Now, it’s not that I’m obsessed with tea or anything…

This is an hour’s work using just pen, paper and iphone- then chucked into Photoshop. Now I’m imagining an entire day and what we could do with it.

Sometimes it’s helpful when it rains.

This project couldn’t really have been better suited to me- map drawing, community and historical geekery all rolled into one. It’s an exercise in creating history visible in a way which is designed to reinforce a sense of local pride and identity.

The fine people at the Rushey Green Residents’ Committee were the ones handing over the completed content this time around, but in future I think I might initiate the research myself. Gotta love archive snooping and interviewing history buffs.

It’s a drizzly day in South East London, and I’m weaving my way through the mazes of Lewisham’s council estates, which only seem to amplify the weather. The homogenous grey terraces and flat blocks are grey in both colour and nature. I’m on my way to Catford, and the Excalibur Estate.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the Excalibur Estate- where the streets are named after Arthurian legend- it is the largest remaining post-war prefab community in Europe, and the only one left in London. Built in 1948 by German and Italian prisoners of war to rehouse those left homeless by the blitz, the prefabs were designed to last between 10-15 years, but after more than sixty, they’re still standing- and so is the community that has grown up around them.
Despite six years of tireless campaigning by local residents and English Heritage, the future of Excalibur is looking bleak. The council have approved plans to ‘regenerate’ the estate- the historical prefabs will be torn down, to make way for yet another block of flats.

Jim and Lorraine Blackender formed the Worried Tenants Group in opposition to the proposed demolition of their community, and kindly invited me into their (beautiful) home. They have been living in their prefab on Excalibur for twenty years, but the last six years have been a whirlwind of bureaucracy, media hype and worry. The thing is, this is more than a bunch of prefab homes, more than an marker of working-class history, more than roof over their heads- this is a thriving community, and the most exceptional phenomenon of neighbourliness remaining in what is our frequently alienated city. There are generations of families living alongside each other. Some residents have been here since the estate was erected. It has such a low crime rate that the police no longer even bother to patrol here, and kids can play safely in the street- parents comforted by the fact that there will always be a pair of friendly eyes to watch over them.

The residents of Excalibur are bound together by the history of the estate, as well as the buildings themselves. The buildings are what make the community- and despite Lewisham councils assurances that it will keep the community together after demolition- Jim and Lorraine know that the reality will be just another council estate with all the distrust, alienation and crime that that brings with it.

“There are waiting lists of people who want to live in a prefab on the estate. In the council flats across the road the waiting list is to get out.”

You can read all about the efforts being made to rescue the Excalibur estate at Jim’s campaign website as well as in numerous national press articles from the past few years (just Google search).

My project to date has been about investigating communities. Why do we have such successful tight-knit communities out in the sticks (where I’m from) and yet in the cities any sense of human significance is lost? The Excalibur estate shows that communities can and do exist within the city limits, and they’re as wonderful if not better than anything you’ll find in the countryside.There are people who dedicate their lives to conserving, rescuing, and building communities every day, but their stories and their efforts are disappearing into the mists of time- just like our sense of neighbourliness.

History frames and contextualises our sense of place- our sense of each other. Maybe we’re making the wrong kind of history memorable. What if what’s available in the history books and museums isn’t good enough? Fuck the hard facts of battle dates and grandiose architecture, this is what really matters. This is the kind of history that’s relevant.

And if we don’t know about it, if we are unaware that there is anything there to preserve, then who is going to do anything about it?

My mission is hence to tell the stories of the communities and individuals who are struggling tirelessly against the individualism and distrust that thrives. They are still here, they do deserve our attention. I’m going to help them get it.

His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin

But, if I go on like this the word count of this blog post will be longer than my dissertation.

So what follows is a very brief summary of how my project has changed and evolved over the last two weeks or so. I really hope it makes sense…

Last week I wrote a bit about Urban myth and legend, having been interested in Nessie and the Black Shuck of Norfolk/Suffolk. I came to wondering about how a character comes to exist on a level of communal consciousness, and how a locality’s desire to make tangible some recognition of its existance- within their minds- results in a system of half-belief: we know it’s not real yet we like to treat it as though it could be. In other words, we’d like to remember it that way. In Bungay, the local running club is named after a hell-hound.

“The long-term reproduction of a neighbourhood that is simultaneously practiced, valued and taken-for-granted depends on the seamless interaction of localised spaces and times with local subjects possessed of the knowledge to reproduce locality.” (Appadurai, 1996)

From here, I’ve become extremely interested in collective memory, knowledge and remembering. I’ve already discovered a lot of evidence that suggests that familiarity within our environments (knowing the history, people, stories and physical spaces) precipitates contentedness and community. It is almost certainly this that makes the tight-knit rural communities of England seem so ideal. They visualise and mark their history, they tell stories and talk about local heroes and gossip. Adapting Marx: “local knowledge is not only in itself, but of itself.”

So I’ve been investigating communal knowledge, memory (Benedict Anderson has some wonderful things to say on the subject of Imagined Communities) and nostalgia. Why and how we preserve and value the past, and ways in which we live our history alongside our present.

Aaghh, if I hadn’t left this post so long I would detail my visits to Dennis Sevvers’ house and Museum of London as well as my interview with a Medieval reenactor, but it will take forever…

Thinking about ways in which we memorialise things, I read a lovely quote by the lovely Stephen Fry: “We all pay lip service to the idea that yesterday makes today, but it is difficult to make the imaginative leap that truly connects us to our past… Blue Plaques, in their simple way, address this defect… for me, they are a unique imaginative portal into the past, for in my mind all Blue Plaques are contemporaneous, which is to say, the people commemorated by them are in their buildings now.”

I love the blue plaque scheme too, but equally am always left faintly under-satisfied whenever I don’t know who someone is, or their situation while they lived there. What if we could make their history more real, more visible?

After my visit to the Museum of London, seeing their London’s Voices projects and also discovering the work of somewhere.org and Tom Hunter and James McKinnon’s The Ghetto, I’ve become more interested in the idea of subjective histories or stories becoming part of a general community memory or consciousness. In Robbie (the medieval reenactor)’s words: The battle takes shape through a “multiplicity of subjective curators”. And in the same way, a picture of a history (accurate or not) is painted on a woven tapestry of personal reminiscence. I LOVE this.

All of these thoughts and ideas are very much in their emryonic stages at this point, but I’m feeling pretty good about this.

My mantra has become ‘Stories are inclusive’. Now I just need to find some stories!

]]> http://harrietmcdougall.com/wordpress/back-on-the-blog-horse/feed/ 1242 http://harrietmcdougall.com/wordpress/just-for-now/ http://harrietmcdougall.com/wordpress/just-for-now/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 13:36:16 +0000 Harriet http://harrietmcdougall.com/wordpress/?p=354

“…Jameson was bold to link the politics of nostalgia to the postmodern commodity sensibility, and surely he was right (1983). The drug wars in Colombia recapitulate the tropical sweat of Vietnam, with Ollie North and his succession of masks- Jimmy Stewart concealing John Wayne concealing Spiro Agnew and all of them transmogrifying into Sylvester Stallone, who wins in Afghanistan- thus simultaneously fulfilling the secret American envy of Soviet imperialism and the rerun (this time with a happy ending) of the Vietnam war. The Rolling Stones, approaching their fifties, gyrate before eighteen-year-olds who do not appear to need the machinery of nostalgia to be sold their parents’ heroes. Paul McCartney is selling the Beatles to a new audience by hitching his oblique nostalgia to their desire for the new that smacks of the old.”

Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai (1996)

If the population of Britain’s countryside continues to grow at such an alarming rate (3x the rate of urban environments) and if we continue to aspire to a ‘simple, quiet’ life in the country, it’s not going to be too long until what remains of the rural idyll captured in the national mind’s eye is nothing but a story. A myth left over to tell the grandchildren about. It’s already happening.

I watched this the other day. It featured a village whose history spanned a thousand years, and in the 1930s featured in a movie showcasing it as a rural utopia- the perfect escape for the middle classes. Years on, the programme takes a look at the same village, talking to a farmer whose old cow-shed is now a £700,000 barn conversion and a city-worker whose two-hour commute home at night crosses paths with a local builder who can trace his family back through the village six generations as he returns to town- no longer able to afford to live the picturesque ideal that is his heritage.

I know I’ve already rambled about the genius of Will Self’s The Book of Dave a few times, but I dragged it out yet again to have a look through the maps in the front. Visions of London underwater at an indeterminable point in the future. It’s full of social and cultural references to the present day. Misremembered and misinterpreted scraps of information and tradition that live on in a broken, fragmented kind of way amidst the new, future culture of Ing (England).

Why do we reflect on lost times and ways of life and elevate them as ideals? Why will yesterday always seem better than today? Countless historical sites stage historic reenactments. Kentwell Hall in Suffolk is the first that springs to mind. During the summer months, they employ around 70 full-time Tudors who work the land and run the house as they did in the 1500s. Tales of a lost time, when things were simple, folks worked hard and were happy, and wore silly costumes and spoke silly words.

I remember visiting Kentwell Hall on a school trip when I was really small. Completely overwhelmed with the place, my childhood imagination reveled in the idea that I had actually been transported back in time; that these people were actual Tudors. It was wonderful… until I spotted the strip lighting on the ceiling inside one of the cattle sheds. The boards covering it over had not been replaced properly, and the illusion of my escape into another time was shattered.

In as little as thirty years time, it’s likely what remains of the culture and traditions of the Countryside will have been warped beyond all recognition. After all, its the people that these qualities live through- not a tangible landscape or object. So, in our future attempts to uncover the lost vision of Britain’s countryside what assumptions will we make about it? Will the children of 2050 sit through an granny-style afternoon tea or a Harvest Festival with the same detatched sense of awe that I felt about the ladies churning the butter in Kentwell gardens? Will it be the same? And what form will our idealised communities now take? We’re already stumbling into a future where idealised rural-living is artificial, misplaced and misinterpreted (like this), so what will they look like by then?

God of all things good, Russell Davies had a great idea with his Lyddle End project, where he took the charming railway models of fictional picturesque Lyddle End village and asked artists and designers to remodel them as they’ll look in 2050. I love this idea that the chinese-whisper effect of history will contort the recognised into something alien. Also, read this. Oh, isn’t he so very clever?

So, more stuff to look into. I want to find out more about these funny folks who dress up and relive history in a variety of weird and wonderful ways, and just why they do it. The escapist element is obvious, as is the nostalgic one. But I’m mostly interested in the inaccuracies of what they do. The fuck-ups and faux-pas of the reenactments. Is it the accuracy that matters to them? Or just the illusion that they have- just for a short time- the undesirables of living life today.

If anyone reads this (in my optomism that anyone makes it this far through my rambling) and has any suggestions for reenactment events or venues, or better- knows anyone who likes to get dressed up and have sword-fights I’d love to hear from them. The closest I’ve come to experiencing this was my 18-month flirt with WOW. And I don’t think that quite counts…

With a bit of a prompt from Onkar, I’ve been researching the systems through which myths and folklore of ‘oldentimes’ (lovely expression) manifest themselves in present day. The Loch Ness monster is an obvious example. The Loch Ness lake has built up an enormous tourist economy based predominantly around the legend of the monster (though I’m certain local residents and business-people are sick of it).

It didn’t take long to dredge up some pretty rancid tourist crap on the subject. Loch Ness now features a ‘nessie’ tour and Loch Ness Monster exhibition centre, all dedicated to the history of the mythic beast and the countless fruitless searches for him.

And so, Nessie- imagined or not- lives on in the consciousness of the American tourists who go on his tours and buy his mundane merchandise, the forlorn creature-seekers who sought [the money and accreditation in discovering] him, and the weary tradespeople who capitalise upon him. Is this all the capacity we have for myth and legend in a cynical age?

I thought it might be interesting to look into something a little bit closer to home. The legend of Black Shuck. The stuff of East Anglian legend.

The Black Shuck is a great Black Dog with saucer-like, flaming malevolent eyes who roams the coasts and lonely tracks of Norfolk and Suffolk. He made his first recorded appearance was at 9am on August 4 1577 in St. Mary’s Church, Bungay. Abraham Fleming’s description in his book A Straunge and Terrible Wunder is amazing:

“This black dog, or the divel in such a linenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a mome[n]t where they kneeled, they stra[n]gely dyed.”

As the tale goes, the church tower collapsed in on itself and the beastie then ran up the pulpit, disappearing in fire and lightning and leaving scorched claw-marks on the Northern Doors which can still be seen at the church today.

The tale has become ingrained in Norfolk/Suffolk culture, but not only that- the Black Shuck has appeared in many other works of fiction and fantasy since. Most memorably, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, which he wrote while staying at Cromer Hall, the sight of one of the more famous subsequent sightings of the dog. He’s also popped up in a few comics (Hector Plasm, 2000ad’s London Falling, Supernatural: Origins), fantasy books (Northern Lights, The Age of Misrule, Harry Potter), a musical play (The Storm Hound by Betty Roe and Marian Lines), and had songs written about him (Nick Drake’s Black-Eyed Dog, The Darkness’ Black Shuck). Apparently he’s even a boss in both MMORPG Lusternia and Final Fantasy XI!

It made me think of this appalling set of images found in the kiddies’ section of Nessieland.com:

It’s interesting that we treat these stories like public property- no copyright law applies here. We have the right to take the characters and brazenly plonk them into any scenario, medium or context we like. It’s almost as if Nessie- as well as Black Shuck- exist on a plain of National consciousness, inhabiting the public imagination. After all, isn’t that how the myths and legends bred in the first place?

There have been no less than a further 153 supposed encounters with the legendary Black Shuck since it first appeared in Bungay in the 16th century. And there is a man who has collected and documented every single one of them. I mapped them. Why not?

Mike Burgess is the man, and wow- what a man. Not only has he recorded, edited, interviewed and categorised his way through every single one of these 153 tales, he has written about the misconceived similarities between Shuck and other beasties (such as the ghosts of people’s pets, the Moddey Dhoo and the Snarleyow), and origins of the legend being from the Vikings (their’s is different). As well as this he has collected and analysed data of all the recorded encounters and legends and written a five-part essay entitled (gloriously): Analysing the Hell out of the Beast.

This actually helped to distract me from my original Shuck fact-finding mission. Just who are these people? These myth-seekers and fantasy-detectives who are so fascinated and become so obsessed with myths and folklore. Another method of escaping a hard and cynical world- harking back to the days of ghosts and monsters. It’s made me want to watch Mythbusters, actually.  After all… what’s not interesting about this man?

…. just some stuff to think about.

I’m having what you might call a ‘hiccup’. It’s been an odd week. I crashed my car which wrote Tuesday off (amongst other things), and Wednesday I gave my Territories presentation. Possibly the worst presentation of my life I might add- I hadn’t practiced and the allotted five minutes ran into fifteen. Shit. Now I have a cold. And all I seem capable of doing is sitting in bed thinking myself into holes.

This is going to be another one of those trail-of-thought honesty rants. Advance apologies.

The feedback from my (dire) presentation made me realise a few things:
a) Urban chintz and decoration has been done to death. And better than I could ever do it, by him, him and these guys.
b) Villages already exist in London (well, I already knew this but have been resisting it) so what point am I trying to make by blending these aesthetics?
c) I’m looking too big, I need to design for something/someone specific.
d) I need to establish a user.

and aside from all of this,

I STILL CAN’T GET FLIPPING MAPS OUT OF MY HEAD.

What is it exactly I’m trying to achieve here? What am I originally interested in about villages?

• Engagement with your environment and how it shapes your identity, and the ties we form with the physical landscape.
• British identity and nostalgia- why is it so wrapped up in the image of the countryside?
• Collective memory- stories and events exclusive to a community that help make it unique.

The other day I found this:

It’s a map of Deptford and New Cross from 1840. As it turns out, most of it was still fields back then. A village overspill of London, if you like. It made me realise- on a deeper level- the history and human-ness that is all around and yet completely invisible to me. I realised also, that any sense of belonging to a place comes from familiarity, and the memories that bind themselves to the physicality of the world around you.

I have already discovered that happiness and contentment within your environment comes from familiarity, and the nostalgia of lost memories. I conducted a small survey (and by small, I mean 20 people or so) a couple of weeks ago, and the results showed that a person will almost always remember being happier in the place they grew up- the place where all the relationships are already formed. Reminiscent nostalgia.

Some other research I’ve found particularly interesting is the overwhelming tendency for the elderly to retire to the countryside. The inherent nostalgia of the place beckons even those that have never set foot outside a city before. And according to the reading I’ve been doing on various retirement forums, a lot of the time the new environment- away from familiar sights and relationships, friends and families- can result in some unhappy twilight years.

So. With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking there could be a lot of potential in talking to London’s elderly population. Why are so many inclined to leave? What are the perks or problems of being retired in the city? What has changed? All of these could open fantastic potential avenues for design, but essentially, I just want to hear their stories. If community life is entangled in memory, then can’t I somehow borrow somebody else’s? What if I could make these stories and memories tangible?

So then I started thinking- how can you make a memory physical?

Here is a map of my childhood memories. Not the memories themselves per cé, but the locations I find them enveloped in. It in no way represents geographical accuracy, but it means familiarity: locations functioning as thought-anchors for my reminiscences. I find this concept of psycho-geography fascinating.

What if I could make maps of nostalgia. Telling tales about London from the people who’ve grown old here. Could this somehow work to transfer reminiscent affection from its origin to a new user, to help nurture a sense of familiarity, and thus community and contentment?

My head hurts. And this is a big tangent. Is this wrong? I don’t know… but I’m still retaining my core themes: Environment and familiarity, nostalgia and romance. It’s just not quite Villages any more is it?