Nina Ellis | Strip the Willow....................................................................................

The newspapers described it a ‘de-commissioned community’ and my first thought was of the concrete cows that stood witness to the wet

Saturday afternoon drives of our youth.

Summers in the early 90s.

It feels unfair to have a whole place which has, after all, since bloomed a literary festival, an art gallery (unpretentious yet world class), and more than one of those expensive hamburger chains pegged on the memory of a small herd made of scrap and cement and left to ruminate just off the A422.

What else was it then?

The grid system, the shopping, the hundred and fifty or so roundabouts, skateboarding. A boy of eighteen, one of us, found dead in the brown river. The watermark and the dead-head of juvenilia— not a car-wreck, but a car and a late-night act of violence. The news was itself a kind of celebrity in the surrounding villages and farms.

Red kites began to gather over the new-build city, sensing carrion under the patio gardens, and in the trees an efflorescence of plastic.