Mythical look at Britain’s unexpected places
A Britain in the cracks of the urban façade, a land where unexpected life can flourish, a land of industrial estates and electricity pylons, o motorways and ring roads of hospitals and housing estates of roundabouts and flyovers, places where modern life speeds past but where people and stories nevertheless collect. Places where human dramas play out: stories of love, violence, fear, boredom, and artistic expression. Places of ghost sightings, first kisses, experiments with drugs, refuges for the homeless, hangouts for the outcasts.
Gareth E Rees explores these spaces and the essential part they have played in the history and geography of our isles. Although mundane and neglected, they can be as powerfully influential in our lives and imaginations as any picture postcard tourist destination.
Unofficial Britain is a journey through the decaying margins of the UK’s built environment, Gareth E Rees, seeks to lift the lid on how myths build up around seemingly mundane places like factories, motorways, canals, and industrial estates that were the backbone of modern development.
In Glasgow, exploring a map marking an abandoned ring road plan, he cites archaeologists who claimed the city’s development follows scared geometric lines and notes the anti-clockwise or widdershins subway system, a direction of travel considered unlucky in Celtic and Pagan folklore.
In Grimsby paranormal events on housing estates are analysed in relation to the fishing port’s decline, haunted by deprivation and the loss of a future.
A Scottish port’s downturn also gives us the “Greenock Catman” repeatedly former dockworker gone feral who lives off rats by the nearby industrial estate, places which “ conceal as much as they reveal”.
In Harlow, Essex, the conversion of office blocks into inadequate housing has an “inherent creepiness”.
Rees also traces secret ICI bomb factories in the Welsh mountains and believes he encounters mythical black dogs by his disused steelworks near Wrexham where his grandfather worked.
In Bristol, close to the M32, the urban park that was once a no-go area is a “thrumming nexus of concrete, vegetation, humans, and machines.”
At Midlands service station, he offers a fanciful take on a roundabout’s outstanding stones with disclosing the reason for their presence.
Amid pandemic, there is a genuine possibility of abandoned office blocks, retail complexes, and residential units of the near future could well prove fertile ground for urban explorers.
Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places by Gareth E Rees, Elliott & Thompson, £14.99, 288 pages.