, where ordinary people are driven to extremes by the effects of late capitalism and ecological collapse.

The stories take place in what I describe as ‘terminal zones’: the crumbling southern English coast, consumed by storm tides and rising seas; the edgelands between town and country, where those dispossessed by late capitalism find themselves an uneasy refuge; and the polar ice caps, at the very ends of the earth, transforming rapidly in an era of global warming.

If you are familiar with my recent non-fiction works, Unofficial Britain and Car Park Life, you’ll recognise much of the terrain in Terminal Zones. These stories were a fictional outlet for some of the ideas that were too weird and speculative to include in those books. But together in this collection they form a disturbing portrait of a civilisation on the brink, seen through the perspectives of stressed, anxious people in everyday places.

A troubled hipster is seduced by an electricity pylon… Sinister omens manifest in a supermarket car park…. a diabolical bioengineered entity lurks in a railway terminus… a former squatter clings to her home on a crumbling cliff…  malevolent bacteria plague a polar icebreaker…a motorway bridge becomes a father… joyriders are foiled by Anglo Saxon floodwaters… the weekly bin collection pushes a bigot over the edge… vampiric entities stalk B&Q… and catastrophe comes to a zoo.

Terminal Zones is available now in paperback from Influx Press the usual online outlets and the best local bookshops.

REVIEWS for Terminal Zones….

‘Fresh and disturbing stories mapping out the pressure points in the psychedelic everyday – Rees consistently reaches the places others do not.’ – Will Wiles, author of Plume

‘Perfect pocket material for your own excursions into forgotten and ignored spaces. Take it with you as you explore towpaths, lay-bys, the far edges of retail parks, and those places whose DO NOT ENTER signs have long faded from oppressive sunlight and relentless rain…’ – Starburst

‘Strange, compelling and brilliantly funny.’ – Prano Bailey-Bond, director of Censor

‘Gareth E Rees propels us into a vast and uncanny future; showing us brief snatches of a world to come. A poignant message delivered with guile, wit and beauty.’ – Matt Wesolowski, author of Demon

‘I thoroughly enjoyed these unsettling, darkly funny tales of people and places at the margins of society. Terminal Zones is an outstanding collection that firmly establishes Gareth E. Rees as one of Britain’s foremost chroniclers of lives lived between the cracks.’ – Tim Major, author of Hope Island

‘All of the usual Gareth Rees tropes are here: motorways, pylons, car parks, retail parks and abandoned industrial sites. The thing that is new, that is experimental, is the range of characters Rees creates, a whole world of them. Some are more fully realised than others but they people his nightmares and, as a collective, they are the driving force behind these stories.’ – Psychogeographic Review

“A hugely entertaining read” – Buzzmag

“Existential angst meets the climate crisis in this thoughtful and entertaining short story collection.” – The Lonesome Reader

“…In pre-empting our ‘lost pasts’ Rees’s stories cling tightly to the present: with its bin days and its marshes and its pylons. We are, as Rees makes clear, irrevocably tangled in this world.” – Lunate

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gareth E. Rees is author of Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013).

WORDS: Joe Barton

PICTURES: Jack Gardner

LOCATION: Newcastle upon Tyne’s Quayside

Content warning: this article contains references to suicide.

There is a ghost story in Newcastle about a haunted Quayside alleyway. It goes something like this:

A keelman staggers out of a warm tavern and into the bitter night. The wind on the Quay is down, but the cold bites just as hard without it. He buttons his jacket with his left hand and, with his right, rummages through his pockets for a sixpence to pay for a bed at the Lifeboat Inn. Finding a mere ha’penny, he decides to try his luck with the landlady all the same. Steeling himself for an argument, he pulls his bonnet over his brow and makes haste for his lodgings.

The keelman treks along the Tyne, flanked on his right by a row of ships resting at anchor. He hears a rustling sound and stops to study their masts but, to his confusion, sees nothing but rolled sails. Only when he resumes his homeward march does he see her. On the other side of the road, a woman is moving in the same direction as him, matching his brisk pace. The rustling, he now realises, is the sound of her long white dress dragging along the pavement. He glances at her face but, before he can make it out, she darts down an alleyway. As she disappears from view, something falls in her wake with a glimmer and a clink. He crosses the road, halts at the opening of the alley and stoops down to the ground. He plucks the coin from the cobbles and studies it under the moonlight: a newly minted gold sovereign, enough to keep a roof over his head until Christmas. He clutches it tightly and steps into the darkness.

At first, he sees nothing. As his eyes adjust slowly to the dark, the woman remerges a few yards ahead, and he notices for the first time that she is wearing a wedding veil. She raises a hand and silently beckons him closer. As he approaches, she lifts the veil. There is nothing underneath it.

*

Four compendiums of Geordie folklore published in the last 30 years include a version of this story. All four of them identify the haunted alley as Trinity Chare: one of the medieval side streets that branch out from the main promenade of the Quayside. Anyone visiting this location today in search of a supernatural encounter, however, risks disappointment. No longer a shadowy passageway, Trinity Chare is now an artfully lit thoroughfare between a barristers’ chambers and the offices of a software company who specialise in ‘content-production solutions’. Those of us keen to get closer to the ghost are better off starting with the story itself rather than its setting.

Every variation of the tale features the central figure of a veiled woman dressed in rustling silks who, when approached, lifts her shroud to reveal that she has no face. Three versions also claim that this faceless apparition is the ghost of a local widow who died by suicide and was interred at a nearby crossroads with a stake driven through her heart. Unlike the keelman, then, we find ourselves in pursuit of, not one, but two mysterious characters: a silken ghost and a local widow. The prospect of explaining their origins glimmers like a gold coin in the moonlight. To find out more, we have no choice but to follow these two figures into the dark.

The trail of the silken ghost leads us to small village 12 miles northwest of Newcastle. A late Victorian compendium of northern folklore reports that, in the early nineteenth century, the villagers of Black Heddon in Northumberland were ‘greatly disturbed’ by a robed female figure known as ‘Silky’, who:

…was remarkable for the suddenness with which she would appear to benighted travellers, breaking forth upon them, in dazzling splendour, in the darkest and most lonely parts of the road. If he were on horseback, she would seat herself behind him, “rustling in her silks”…

The villagers believed that Silky ‘was the troubled phantom of some person who had died miserable because she owned treasure and was overtaken by her mortal agony before she had disclosed its hiding-place.’ In the neighbouring village of Belsay, Silky was known to haunt an old tree that stood beside a waterfall and a lake. To this day, the tree is known as ‘Silky’s Chair’.

Silky of Black Heddon shares much with the ghost of Trinity Chare: her origins in agony and despair, her rustling dress, her waterside hauntings, her appearances to benighted passers-by. Given these similarities, as well as Newcastle’s proximity to Black Heddon, it is easy to read this modern ghost story as a translation of rural folklore into an industrial setting. It could have come about after a villager migrated to Newcastle in search of employment, taking the tale of Silky with them. Alternatively, a Tyneside labourer might have taken up seasonal work on a Northumberland farm and brought a ghost story back with their pay packet. Somewhere along the line, a crag became a Quay, and a country lane became an alleyway.

The trail of the silken ghost tales us further, out to the western edges of Northumberland and beyond. Blenkinsopp Castle, near the border with Cumbria, is said to be haunted by a woman ‘clothed in white from head to foot’, who cannot rest while a chest of gold remains in the castle’s vault. Further afield in Wales, there are several White Lady ghost stories. Once again, the figure is depicted as the spirit of a woman in possession of hidden treasure, who died as a result of murder or suicide before she had the chance to tell others of its whereabouts. The Lady in White of Llangwm in Conwy, for example, is said to have died by ‘by throwing herself into a lake near where she lived’, while another tale from Mid Wales features a woman ‘attired in a lustring silk dress, and her face covered by a silken veil’.

Nor does this trail end in the nineteenth century. The folklorist Jane C Beck claims that the White Lady is a modern iteration of the lake-dwelling water fairy Morgan Le Fay, which is, in turn, a corruption of Modron, the supernatural mother figure who appears in Middle Welsh prose tale Culhwch and Olwen. Beck goes even further to propose that Modron is, in turn, descended from the pre-Christian Mother Goddesses of Celtic Briton. These ‘Matronae’, as the Latin altar inscriptions dating from the period of Roman occupation call them, were embodiments of fertility and natural abundance, which, for Beck, is the ultimate origin of the longstanding trope of unclaimed treasure in the White Lady lore.

To follow the White Lady from her ancient origins back to the Newcastle Quayside, then, is to witness her two millennia-long demotion ‘from a mother goddess to a kind of fairy and finally to a ghost’. Along the way, we see a deity once lauded for her life-giving gifts becomes a haunting spectre, feared for sharing not her treasure, but her trauma.

Back at Trinity Chare, the second figure –that of the local widow– also begins to emerge from the shadows. All three versions of the tale that mention the widow identify her as one Martha Wilson – a woman whose death does in fact appear in the historical records. A notice in the Saturday 26th April 1817 edition of the Durham County Advertiser announces that:

‘On Wednesday, an inquest was held on the body of Martha Wilson, of the Trinity House, Newcastle, who hung herself on Sunday evening. Verdict, Felo de se. Her body was on Thursday evening buried in the public-road leading from the New Bridge to the Red Barns, a little beyond the turnpike gate.’

This account is expanded upon some 70 years later in the Monthly Chronicle of North-country Lore and Legend, which explains that Wilson was:

‘a seaman’s widow, subject, as was said at the time, to frequent fits of melancholy. There were seasons in which she had threatened to destroy herself; and to this sad end she came on Sunday, the 13th April, 1817. She had that morning been to a huckster’s shop, where she purchased a little tobacco; after which she was no more seen alive. She was missing until the following Tuesday, when she was found dead in her room at the Trinity House [….] her door-key was lying on the floor; her prayer-book lay open on the bed. There was a coroner’s inquest on Wednesday; witnesses were examined and the jury, on what grounds is not recorded, returned a verdict of Felo de se.

The charge of felo de se, or ‘felon of themself’, in cases of death by suicide stemmed from the belief that, as English subjects were the personal property of the monarch, a completed suicide thus constituted an act of theft against the Crown. Moreover, as the church held that suicide was an unrepentable sin that nullified one’s relationship to God, a ruling of felo de se thussanctioned the desecration of the deceased’s corpse through a profane burial at a crossroads. After excommunicating the deceased, and thus denying their soul a direct ascent to Heaven, their body was buried face down to prevent it from facing God on Judgement Day. Driving a stake through the heart of the deceased’s corpse, furthermore, was said to pin their soul to the crossroads, thus dooming it to confusion and consternation should it rise from the ground after dark. Having spent the night unable to decide which way to go, the soul of the departed was expected to return to the earth with the coming of the dawn light.   

Rulings of felo de se were extremely rare by the time of the inquest into Martha Wilson’s death, and the account from the Monthly Chronicle notes that her profane burial was the last recorded instance of the practice in Newcastle before it was abolished in 1823. The grounds for the jury’s ruling in Wilson’s case are, as the Chronicle notes, ‘not recorded’. It could be that the views of Newcastle’s establishment were out of step with the softening attitudes of social elites elsewhere in the country. Alternatively, the inquest might have been influenced by the concerns of the small dissenting communities that met in rooms in the streets around Trinity House; in contrast to the Church of England, many non-conformist churches continued to profess the belief that the Devil played an active role in driving a despairing person to take their own life and, moreover, that he lingered at the site of death thereafter. For adherents to this view, the corpse of a person who had died by suicide was not just spiritually polluted, but a present threat to the souls of the wider community. Perhaps these churches sent representatives to join the ‘large and curious’ crowd that the Chronicle claims witnessed Wilson’s interment on the evening of the 23rd of April, so as to ensure that the ritual of spiritual purging was followed through to completion.

Alongside the parish officials and voyeuristic strangers, the assembly at the crossroads that night may have included some of those that had known Martha Wilson from her time at Trinity House. A seafarers’ guild concerned with the welfare of local mariners and their families, Trinity House owned a number of alms houses on Trinity Chare for the dependents of deceased sailors. The guild’s records show that, in the years leading up to 1817, a number of widows petitioned for accommodation in its alms houses, including Mary Gray, Sarah Fenwick, Elizabeth Johnson, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Stephenson, Ann Wardle, Ann Maxwell, Elizabeth Coulson, Margaret Brown and Mary Ridley. It is likely that some of these women would have known –or at least, would have known of– Martha Wilson. Indeed, the minutes from the meeting of the Board of Trinity House on 5th of May 1817 note that ‘Mrs Sarah Davison, widow of the late Robert Davison, petitioned for the room in the high yard vacant by the death of Martha Wilson’. Her successful request reflects a wider pattern in the guild’s records, in which men petition the Board to become brethren and elders and women petition them not to be made destitute by their widowhood.

While we know who took Martha Wilson’s room, we do not know who took her name and gave it to a ghost. Perhaps an acquaintance of Wilson’s, familiar with the story of Silky, saw a parallel between their late friend and the ‘troubled phantom’ of a woman ‘overtaken by her mortal agony’, and decided to grant Wilson a return to the neighbourhood from which she had been exiled. Maybe, as the whispered news of Wilson’s death and burial travelled from chare to chare, gossip gradually gave way to ghost story – one that gave voice to the guilt haunting the community that had condemned her.

These are theories about Wilson’s afterlife. Of the life that came before it, we know little. We do not, for example, know how long Wilson lived as a widow. Nor do we know whether her bereavement brought her grief for a lost sweetheart, relief at the end of a loveless marriage, or fear of an uncertain and insecure future. We do not know when or where she was born, whether she had siblings. or how old she was at the time of her death.

From the entry in the Monthly Chronicle, we do knowthat Wilson ‘purchased a little tobacco’ on the day she died. More strikingly, we know that she was ‘subject […] to frequent fits of melancholy’ and had previously ‘threatened to destroy herself’. Yet again, however, we do not know how her expressions of despair were received: whether they were met with sympathy and support or disdain and disregard. Beyond a few scant details, it seems that every facet of Wilson’s life –her dreams and delusions, her good deeds and bad habits– has vanished without a trace.

The alms houses in which Wilson and the other widows lived survive to this day in excellent condition. Some are still used by Trinity House –now a registered charity dedicated to ‘the continuance of ancient maritime traditions’– while others are used as offices by the nearby Live Theatre. Wilson’s burial site is still a crossroads, cut through by the A193 and dominated by Northumbria University’s City Campus East.

Whether Wilson’s remains still lie there is another question. The Monthly Chronicle explains that road works carried out on this spot in the 1860s led to the discovery of ‘human remains’ and ‘a piece of wood placed in such a position as to indicate […] a stake through the body’. The attending coroner concluded that the bones constituted evidence of the ‘the last case of local interment of a suicide under the old conditions’. The Chronicle entry speculates that the remains ‘would, in all likelihood’ be put back where they were found but admits that ‘there is no record of this having been done’.

Thousands upon thousands of people have moved through this corner of Newcastle in the two centuries since Martha Wilson’s death, most leaving little or no trace of the time they spent here. For reasons that we will never fully understand, Wilson has been singled out from the multitude, her individual spirit obscured by the circumstances of her death and the shadow of a ghost. Perhaps the sole consolation in all of this is that, through the figure of the White Lady, she has become subsumed into something greater than herself. She has become a bearer of historic treasure, a link in a chain that connects her to an ancient culture and their forgotten goddesses.

This assumes, however, that the origins of the modern White Lady do in fact lie in Celtic worship. As comforting as it may be to trace the apparent continuities between the Regency period and the Iron Age, the fact remains that navigating time is a risky endeavour. The altars dedicated to the Matronae may well still rest on these shores, but the lifeworld that gave them meaning lies on the far side of a vast ocean, and the bridges we build in hope of getting there –each assumption, every conjecture– are rickety at best and rotten at worst. It is our nature to reimagine and misconstrue the past, just as it is the past’s nature to resist and elude us. That is how retrospection becomes introspection, how we see a face where there is no face to be seen.

We can respond to the facelessness of history like the keelman of Quayside lore – by running away from it, chiding ourselves for wandering down the darkened alleyway, cursing that we came back without a gold sovereign. But why should Martha Wilson share anything of her life with those who come after her? Her posthumous degradations cannot be undone, but there is no reason why the exploitation should continue into the afterlife. Wilson’s spirit –her interior world, her private relationships– were never passed on before she passed on. Like Silky of Black Heddon, the White Lady of the Quayside did not give away her treasure before she was overtaken by mortal agony. Perhaps that is a cause for celebration rather than mourning. After all, the details of Wilson’s life were never anyone’s business but her own. They died with her and are all the more precious for it. Her treasure was her spirit, and she took it with her.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Joe Barton and Jack Gardner live and work in Newcastle upon Tyne. In their spare time, they trek around Tyneside in search of the unexpected and overlooked.

Website – www.ontyneside.com

Twitter – @OnTyneside

ARTWORK & PHOTOS: Matt James Healy

In 2020, we featured the first series of Edgeland Vision artworks by Matt James Healy, created by applying paint and wood stain to panels of wood, foraged from industrial edgelands (you can view them here.) In advance of an exhibition in Margate, Matt shares with us some new works in the series. As he explains….

“The ‘Unnamed Heraldry’ pieces still employ the universal symbolism of basic shapes of previous work while incorporating these into heraldic designs, These are relics of an imaginary time and space, hinting at the colours of canals and tow-paths, nettle bushes and concrete. Their designs are reminiscent of road signs and markings.

The new ‘Edgeland Visions’ use a much more nocturnal and apocalyptic palate than their predecessors. I wanted to convey that feeling of looking out of a train window as the sun lowers in an atomic-coloured sky and seeing a glowing, alien landscape of wires and pylons flashing by so quickly and repetitively, that question if you are moving at all.”

You can see Matt James Healy’s exhibition at The Lido Store 2 Ethelbert Terrace, Margate, from the 9th-18th September 2022.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Matt James Healy is a London born painter working in the Neo-Romantic tradition. He currently lives and works in Folkestone. Visit his website here: www.mattjameshealy.com

Or follow him on Instagram @mattjameshealy

FILM & MUSIC: Martin Fuller / Dinlochav

WORDS: Gareth E. Rees

LOCATION: The Lower Lea Valley, London.

In 2008 I fell in love with a pylon on Hackney Marsh. Or, rather, I fell in love with the edgeland of the Lower Lea Valley and the pylon on the marsh became its compelling locus. It dominated the abandoned Victorian filter beds, power lines slung across the dirty canal, joint roaches strewn beneath its barb-wire-gartered legs.

I’d walk past it every day with my cocker spaniel, Hendrix, and take photos or just sit beneath it for a while. After a few years, it was relocated onto the edge of the football fields, just behind the filter beds’ wall. I wrote a story about it, from the perspective of a man who is erotically involved with the pylon, entitled ‘A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes’. It was published by Influx Press in their debut anthology in 2012. That anthology is now out of print, but the story is included in my new book, Terminal Zones, which collects together the weird fiction I’ve written over the past four years, plus this seminal tale – the one that got the ball rolling for me.

Sadly, Hendrix died this year, so I decided to take his ashes back to the marshes from my home in Hastings. It was strange to return to the place we walked so often, with his disintegrating remains inside a cardboard tube. The marshes had barely changed since 2008 but I had become wrinkled and greyed, divorced and relocated to the south coast, while Hendrix had turned into gravel.

My friend Martin Fuller, a filmmaker who has featured regularly on this website (check out this one), joined me on the walk. As a result he made two films, one about the pylon from ‘A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes’, and another in which I scatter Hendrix’s ashes and recall a very weird incident involving my future ghost.

A Dream Life of Hackney Marsh from Dinlochav on Vimeo.

A Walk by the River.mp4 from Dinlochav on Vimeo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Gareth E. Rees is author of Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013). His new book, Terminal Zones is available to order here.

“Strange, compelling and brilliantly funny.”- Prano Bailey-Bond, director of Censor. 

‘Fresh and disturbing stories mapping out the pressure points in the psychedelic everyday.’
– Will Wiles, author of Plume

“An outstanding collection that firmly establishes Gareth E. Rees as one of Britain’s foremost chroniclers of lives lived between the cracks.’ – Tim Major, author of Hope Island

FILM & MUSIC: Martin Fuller

WORDS: Gareth E Rees

‘Terminal Zones‘ is my book of weird tales about climate change and social disintegration at the edges of town and country, published by Influx Press. in October 2022.

‘Fresh and disturbing stories mapping out the pressure points in the psychedelic everyday – Rees consistently reaches the places others do not.’
– Will Wiles, author of Plume

In this film by Martin Fuller, I investigate the location of the mysterious murder described in one of its stories.

“The girl from the farm found the dead cyclist on a single lane road to Rickney on the Pevensey Levels. He lay awkwardly, arms buckled beneath his torso, head twisted, eyes in a frozen stare across the tarmac. The girl was certain that he was a cyclist because he wore a luminescent yellow vest and Lycra shorts, but she could see no bike.”

The Levels.mp4 from Dinlochav on Vimeo

Terminal Zones is out in October – you can order it here.

‘Gareth E Rees propels us into a vast and uncanny future; showing us brief snatches of a world to come. A poignant message delivered with guile, wit and beauty.’
– Matt Wesolowski, author of Demon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gareth E. Rees is author of Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013).

WORDS & PICTURES: Marcus Liddell

A chance observation alerted me to the history in Heathrow’s hinterland. The words ‘tithe barn’, printed on an OS map, in a gothic typeface, about five centimetres above the northern runway. A quick search showed it was the Great Barn in Harmondsworth. It hinted at a rural, pre-industrial world, in part of greater London I had associated with flight paths, flyovers and distribution centres.

Further research revealed the barn was well known. Of the medieval timber framed barns to have survived the centuries intact, this was the largest. Sir John Betjeman had called it the ‘Cathedral of Middlesex’. But what about other villages neighbouring the airport? Was there more to be seen? Used local history books arrived in the post. These formed the basis for unconventional Sunday walks terminating at Hatton Cross and West Drayton. I realised you could circumnavigate the airport on foot. A month or so later I boarded a train to Staines.

Thousands of people must look out on Staines Moor each week. About 70% of aircraft leaving Heathrow take off to the west and this piece of common land, grazed since the 11th century, lies close to a flight path. I entered through an underpass. The moor is under siege. Surrounded by a dual carriageway, a motorway and the King George VI Reservoir. But nature survives and thrives. Numerous bird species use the moor which also boasts the oldest known ant hills in the UK. ‘It was as if someone had taken a square mile of best Suffolk countryside and dropped into the space between the A30 and M25’, said the writer Bill Bryson in his book The Road to Litte Dribbling.

Staines Moor sits at the base of Colne Valley Regional Park. It is a green belt corridor just to Heathrow’s west. Remove it, and there would be little stopping west London from sprawling into Staines, Windsor and Slough. I planned to follow the Colne Valley Trail to Colnbrook. The town is less than two miles from Heathrow’s northern runway, and the journey was a real edgelands ramble incorporating a crossing of the M25 and a walk beside DHL’s southern distribution centre.

Fortunately, Colnbrook was worth the trip. Houses and a handful shops lined the main street which was once an old turnpike road. The town’s history was detailed on several signs evidence, perhaps, of a degree of civic pride. I learned Colnbrook was once home to a handful of coaching inns. Two of them survive. And one, The Ostrich Inn, claims to be the third oldest pub in England. It all gave the place some character. And with a slab of imagination, you could envisage life when the turnpike not terminal five was the local transport hub.

Colnbrook had insulated itself from Heathrow but as I neared the northern runway the airport’s influence became impossible to ignore. A change in wind direction meant aircraft were landing from the west. Planes roared overhead as I walked through Poyle and things grew even louder as I bridged the M25 for a second time. Respite came when I turned onto a footpath, heading north, towards Harmondsworth.

I had hoped to explore the old barn, but it was closed so I toured the village. It was an unlikely neighbour for an international airport. Yew trees massed around a church with a 12th century doorway while a red phone box stood on the tiny village green by The Three Bells pub. ‘Stop Heathrow Expansion’ signs adorned almost every lamp post. Was this NIMBYISM? A third runway would destroy a chunk of Harmondsworth. Perhaps a different acronym applies when they are demolishing your actual backyard.

The area around Heathrow was known for market gardening. That trade is gone but there is still some arable farming on land next to the village. I used a footpath to traverse a field and climbed a stile before dropped down to the Bath Road. Suddenly every building was ancillary to the airport and hotels dominated. They came in a variety of architectural styles, from the brutalist (Sheraton Skyline), and the functional (Premier Inn) to the indescribable (Radisson Blu Edward).

The Bath Road was the main route into London for travellers in the west. And you can still find a couple of milestones beside the road near Heathrow acting as reminders of this history. It was not always the safest route, In the 18th century, the area around Hounslow Heath, east of the airport, was known for highwayman.

Policing was a local matter then and we can see this in Cranford. The village, on the Bath Road at the northeast corner of Heathrow, had a lock up to detain suspects caught by the local constable. The small brick building with a conical roof and iron door survives. It was built in 1838 but may have replaced an earlier lock up.

Hatton, about a mile south of Heathrow, was also associated with highwaymen. But there is not much left of the old hamlet – the construction of the airport destroyed a large portion of it. Nonetheless it does have a spot on the tube map. In 1975, Hatton Cross station opened to alleviate airport traffic and for a short period it was the only tube station serving Heathrow. Today it has a retro feel. Observant travellers, with good memories, might recognise the ‘Speedbird’ logo of the British Overseas Airways Corporation depicted in a mosaic on a platform column.

Hatton Cross provided a convenient starting point for my exploration of Heathrow’s southern perimeter. It is also useful if you fancy a bit of plane spotting. A patch of grass by Myrtle Avenue, just a short walk from Hatton Cross, is a popular spot for aviation enthusiasts. Type the street name into YouTube and you will find numerous videos of low flying jets descending over local houses.

By the time I had reached Terminal 4, any plane spotting opportunities were gone. The tarmac was obscured behind buildings and my attention had shifted to the rivers flowing by the perimeter road. They both looked manmade and had I not known better I would have assumed they belonged to the airport. But although they are artificial, the Longford River, dug to supply Hampton Court, and Duke of Northumberland River, set up to carry water from the River Colne to the River Crane, both predate Heathrow by several centuries. And if their channels appear modern, it is because their course was altered to accommodate the airport.

I walked between the two rivers before crossing a bridge into Stanwell. I was looking for a route across two large reservoirs just to the northeast of Staines. The pair, known as Staines Reservoirs, hold 14.5 million litres of water. But there was nothing to see from Stanwell apart from their steeply embanked sides. It was only when I found the path to a causeway across the two reservoirs that I gained a better view. It was worth the wait. A wide expanse of blue water shining in the sunshine.

I stopped halfway across the causeway. A low flying bird touched down on the flat surface before skidding across the water. In the distance a Virgin Atlantic jet rose out of Heathrow before wheeling away towards its flight route. I was just a 20-minute walk away from Staines station once I crossed the reservoir, but I was in no rush. There might be more beautiful places to walk near London but few match the interest of Heathrow’s Hinterland.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Marcus Liddell is a former local journalist turned History teacher living in west London. He is particularly interested in the physical legacy of the distant past. (Old Roman roads, ancient boundaries, medieval churches etc.) He has previously written for BBC News online. When he is not in the classroom, or on a footpath, you will find him following the fortunes of Chelsea FC.  

WORDS & PICTURES: Dan Carney

LOCATION: The London Borough of Redbridge

He leans out of the car window. His expression is emotionless, his side-parted hair slightly windswept. On the side of the vehicle is a logo for a Beck’s College of Motoring. Despite being blindfolded by a strip of black silk, he knows he is being photographed.

The picture is from the Manchester Evening News and shows Ronald Markham, better known as stage hypnotist Romark, before his attempt on October 12th, 1977 to drive blindfold down Cranbrook Road, Ilford, to publicise his upcoming run at the Ilford Playhouse.

There will be no injuries, but it will not go well; he will drive the yellow Renault for around twenty yards before ploughing into a parked police van.

*

Markham’s path into the back end of a police vehicle in Ilford was a varied one. He started as an auctioneer in his native northeast, hawking discontinued stock in his Oxford Salerooms shops-cum-auction halls.

Then, in 1969, came an ill-fated foray into Newcastle nightlife, when, along with his close friend, the comedian Bob Monkhouse, he launched the Change Is club. This three-floor city centre fun palace boasted hallucinogenic light shows, circular floors, and hidden projectors casting rotating backgrounds – jungles, deserts, ice caps, and mountain ranges – onto the curved walls. Markham was manager-cum-host, showcasing his growing prowess for hypnosis and adding a sheen of light entertainment glitz to the air of late 1960s irreverence and wilful surrealism provided by a suitably bizarre mix of acts including King Crimson, Ivor Cutler, and Max Wall. Petty thievery by employees, however, was keeping profits low.

In his 1993 autobiography ‘Crying With Laughter’, Monkhouse offers the view that Markham and his wife were too seduced by the lifestyle to stay on top of things. Worse came after a year, when the bank informed Monkhouse that Markham had withdrawn all the cash and fucked off. The comedian would later claim that his funding the venture to the tune of £130,000 – money he never saw again – had been the result of suggestions inserted by Markham into a stop-smoking hypnosis session. His resigned, but admiring, description of his former business partner is after-the-fact, but more entertaining for it:

 “His disarming charm was that of the confessed conman, a cardsharp who declares his hand before the bilking, the dip who enquires what pocket you keep your wad so as to minimise mutual inconvenience.”

Markham then seems to have assumed the mantle of celebrity illusionist/hypnotist, surfacing next in Durban, South Africa, bearing his new portmanteau-d stage name and fronting the modestly titled ‘The World’s Most Remarkable Brain’. During this, the longest running one-man stage show in the country’s history, he was reported to hang himself before coming back to life.

A spell in Hollywood followed, where he appeared on late night talk shows and performed for Zsa Zsa Gabor. Back home, he attempted to hypnotise 1000 people at Newcastle City Hall into stopping smoking. Nothing is known about whether this was successful, although some reported feeling powerless to resist. Six women collapsed and required reviving, albeit by Markham himself after paramedics were, curiously, unable.

Next was a BBC series, ‘The Man & His Mind’, in which Markham promised to outstrip the young Israeli Uri Geller, already well on his way to becoming the UK’s premier psychokinetic illusionist. Although Markham did identify a word randomly pre-selected from the dictionary, at odds of 1 in 130,000, ratings were poor and the programme was canned.

He then combined a spell as a Harley Street hypnotherapist with higher profile paid gigs for professional football clubs. He hypnotised players, cursed opponents, and at one point announced a hex on The Sun for trying to expose him as a fraud.

In 1976, he was flown to Munich by The Daily Mirror, to hypnotise Yorkshire heavyweight Richard Dunn ahead of his world title fight with Mohammed Ali. Markham went one better, cursing a bemused Ali to his face after unexpectedly encountering him in a hotel. While this proved fruitless, Ali beating Dunn easily, the hypnotist was adamant that the collapse of the stage at the pre-fight weigh-in was due to his efforts. He pitched up in Ilford, ready to demonstrate his mastery over the primary senses, the following year.

*

To fill in some of the gaps, I visit the Redbridge Museum & Heritage Centre at Redbridge Central Library in Ilford, around 800 yards from the site of the now-defunct playhouse, in order to look at local press archives.

A helpful assistant sets me up on a microfilm reader. It isn’t long, however, before I’m distracted. Local newspapers from 1977 are a wormhole into a more febrile Britain, a relatively bloodless location such as the outer London borough of Redbridge presenting a gamut of dangers.

All the following comes from publications a month either side of Romark’s driving exhibition:

…Redbridge pet shops are alerted by health chiefs following a case of “rat bite fever” from a rodent purchased in the borough.

…Four nursery children in South Woodford are hospitalised after eating poisonous berries in the playground.

…An eight-year-old Chadwell Heath boy is found playing with an unexploded World War II bomb.

…A cyclist shoots a twelve-year-old boy in the back with an airgun, an apparently motiveless attack leaving the child needing stitches.

The danger isn’t just physical; an Ilford shopkeeper claims to have been hypnotised by a mysterious customer into handing over £1700 (sadly, the description of the perpetrator, heavily built with a thick Italian accent, rules out Romark). It’s easy to imagine, given the peril constantly stalking the local populace, how a stage hypnotist ploughing blindfold into a parked police van may only merit a cursory paragraph.

But then, on the cover of the Ilford Recorder dated October 13th, 1977 – there it is: “HYPNOTIST IN A BLIND SPOT – Day Romark gave himself a crash course in dented pride.” A rundown of the event reveals nothing new, but there are longer quotes from the man himself:

“I wasn’t expecting a police van to be in the way… If it had been any other car I would not have hit it. I’m a psychologist by profession, and the police vans should give a sense of security – but this one did not. I only attempted the stunt because I was sure no damage would be caused. The impact was only very slight.”

There’s a triptych of (possibly staged) photos, showing Markham first exiting the car blindfold, dispassionately surveying the damage while being interviewed by a journalist, then talking to a policeman, smoking a fag and looking pissed off. The police van is one of the old-style Black Marias. The Beck’s College of Motoring logo is visible atop the crashed car; it is revealed that Chuck Beck, proprietor, was also on the scene, examining Romark’s driving from a car in front. He assures the paper he would have reported the accident had the police not been present. Chief Inspector Terence Barratt, however, is unimpressed:

“The police knew nothing of this stunt. A police officer saw a driver who appeared blindfold, but could not stop him. The driver collided with an unattended police van. The question of culpability will be fully considered. If we had known about this stunt, we would have taken firm measures to stop it.”

The following week’s Ilford Pictorial provides more. The following Monday, Markham visited Romford’s Cardrome Learner Centre to conduct a more controlled stunt in a dual-control car. Accompanied by Len Beisser from Beck’s, he achieved full marks on a two-minute blindfold test. He had driven unaccompanied in Ilford, refusing to test the route beforehand – “I just know what I can and can’t do” – and that he had planned to drive for at least eight minutes. Beck, meanwhile, suspected police interference – “The police deliberately tried to jeopardise him, instead of stopping him before he started off” – adding that the van was parked in contravention of the Highway Code: “… five feet from the kerb, on a double yellow line, at a bus stop.”

Markham changes his story of what happened in Ilford, saying he had run into the police van deliberately, in response to their harassment. This contradicts what he is reported to have said on the day both immediately after the accident – “I didn’t know the police van was there” – and half an hour later after being questioned by the police: “I knew the police van was there, but carried on because to me it represented security, not danger.”

The accompanying photograph shows the aftermath from a wider angle. A policeman records the details, while a suited Markham solemnly inspects the damage. This looks minimal, suggesting low speed and gentle impact.

Two details offer new insight. Firstly, waiting behind, travelling in the same direction, is a 129 bus showing the destination Ilford Station; if correct, this means Romark was driving south towards Ilford town centre, where the station is located.

Then, on the right in the background, is a distinctive-looking first floor window. A speculative cross-reference with Google Street View show that the window, surprisingly unchanged, is still there; the photo was taken in front of the junction of Cranbrook Road and Park Avenue, a few yards on from the Playhouse. With rising excitement, I realise that I have geo-located both the direction and the start and end points of Romark’s journey.
Next comes yet another novel detail – page 76 of the following week’s Recorder is a short article detailing Markham’s plans to flout a Greater London Council regulation prohibiting the use of hypnotism in a licensed establishment. He cheerfully explains how he will get around it, throwing down the gauntlet:

“I have developed a method to hypnotise people without them knowing about it. I welcome anyone from the GLC to attend the show so I can prove what I mean. I am determined to demonstrate hypnosis.”Playhouse director James Cooper assures readers he will be “watching very closely to ensure the law is not broken.”

A further search of the British Newspaper Archives reveals nothing else about the drive itself, bar a wider-angle shot in The Daily Mirror that confirms the location. New information is, however, provided by the fact that the same publication, possibly trying to recoup the money they spent flying him to Munich a few years earlier, are much more interested in the punishment than the crime.

On 19th September 1979, almost two years on, they report Markham appearing at Snaresbrook Crown Court, charged with reckless driving. The hypnotist denied the charges, but prosecutor John Leslie was damning: “It would be hard to think of a more reckless thing to do in a busy street.”

Amazingly, Markham is reported to have denied, immediately afterwards, even causing the accident, or even being blindfolded: “What blindfold? The marks on the van were not caused by me.”

Three days later, they report that Markham was found guilty – fined £100 and ordered to pay £220 costs – and criticised by David Berglas, a senior member of The Magic Circle, for revealing when cross-examined how he had planned to “see” while blindfold:

“Romark not only let down the rest of my profession but he let down the public, which enjoys being led to believe that a fairly simple trick is done by supernatural magic.”

Markham, however, was defiant:

“It is immoral for magicians to pretend they are anything other than people who perform a good trick.”

Sadly, no fresh insight on whether he knew the police van was there, or crashed into it deliberately, is provided.

*

I decide to go to the site of the event to stand in the exact spot where Romark ploughed into the van, the angry shouts of policemen and blocked motorists in his ears.

Outside the old Playhouse – a beautiful art nouveau gothic church building – early on a cold April morning, it strikes me that Romark’s plan to drive for eight minutes would have taken him a reasonable distance.  At an average speed of, say, ten miles per hour, this would have been around 1.33 miles. Round the gentle leftwards bend into Ilford town centre, past the old Pioneer indoor market, about halfway up Ilford Lane towards Barking.

Even for a straightforward magic trick, this would have been pretty impressive, although it is undoubtedly for the good of the pedestrians of 1970s Ilford that it didn’t happen.

I step out into Cranbrook Road, and stand at the collision spot. To my disappointment absolutely nothing happens. No discarded piece of black blindfold cloth flaps forlornly at the side of the road. There are no new frequencies, insights, or answers.

But I don’t mind. For what little I have unearthed now means that there are new questions to ponder, new uncertainties to enjoy. And maybe, the unanswered questions make it more interesting in the long term.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dan Carney is a musician/writer from northeast London. He has released two albums via Lo Recordings, as Astronauts, and also works as a composer/producer for TV and film. His music has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also been involved in academic psychology research, authoring a number of articles about cognitive processing in genetic syndromes. His non-academic writing covers a range of subjects, and has appeared in publications such as The Blizzard, McSweeneys, Elsewhere, and The British Psychological Society Research Digest. His other interests include walking, hanging
around in cafes, and spending too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Twitter – @astronautheart
Instagram – astronauts_uk

WORDS & PICTURES: Peter Riley – this is an extract from his book, Strandings (Profile Books, 2022)

When I was thirteen, I helped a woman with blue hair load the jaw of a sperm whale into the back of a yellow Volvo 245. It only just fitted. What she’d got hold of wasn’t quite as big as the one that greets you at the entrance of the Natural History Museum in Oxford; that’s still the most enormous jaw I’ve ever seen. Nevertheless, what I helped carry was big. And heavy. Add to that the pounds of blubber and you get a sense of what we transported that morning – maybe the weight of a tall man. According to the butchers I’ve asked, it must have taken her at least half an hour to saw through. If you’ve ever handled a piece of whalebone, you’ll know how durable and solid it feels – like reinforced, triple-weighted pumice. In the case of a sperm whale, it’s even sturdier, needing to withstand higher water pressures than in other, shallower-diving members of its species. The blue-haired woman had accomplished this at night, alone, and in the steady Norfolk rain.

The sperm whale in question had stranded itself the day before on the iliac crest or hip of eastern England. Old Hunstanton’s north beach is a stretch of sand and mud that slides into the Wash, one of Britain’s largest estuaries. It was 1997, the first weekend of the Easter break, and my mum had rented a small barn just outside Holme-next-the-Sea, a nearby village that would, a year later, become known for its ‘Seahenge’ – a 4,000-year-old Bronze Age timber circle of fifty-five posts surrounding an upturned oak stump sunk into the sand.

There was a break in the rain, and the very early morning horizon already shone through a light blanket of coastal cloud. In a neighbouring field, the hares were beginning their daily boxing and sprinting. I had written ‘Gone to visit the whale’ in my neatest handwriting and left the note on the doormat.

We’d driven up from the south-west suburbs of London in a light-blue Ford Fiesta. Mum and I had recently moved into a place that stood about twenty metres from a stretch of the Windsor-to-Waterloo line. Four trains an hour. In spite of everything, it all ran fairly smoothly. I was a member of the Fifth Staines Sea Scouts, which meant that once a week I swore allegiance to the Queen and the Union Jack. I was shy and polite. My dad would dutifully pick me up on Saturday mornings and take me clockwise past Heath-row and up the M25 to see his mother in Watford. We’d eat cream of mushroom soup from a can, and everyone would say how delicious it was. My mum held down a series of jobs. She saved up enough to put herself through university – I was nine when I went to her graduation. She began working in adult education, teaching German. On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings she taught language classes in our front room to groups of adults – Tony, Robert, Reg and Sheila. They all greeted me whenever I passed through the living room on my way to the toilet. Robert once took Mum and me to the South Coast and Lyme Regis, where the fossil remains of 180-million-year-old marine reptiles regularly wash out of the cliffs.

The afternoon before I helped load the sperm whale’s jaw, I had joined a crowd of maybe fifty people that had converged on the animal. As is usually the case, one or two tried to think of ways to float it back out to sea. A man wearing white chinos had taken it upon himself to sprint back and forth between whale and surf armed only with his toddler daughter’s crab bucket. The child ran after him angrily demanding its return. The rest of us stood and watched as he tossed small amounts of water onto the whale’s head. After maybe twenty buckets, a fluorescent-jacketed man who was putting up a cordon of red and white tape informed us all that if the creature was not already dead, then it would very likely soon be. The best and kindest thing to do, he urged us, would be to leave it in peace. ‘A whale of this size’, he said, ‘once stranded, tends to suffocate very quickly under its own weight.’ The father received a smattering of applause as he re-joined the assembled crowd. His daughter continued to cry.

The next morning, the whale’s jaw appeared over the crest of a beachgrass dune, followed by a face concentrated in the effort to keep it balanced as the bowsprit of a wheelbarrow. The blue-haired woman had wrapped her prize in a white sheet that fluttered bloodily in the breeze. I knew immediately what she’d done. A butcher’s bowsaw sheathed under her arm, she wore a pair of industrial- looking rubber gloves that were now smeared in a thick abattoir slime. For a few moments she carried on struggling, unaware of the child standing just a few metres away. At that moment she was easily the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Her blue hair was cropped short. The bridge of her nose was tanned and freckled. I stood dead still. She stopped; looked at me – inhaled a lungful of sea air. Setting the wheelbarrow down, she transferred the saw to her right hand, drew herself up a good foot taller and faced me in silence. It occurred to me that I was about to be murdered. A minute passed before she spoke.

I now know that she was part of a wide circle of cetacean body-snatchers and bone-collectors. When the whales appear, the scavengers move in. There are more than you might think. Take this hooded figure, snapped for the Daily Mail in late 2011. Notice that the jaw’s already gone. The accompanying caption explained, with some restraint: ‘Member of the public cuts off a tooth from the beached whale, which washed up on the Norfolk coast on Christmas Eve.’ By early January, a follow-up story described how local police had detained a local ‘male youth’ for subsequently posting a bill of sale on a social networking site; £5 per individual tooth (fifteen available) or £45 the lot (fifteen teeth plus eleven still in situ, plus the jaw itself). How had he settled on the going rate for a whale in 2011? There are a few considerations he might have weighed up.

First, under International Whaling Commission regulations there’s a ban on ‘harvesting’ (though harvesting really only applies to whaling proper), as well as a ban on ‘trade’, under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (that’s one he might have been cautioned for). Then there’s the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations Act of 2010, which promises up to six months in prison and an unlimited fine for this kind of activity. Contraband once, twice and maybe three times over (without a specific buyer in mind), the youth’s modest pricing reflected some challenging market conditions.

To read more about Peter and the whale, order Strandings here.

“Brave, reckless and engaging” – Iain Sinclair

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Peter Riley has been investigating stranded cetaceans and their afterlives since his teens. He lectures in American literature at Durham University, with a special interest, naturally, in Herman Melville. Strandings won the inaugural Ideas Prize for nonfiction.