Nostalgie de la boue

In the late 1960s I grew up in the London borough of Greenwich, which in those days had a shabby, post-industrial edge. Behind our house on Crooms Hill stood a disused London Electricity Board sub-station. Broken glass crunched underfoot and buddleia grew amid the fly-tipped junk. I went there chiefly to shoot at pigeons and set fire to things. Tea chests went up in a satisfying orange whoosh; I was mesmerised. One day, dreadfully, the LEB building burned down after I neglected to extinguish embers. The fire-fighters flashed a spectral white and blue, I remember, from the fire-engine’s beacon. I could no longer go there unnoticed.

I was reminded of that episode while reading Edgelands, by the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. The book celebrates the scrublands, sewage works, brownfield sites and silted canals where urban meets pastoral in contemporary England. These ‘drosscapes’ have been insufficiently chronicled in our literature today, object the authors.