Farley and Symmons Roberts pp 1-22

This summery begins with Robert Macfarlane's book review of Edgelands in the Guardian newspaper https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/19/edgelands-farley-symmons-roberts-review 

Macfarlane writes about the fact these two writers are poets and that there is a poetic sense to the book and it’s focus on what we call urban sprawl or edgelands, my immediate interest was the connection to Marion Shoard who I have just been reading and her detailed historical information about land ownership, Macfarlane describes the location called edgelands as,The zone goes by different names, few of them complimentary. Victor Hugo called it "bastard countryside". The landscape theorist Alan Berger called it "drosscape". The artist Philip Guston called it "crapola". And the environmentalist Marion Shoard called it "edgeland", which she defined as "the interfacial interzone between urban and rural". The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies.

I was surprised the artist George Shaw wasn’t mentioned

Macfarlane isn’t a fan of the book although he wrote a polite review, but this paragraph packs a powerful punch; The book also suffers from an inverted form of the blitheness that can beset traditionally romantic nature writing. A pond on the outskirts of Peterborough is "a Pre-Raphaelite vision". Burnt-out cars dumped on waste ground "provide . . . a space where children can turn immobility into limitless freedoms". Waste ground is paradise. Sewage farms are "simple geometric playgrounds" where children have been known to ride the sweep-arms. "Container yards are places of beauty and mystery." Well, perhaps, but they are also places of crushed fingers and low wages. In the end, the love shown for the edgelands is too strong. There is at times an atmosphere of what Patrick Wright calls "the New Baroque sensibility", characterised by a romancing "interest in debris and human fall-out".

I am interested in how easy it is to romanticise landscape, projecting social conditions and assimilating memory and reality, Shoard makes it very clear in her book This Land is Our Land the hideous behavior of some landowners and the artifice ‘we’ now know and love, was created through abject poverty and greed. Edgelands are interesting places, useful if city councils are forward thinking as they can accommodate micro-breweries and bars as well as flea markets and cafes, sitting alongside industrial units, but not all councils have the capacity for forethought and many are eerie dilapidated, dangerous places that sit alongside infill housing with no pathways or routes to the countryside, shops or community places. See blog post Lost   

The chapter Cars highlights perfectly what I am saying in the post Lost, for many including myself cars are our only means of getting to work or getting the children to school on time and within our financial means, some of the roads are ancient tracks that have been used historically whereas others to and from trading estates/edgelands are new. These new roads are the ring roads or arterial roads keeping cars out of town and offering quick routes to places of public necessity, hospitals, crematoriums, out of town shopping, schools, university campuses. The necessity for good public transport is vital, but the concern is the infill houses that are being built in-between the edgeland and the city, squashed in with no access to anywhere of interest apart from if you can drive.

*I have noticed from the train window, new houses in north have more land space than those in the south (I don’t know if this is a thing?)

I know from my research that paths come and go over time, but if there is nowhere to go there will be no paths. Maybe in the future these edgelands might become destination places other than places for industrial purposes as technology takes over and warehouses are turned into trampoline parks with cafes?