BOOKS Urban fragments

Edgeland wanderers and psychogeographers will find a wealth of shabby but otherworldly relics of abandonment

Unofficial Britain Journeys through Unexpected Places Gareth E Rees Elliot & Thompson 2020 Hb, 268pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781783965144

In the late 1960s my grandmother drove me around south London, saying: “Take a good look – they want to destroy it all!”

In Unofficial Britain, Gareth E Rees relates how capitalism steals our past and abandons us among the relics of truncated utopian visions: “A tower block can become eerie in the absence of that life it once promised.” Inhabitants of a visionary housing estate “were promised an entirely new way of life”, but the community centre and pub failed to materialise, the place disintegrated, and they were “left to exist in a cancelled idea”. Council estates are haunted by the usual white ladies, poltergeists and faceless monks: the Grimsby Ghosthunters investigate sightings.

“It makes you wonder how many times people meet ghosts and don’t even realise it,” says one.

Hundreds of houses were flattened to make room for a motorway in Cardiff. Those doomed to exist right next to it received no compensation – they were “a necessary sacrifice to the gods of economic progress”. They were even expected to be consoled by the idea that the flyover would become one of the “sights of Wales”. (Unlike those living by London’s Westway, whose banner “GET US OUT OF THIS HELL” was eventually acted on.)

Rees set up the website Unofficial Britain in 2014 (unofficialbritain.com, with links to outfits such as Liminal Whitby and the Pylon Appreciation Society). He drives off almost at random in search of the Stonehenges of the modern world: pylons, roundabouts, flyovers, motorways, new towns, multi-storey carparks, industrial estates, hospitals, factories and his home town. He doesn’t seek enlightenment or, God forbid, “closure” – he’s looking for the human factor.

A displaced Pole may have succeeded in living on a roundabout for years, but in Morecambe’s Central Retail Park they “are populated by sculptures of seabirds, celebrating its coastal heritage”.

The factory chimney that dominated Rees’s childhood landscape fell into disuse, and suggestions for turning it into an artwork included the addition of a giant hare. He found no such “iconic” mammal when he visited but instead “a gated trading estate with motor-repair centres, tool companies, medical-supply businesses and dog-groomers”.

Under the Eastville Flyover at Junction 2 of the M32, the concrete has been painted with fish and dragonflies. A man with dreadlocks has made a home in a tent, and another human lies bundled in a sleeping bag at the mouth of a pee-stained underpass. Down here among a forest of concrete pillars, a river still flows.

“Can you help me?” asks a woman clutching a Tesco’s bag. She explains she left her mother shopping but now can’t find her way back. She borrows Rees’s phone to call mother (no reply), but declines to return to the supermarket and wait there. He regretfully leaves her in the underworld.

“Lingering fragments” of 1960s docklands survive among main roads, scrapyards and Bow Creek, with its occasional sightings of out-of-place bears and an alleged crocodile.

In Canning Town the niche music venues are shutting and co-working spaces taking over, but it’s just another phase: “Small creative businesses and artists are only the outriders of the rapacious property development boom in London.”

The Bruce Report of 1945, which recommended the demolition of central Glasgow, “met with fierce opposition but was nonetheless approved by the Glasgow Corporation in 1947”. Two years later the plan was cancelled as too expensive, but work was started on the motorway “box” before it was abandoned in the 70s. What remains is plagued, of course, by phantom hitchhikers and Roman armies.

While criss-crossing Britain, Rees stops off at Hilton Park’s space-age service station of 1967, now a “shabby relic”. But all motorway service stations are somewhat “other-worldly”: are they a foretaste of the afterlife, where we’ll be trapped for eternity among “wet floor” cones and unused massage chairs?

Is there no escape? You can always get back in your car and drive off along the tarmac, where everyone is trying to overtake, or tailgating those following the legal speed limit: “It’s as if the world beyond the crash barriers was an illusion and the only reality was the road.”

Written without frills but evoking the most eerie of locations, this book will appeal to ley hunters, psychic questers, urban explorers, psychogeographers and all edgeland wanderers.

Lucy R Fisher

★★★★★