Walking In

 

'Hostilities on Hold' 2021 by Jen Orpin

When you cycle, you are out in among it, observing, but you have speed on your side; you are in the thick of it for seconds. On the bus, you join a new colony for the journey, all looking out the window believing themselves safe from it. If you drive you may as well be in space, caged in your metal box. Walking is being out in it. You’ve no choice but to move through it and around it as it comes to you down the path.

Set out on Church Road. Almost autumnal morning. Still in my little shorts. Church Road is one of those that feels like a great artery in the city. Connects some distant land to something bigger. Others in the city, maybe Gloucester Road, Old Market (but it’s very small) The Hartcliffe Way, Whiteladies Road. You start somewhere and are taken away from it all.

I feel like a psychogeographer would love Church Road. A long road that goes through at least three distinct neighbourhoods; St George, Redfield, Lawrence Hill. A train line goes under it. An Aldi and a Lidl, a couple of small other big chain pop-in shops but then loads of local markets. The Bristol- Bath cycle path goes underneath it, secluded from the hustle and bustle. There’s an old fountain at the top adjoining an ancient and closed public loo.

There’s what I like to think of as ‘international stretches’- East European & Polish at the St. George end, and East African in Lawrence Hill, and paradoxically the Hell’s Angels last pub in Bristol by Lawrence Hill station. Sometimes they come in their droves up the road for a meet or whatever. Abandoned buildings throughout where the owners are holding out for more money on a sale. The only Miss Millies (famed Bristol chicken shop chain) in East Bristol. A self storage with a spitfire in the lobby. At the end is the great bowl of the Lawrence Hill roundabout, with its green slopes and clusters of trees and wilderness. The cider cans torn to shreds by the council mowers. In the dry summer a couple of years ago a bit of the long, dry grass caught alight.

Outside the Machine Mart by Lawrence Hill station a Northern Irish guy tells me he’s desperate and I say I don’t even have my wallet on me. He’s twice shown me a scar on his chest and said he’s just had surgery and is sleeping rough. A year apart. Another time in the same place a van was parked up and a massive dog leant out the passenger window barking and snarling and going mad at its reflection in the wing mirror.

Not long and I’ve hit Old Market. At the top end there’s a strong, nutty, woody smell outside the unopened Bulgarian grocery. A warm, inside smell. It strongly reminds me of Greece but I can’t place what or when or where. Graffiti by Long Bar reading ‘Louis got Oasis Tickets’. Is this the new ‘Yer da sells Avon’ now Avon are closing? As I walk through Castle Park I’m struck by the sight of huge fig tree growing out the wall by the river. There’s even fruit on it. I wonder if it has grown from some plant material dumped with a load of ship ballast.

Coming home later I think I’m taking a short cut through Broadmead but when I look at a map I realise it’s actually a longer route. A plethora of negative thoughts as the whirlwind strikes around me. Junkies can’t half move fast when they want to. The place is a dirgetown. Hamburger alley from start to finish. Somewhere for plagues to cut their teeth. I’d ask “why do we do this to places’ but I don’t think termites feel bad looking at the wood they intend to colonize. I had similar feelings as I passed through Torbay, Torquay and Paignton on a summer bank holiday. The fair grounds and tourists and madness. How a place can work on shitting on itself.

The next time I come through Castle Park instead which is more direct and as I come down a set of steps I find a fiver in among a smashed and trodden bouquet of cheap flowers.

Abandoned Cities 2: Flaw in the Design

I've previously written about what I call 'Abandoned City Ecology' here

            The other day, I went for a walk in Leigh Woods. I’d done this walk a few times before, but this time I got a little lost because I was being lazy and stupid with following directions, and so I got to walk past the Stokeleigh camp twice, and on the second amble past, I really thought about it, and imagined what it was once upon a time.

            The Stokeleigh camp is an ancient site in Leigh Woods, facing out towards the Avon gorge by Bristol. Two crescent shaped mounds are all that’s left of an iron age fort that once kept guard over the banks of the River Avon for reasons so far unknown. All that’s left are the two mounds, surrounded by trees, shrubs, grassland, and themselves completely covered in a variety of wildflowers and weeds.

  Between the two mounds at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods.

The Mound Rising up ahead at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods, Bristol.

            I’d been thinking a lot lately about the impermanence of all things, especially artifices, and how cities have a lifespan. The abandoned cities archaeologists find weren’t always deserted during some cataclysmic event, rather citizens trickled out as life in the city became less and less viable. The cities we have opted to create in ridiculous climes such as Las Vegas, a city that functions as any other American city albeit in the middle of the desert with strained water sources; similarly, Cape Town in South Africa experienced a water crisis just last year. Whether we like it or not, artifices have a lifespan of usefulness that might be shorter than we expect; everything from a skyscraper to a coke bottle to a city has a timer counting down in its usefulness.

The problem with artifice’s useful lifespans is that, unlike organic features, artifices do not break down or transform on the demise of their usefulness. Where an eggshell, once empty, will dry up, the membrane and residues rotted away, the shell becoming brittle, eventually shattering, and then one day becoming powder, returning the mineral constitution of the shell to the ground. A plastic drinks bottle, once empty, just sits. It might tear or warp, and shed a few shavings of plastic into its surrounds, but generally it will not disappear.

The Stokeleigh camp, re-absorbed into nature being just mounds of dirt, seemed to me the most brilliant, unintentional design, because its demise was factored in, and this isn’t a spoon we’re talking about, but a fort. If we accept that an era’s worth of cities could well be left due to war, climate change, and  resources stress, then we should be designing and building with decay factored in. Nothing is permanent, including unfortunately us as a species; whether we evolve, planetary migrate, or go extinct, I’d hate to wander the globe a spirit, and see city stacks still stood where a rich base of habitats could have instead been fed and allowed to succeed us.

Followed up by Abandoned City Ecology 3: Cut in the Landscape