Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth Rees explored east London’s edgelands in his hallucinatory Marshlands. Now, with Car Park Life, he reveals an urban wilderness hiding in plain sight: ‘It is Morrisons in Hastings that lights the fire of my obsession. Not the supermarket itself but the space outside: the car park.’
Strange, often violent stuff happens here: murder, hauntings, sex, from dogging to adultery. Late-night improvised race tracks spring up, where petrolheads compete in hair-raising skid contests, spurred on by whooping spectators. Even in opening hours the clandestine flourishes — who notices what goes on in cars outside Sainsbury’s? Bringing a whole new meaning to cutting-edge retail, a drug dealer stabs one of his customers five times outside an Asda and flees, while police seize £3,000 worth of cocaine. Illicit trade is rife — ‘even cars are sold in car parks’. (No royal skeletons dug up so far: Richard III was found in a municipal parking space in 2012.)
Rees’s passion began with that Damascene moment outside Morrisons when he realised ‘a bleak parking lot could hold as much mystery and allure as a mountain or lakeside’. This is when ‘the car park nonsense’, as his family called it, took over his life. The book is both a celebration and a lament: pain and loss lurk beneath the eccentric comic surface (think Detectorists). There’s a sweet lunacy to his adventures.
‘In an ideal scenario we’d pitch a tent on the nearest roundabout and dine on roasted rat, poached from the traps behind Pizza Hut… stare up at the night sky, obscured by light pollution, sit around a bonfire of pallets.’ Who could ask for more? Rees doesn’t duck the commercial ugliness, the squalor, rusting debris, litter, but he has a transforming eye: trucks parked round a rain puddle look like elephants at a jungle watering hole.
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