Memories scar landscapes.

Like fault lines, moments in history can be traced through the marks they leave behind. Some spectres are explicit. The vestiges of the post-industrial, for example. Boarded up terrace houses that once symbolized the collective past of flourishing industries.

The towering, derelict factories that were once a hotbed of production and now sit awaiting their fate of being demolished or redeveloped. Even when co-opted by present day conversions, most readily understood through the lens of gentrification, the physical remnants of the past resonate something that once was, and no longer is. An overarching fascination with such spaces, particularly of the post-industrial, can be read through a contemporary acceleration of interest in ruin-porn — the endless blogs that document Urbexers explorations and high contrast images that capture the ghostly qualities of decaying buildings and abandoned sites. As Mark Fisher argues in his 2014 book ‘Ghosts of my Life’, our landscape is ‘haunted by futures that failed to happen.’

The 80s industrial music scene’s relationship to subcultural daddies William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and their ‘cut up’ method, spurred my interest in hauntological resonance during a research project in 2016. The cut up evolved as a tool for transgressing the controlled mannerisms of societal conditioning through a belief in how the conventions of process could be broken down through random assemblage, allowing uncontrolled results to form. I began traversing once-industrial London landscapes where bands such as Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, 23 Skidoo and Test Department had taken influence, filming, recording sounds using leftover debris, squatting, playing music, and making use of the dereliction.

I drifted around the Isle of Dogs, Victoria Docks, London Fields and along the Thames from Deptford and it bore little resemblance to the gritty reality of the 1980s, where the industrious past was devoured by the advent of neoliberalism in Thatcher’s England. Shiny monoliths and new build houses, private gated sections along the river, endless Pret A Manger, Starbucks and independent coffee shops lining ghostly parades where immaculate brick pathways appear entirely untrodden, and industrial facades assimilated into high brow developments. Overcome by an aura of psychic death possessing these spaces, the cut-up became a weapon for breaking through the deadend atmosphere — a means of cracking the fabricated sheen of rendered environments and peering back into the past. Splicing my experience of passing through these places with untethered soundscapes such as 23 Skidoo’s Seven Songs … Throbbing Gristle’s Thee Pyschic Sacrifice … or Coil’s Transparent, provoked an awareness of incongruity and confusion. With the realities of manufacturing’s decline and austerity punctuating the city the clean-sheen of regeneration chimes a sinister omen of cultural subsumption.

A year later, in 2017, I found myself squatting a derelict Victorian building, on back streets between New Cross and Deptford.

A site sandwiched between the skeleton of a new-build development and an early 2000s housing estate, the cracks in its decorative brickwork sprouting blooms of buddleia - a developers nightmare and the occupiers best friend. Never have I been inside a place containing so much stuff; boxes stacked upon boxes rotting from water coming through the barely slated roof. Graffiti, 90s gig posters, huge sheets of silver foiled paper like that found within cigarette packets are pasted upon the walls — indicating an element of the building's life prior to being filled with boxes and left to rot. I began researching its history through talking to people in the area and making visits to local history archives. It turned out that it had been built in 1842 as a Coffee House and institute for the workers of the adjacent foundry, J. Stone & Co Ltd. Becoming The Welcome Institute in 1922 the spac e operated as an educational and sports centre, as well as a canteen for the workers and their families. In 1984 the building was listed as ‘Lady Florence Hall’ and ‘Deptford West Indian Social Club’, where a youth training scheme was provided alongside an events space for social gatherings. One YouTube search led me to a 3 hour video of Jah Shaka playing in the upstairs space in 1986, short glimpses of the now-rotting interior beam work flashing amongst dancing bodies. Following this, there’s a five year gap in the timeline, presumably to do with a council -forced closure due to the funding cuts/state restructuring of the 1980s.

In 1991 activity was reinstated when a group of squatters known as ‘The Conscious Collective’ occupied the building, named it Lady Flo’s and began putting on events — parties, circus, performances, workshops — before being evicted in 1993 by Lewisham Council, who sold it off for £80,000, £60,000 of which had to be returned to the central government, meaning the local council made just £20,000 all-in-all from stripping the community of a valuable cultural asset. 

A surreal conversation with the owner of the contents – who turned up for a while, attempting to remove the many tonnes of piled up debris – alluded to a soap opera-style tale of romance and revenge layered into the place's history. 

In a villainous cadence, the old man announced he had bought it shortly after his wife divorced him and fell in love with his friend. He closed their shared wholesaler business and began filling the building with its assets and documents, alongside family treasures – photos, school books, art works, then bricked up the windows and doors and left it to rot. Inevitably, as the area changed over those years the value rose, and in 2017 he sold it, for just short of £2,000,000.Here, collective memories emanate with vibrancy. Its architectural presence splintering the past into the present, in a once industrial, now rapidly gentrifying area. The initial years spent inhabiting this space were accompanied by the thudding sounds of the adjacent development's construction. The busy sounds of pile-driving and drilling reverberated like disfigured echoes of the factories and workshops that once stood here. A long time after the previous owner's initial attempts to salvage items of value, the new ones paid to have it removed [23 tonnes in all] by rubbish removal contractors. The issue of removing it, due to the sheer volume, was eventually resolved by pulling down part of the upstairs floor so that the detritus could be pushed over the edge and shovelled out of the front door into tipper trucks. 

The salvaging act that took place was reminiscent of the rag and bone men, whose music would have once been familiar in the area, as they sounded their presence into the street to signal their offering of a removal service.

Whilst this building had been physically lifeless for years its aura was never silenced. Later, when the interior had physical space to inhabit once again, different sounds filled and flowed out from it: those of music and people — a new but not unfamiliar chapter for a place of socialisation that had been dormant for sometime.

The paradoxes of recollection frame the obscure zones of memories fragility through a montage of still images in Chris Marker’s 1962 film ‘La Jetee’ — a poetic sci-fi film in which a man in a post-apocalyptic future uses a remembered image from his youth to travel through time.

The film’s circular narrative comments upon the imperfection of memory and unpredictability of recollection, as past lives live on within the protagonist as an image. The sequence of events aptly reflected upon in the narrator's statement that nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars. Like the unnamed narrator in La Jettee’s discovery of himself as a "living object mortally trapped in a coil of time", architectural structures that were built or places with intention and purpose in the past live on as remainders through their preservation within a landscape. Beyond the blunt leftovers, post industrial and brutalist buildings, war defenses, towers, castles and ruins, whose demand for remembrance carries clearly throughout time, exist the blurred blemishes of histories that are psychically imbued upon a place.

In the midst of lockdown three, in February 2021, I am working on a body of research concerning the 17th century witch trials that were widespread across Suffolk. With no ‘day of memory’ having ever been introduced to any European calendar to commemorate the lives brutally lost during the legal enforcement of ‘The Witchcraft Act’, my work seeks to consider how and where these histories exist within the area. On Imbolc, a pagan holiday that marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, I walk out into the twilight at dawn, setting off along the long shingle stretch between Alde & Ore Estuary and the River Deban. In the half light the environment feels otherworldly; my body a stranger passing through unknown territory.

Walking along a footpath upon a grassy bank that traces the coast, my feet sink and slip through thick mud. I consider the mired land a reflection upon the rate at which we seek solace in natural environments during the ongoing pandemic. Daffodil’s are emerging, still flowerless, upon the paths edges, alongside the skeletons of last year's Mugwort. The two plants symbolistic meanings, rebirth and protection, attribute relevance to this moment hung in time.

Martello Towers and concrete war defenses punctuate the vista. Built across the British Empire in the first part of the 19th century, their purpose was to withstand a siege and fire on enemy ships when the threat of invasion was feared. As no Napoleonic invasion took place the towers were never actually tested in combat, but used to prevent smuggling along the coast. These visible ruins combine with the backdrop of cargo ships lining the horizon at sea, waiting to land at Britains biggest container port. There are more than usual — the logistics of cargo’s movement inevitably slowed by both the pandemic and Brexit. At Bawdsey the River Deban flows out into the North Sea.

[Martello Tower]

Here, the radar station at Bawdsey Manor was a project of utmost secrecy in 1937 where employees scanned the skies day and night for signs of German aircraft. The same year different secrets were unearthed along the rivers banks after wealthy landowner Edith Pretty sought out an archeologist to investigate the contents of 18 ancient mounds on her estate, and the Sutton Hoo burial ship was discovered. These corporeal artefacts of industry, defense and archaeological discovery preserve histories and incite remembrance. The presence of the past permeating the area with its eerie quietness. Thrown into the mix with the witchcraft trials and an abundance of folklore, the county creates an alternate reality for hauntological and psychogeographical exploration. 1A place where memories can be felt out through the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions and characters that charge environments, as astutely described by Andy Paciorek on the folk horror revival website. 2

Walking North along the coast I pass through a graveyard of Mullein, thirty or so plants standing tall and still, new leaves emerging beneath them. In the distance I can make out the silhouette of Orford Castle, behind the shingle spit of Orford Ness - a haven uninhabited by humans, where birds, rabbits and water deer roam upon the wet marshes. The cellar of the 11th century castle was used for the bloody climax of Michael Reeves 1968 folk horror ‘The Witchfinder General’. A disturbing tale set during the English Civil War that dramaticises the story of Matthew Hopkins appointment as the Witchfinder General by the puritans under Oliver Cromwell. This fictionalised account spins a yarn of hysteria and mob-mentality, associations easily made with the cruelty and horror of the 17th century witch hunts. Whilst there is little doubt that such behaviour played its part, there’s something much darker in the structural establishment of power that led so many to their gruesome fate. Just as politicians today lean into the incitement of culture wars to detract from their wrongdoings, the association of lynchings to the witch-hunts glosses over the terror of the English legal system at that time.

The terror reigned upon East Anglia by the self styled witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins has made the area synonymous with the witch hunts. Each time a ‘witch’ was rooted out, tried and executed Hopkin became richer, and gained further power. It is estimated that his work led to around 100 executions across the county. The coast tracing North from Orford eventually leads to the ancient fishing town of Lowestoft. Here, the war on witchcraft reared its brutal head in the second half of the 17th century, closely following the upheaval of plague, fire, civil strife and fishing industry decline. In 1661 two elderly Lowestoft widows, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, found themselves suspected and accused of being witches. The allegations made against them included making children vomit pins and nails, infesting a man with lice, causing a cart to collapse and a chimney to fall down as well as causing a toad to fall out of a child’s blanket then vanish and hiss in the fire. 3 At the Lent Assizes held at Bury St. Edmunds on March 13th 1662 both were found guilty and hanged upon the Thinghow — originally a tumulus or burial mound situated on the healthland outside the North gate of the town. The prominence of Denny and Cullender’s fate was far reaching as the use of ‘Spectral Evidence’ in the trial (evidence based on dreams and visions) became a model for the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts when the magistrates were looking for proof that such evidence could be used within a court of law.

The imagination feeds on the essences of history, its rotting timbres, the stumps of its gibbets ...

The story of these two women brought me to the area. With the Suffolk landscape permeated by wyrd histories there is no shortage of stories here to unearth, entangle and re-bury. Memories as scars here are multisensorial, despite the banality of some scenes beneath the surface are endless triggers to the imagination. Looking closely underfoot and into the undergrowth I begin a journey seeking out the ‘un-signposted remains’ that deter from the path of heritage history and ask questions of that which can be felt ... heard … but not necessarily not seen.