The Ruins

By Ben Tufnell:

Traveling north, the vast skies, marshes and glittering lakes of Corrientes province slowly give way to endless forest. There are winding red rivers and rule-straight logging roads and, as the horizon disappears, it becomes almost impossible to orient oneself. What towns there are resemble ribbons festooned along the edges of the highways.

Here, it is said, deep in the forest, the author Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) slowly lost his mind. Here, you are a long way from Buenos Aires or Montevideo and everything is tenuous. Life is fragile. Quiroga loved the jungle but understood that his presence there was at best contingent. In brilliant stories such as ‘Drifting’ (1912) and ‘The Dead Man’ (1920) he wrote of a constant and unceasing conflict between man and nature. He wrote of suffering, of life right at the edge of things. After his first wife committed suicide by taking poison and his second wife left him, Quiroga reportedly filled his empty swimming pool with snakes. I imagine him sitting on the veranda of the wooden house he has built with his own hands, in the middle of the forest, contemplating that febrile spectacle, a boiling, writhing mass of serpents.

Quiroga later committed suicide himself. Both his children killed themselves. These facts are like scenes from his own fiction. The river runs as red as blood, there are bird-eating spiders in the trees and there are hundreds of snakes in the swimming pool. 

Travelling north, the air grows hotter and more humid. We took Ruta 12 north from Posadas to one of the most spectacular places in South America, the Iguazu Falls. The Rio Parana and the Rio Iguazu and the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all converge here. The jungle here is improbably dense, excessively verdant, the air heavy with moisture and filled with the fluttering of masses of huge and kaleidoscopically coloured butterflies. Capuchin monkeys laugh hysterically in the forest canopy. The falls themselves are vast, overwhelmingly so. The roar of the waters is deafening.

This is Misiones province. In the seventeenth century it was one of the strongholds of the Jesuit faith in South America. At their peak the Jesuits had twelve major missions scattered across the region, each with populations in the thousands. They were eventually expelled from Argentina in 1767 and, hidden by the jungle, their cities succumbed, as all things must, to decay. Now, the very idea of the missions seems not only foolhardy but inherently doomed. The landscape ensured that the project was shadowed with failure from the very moment of its first imagining.

The biggest ruins are at San Ignacio, a few hours south of Iguazu, and they are justly famous, a must-see for any visitor to the region. Well-cleared and restored, one can wander through what must once have been a considerable town. There are the remains of many houses. There are information panels about life in the mission. And one can wander through the nave of the huge red sandstone church, now open to the sky, and admire the fig, olive, orange and lemon trees that continue to flourish amidst the crumbling stones.

But while the ruins of San Ignacio are the biggest and best maintained, a few miles south, down a red dirt track leading into the forest, we discovered a site that, although much smaller, was, in many ways, more affecting, and which seemed somehow to better illuminate the conflict between man and nature which so preoccupied Quiroga. 

The Santa Luisa Mission was founded in 1633 and, alongside the Jesuit brothers, was home to some two thousand Guarani Indians. Deserted in the eighteenth century it was soon overrun by the jungle and forgotten. 

This is a place in flux, where the principle of entropy is made visible. The site had been cleared, mostly, not long before our visit, and there is even a small (and empty) visitor centre, but the jungle was already reasserting itself. One of the first things we saw were the roots of a tree curling through the stones of an ancient wall and breaking it apart in imperceptible slow motion.

The site has been cleared, revealing its profound dereliction, but nothing has been reconstructed. A few fragile walls have been secured with wooden scaffolds but nothing more. And because of this it is extraordinarily evocative. The main square and the broken spine of the church are mostly clear of forest but everywhere else is doubtful. In comparison, San Ignacio seems too tidy. Santa Luisa,  a ruined city in the middle of the jungle, could be a setting for a tale by Lovecraft or Borges (and of course the blind librarian was much in my mind during my travels in his country). Creepers cover every surface, gripping and pulling. There is incredible heat and humidity and a very strange kind of stillness. The forest was quiet, as if waiting.

Away from the main square everything is overgrown, is being overgrown. Santa Luisa is a place simultaneously taken from the jungle and being reclaimed by the jungle. The cracks widen. Huge flowers bloom, briefly. Things are drifting back into the entropic zone. It is impossible to tell where the old Jesuit mission ends and the jungle begins. I didn’t – couldn’t – go far enough into the undergrowth to determine that precise border. Thick spider’s webs were stretched between the trees and I turned back when I noticed the husks of some huge and grotesque looking insects, as big as my hands, clinging to the underside of a branch that barred my passage.

The old cemetery is the eeriest part of the site.  The locals continued to use it until the 1960s and it is dense with graves, tombs, and even grand crypts, all now  derelict. Dragon’s Teeth forces up through the graves. The once ornate tombs are broken open. The beautiful ironwork and stone carvings are now embellished with gripping tendrils of the very foliage they were meant to imitate. A steady humming of insects fills the air. Wasps nest in crypts filled with impenetrable shadows and dusted webs. Broken coffins are glimpsed through the wrought gates of the big family mausoleums, the heavy wooden doors long since rotted away. Flowers, creepers, vines cover every wall. Even in the bright sunlight, it is an unnerving spectacle. An old skull, missing its jawbone, dislodged by the ongoing collapse, had rolled from one decrepit sanctuary and lay in my path. 

I wondered what it must have been like for the priests, their pale European skin blistered by the unceasing glare of the sun. How did they cope with the always encroaching darkness of the forest, the spiders and snakes concealed within every shadow, the overwhelming heat and humidity? How did they keep faith when His work seemed to be constantly undoing their best efforts?

It was clear to me that if the caretakers stopped maintaining the square and the broken church, it would be only moments before the jungle completely enclosed and obliterated the site, breaking down the ruins and pulling them back into the red earth.

We were not there long. We looked around together and then I wandered off to the edge of the site, where it was difficult to tell if I was still in the site. When I looked back I saw that C had crossed the square and was making her way back down the track towards the car. She passed out of sight and I was alone. There was silence. Or rather there wasn’t silence, for the forest is always busy, but there was a focussing. I became overwhelmed by my thoughts; I was aware of simultaneous registers of time (a sensation not unlike a fissure opening at what Robert Smithson once called ‘the cracking limits of the brain’). Undoubtedly, I was affected by the heat, the long drive, the ruination, the tropical Gothic of the cemetery, the pool of snakes, the blood red river, the huge waterfalls and the vast whirlpool that lies at their base. Standing there, a few minutes seemed to stretch like hours, years. I felt I could almost see the forest creeping forward, tightening its grip on the shattered brickwork, bright flowers like fresh wounds blooming and fading.

I saw that I was looking down into an open tomb. The sunlight at my back was so bright and the contrast with the inky darkness inside so extreme that there was an astonishing contrast, so that the shadows within that grim enclosure seemed to be solid. And I had the idea that I was looking through a point, a punctum, in its surface. I thought then of the Aleph, described by Carlos Argentino in Borges’s account as ‘the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending…’ For it seemed to me I could then see before me the unfolding of this place over time, from primordial swamp, filled with ferns, mosses and small crawling things, to the gradual encroachment of the forest and the eventual arrival of the missionaries (I saw their terrified passage deep into the unknown interior of dessicated deserts, fugal marshes and evil forests) and even the birth and death of the lizards, insects and trees, all those things that were here and now. 

The Aleph was not an opening. Carlos Argentino himself described it as ‘a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance.’ He attempted the impossible task of writing down what he saw:

‘At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.’ 

This mysterious object was located in the basement of an old house in Garay Street in Buenos Aires, now long vanished. We had been there, of course, and to Borges’s house too, hoping to discover some vague trace but finding, inevitably, nothing.

But now, in the jungle amidst the ruins, staring into that dark tomb, I had, just for the most fleeting moment, a glimpse of the Aleph (or of a kind of Aleph, for Borges himself said that he thought the one in Buenos Aires was a false one, and that there might be many). It was gone as soon as it was present. And then the darkness was only darkness again. I walked slowly onwards, wading through a warm viscous liquid: time itself. I saw human activity, the jungle, each assimilating the other again and again, not erasing the past but absorbing it. Endless and infinite cycles.

Something large moved in the forest. I had the weird notion that if I saw what it was, my reason would give way, would crack; for I fully expected a great and ancient lizard to come lumbering out of the undergrowth. Shuddering, I quickly made my way back through the trees to the main square, where the full sun had now attained an infernal intensity. Huge birds (or were they pterodactyls?) flapped wearily into the sky from the tops of some of the trees. I passed through the crumbling gateway and down the dirt track, past the empty information centre and back to the car, where C was waiting. Behind me the whole site shimmered in the heat, like a reflection in oil, unsteady. Already I was wondering if I had dreamt it.

I started the car in silence, drove us back along the track onto Ruta 12, and we headed north.

***

Ben Tufnell is a curator and writer based in London. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on art forms that engage with landscape and the environment. His most recent book is In Land: Writings About Land Art And Its Legacies (Zero Books, 2019).

On Place and Time

By Ian Grosz:

‘What am I doing here?’ I asked myself, emerging from the trees as the lady from the house whose grounds I was rummaging around in, politely pointed out that while under Scottish laws of trespass I’d every right to be there, I had parked on her lawn. She raised an accusing finger toward my camper van left on a patch of grass clear of what I took to be the entrance to her property and the narrow lane leading up to it. 

I had left the van beyond a large stone wall and gateway that looked to me like an obvious boundary. It’s true I had crossed that boundary on foot to gain access to a ruined mausoleum that lay in the trees just on the other side, and adjacent to the property, but I hadn’t thought the property extended to the mausoleum or the access road leading up to it. I apologised and told her as much by way of inadequate explanation, telling her I’d move the van. She nodded gruffly, turned, and began her long and dignified walk back to her large steel-framed house just visible beyond the trees. 

This was in the tiny farming hamlet of Bethelnie where I’d come to look for the visible traces of lost and half-forgotten histories, a pattern I was beginning to repeat at various places all over Aberdeenshire. Bethelnie, according to the Banffshire courier of December 1893, comes from the word bethnathalan, meaning house of Nathalan because of a church Saint Nathalan is supposed to have established here, after which, the parish of my home turf was once named. The mausoleum still extant houses the medieval remains of the Seton, Urquhart and Meldrum family lines, dynasties that once gave the area its identity and can still be found in its place names. 

All trace of Saint Nathalan’s church has long-since vanished, but his legacy is retained in local folk memory. In the village where I live, there was a public holiday dedicated to him celebrated until the late 19th Century. An ash tree marks the spot where Saint Nathalan is said to have collapsed and died, having become exhausted through ridding the area of a plague by making a circuit of the district’s bounds on his knees, praying to God to spare its inhabitants. Where his staff of ash went into the ground as he fell, a holy spring came forth and an ash tree grew. The tree is known as the Parcock Tree, the current tree planted in the 1990s and replacing a much older tree that was said to have stood for over three-hundred years in the same spot, itself arising from a lineage of trees going back to the time of Nathalan in the Seventh Century. 

The holy spring at the site of the Parcock tree is long-gone, with only the trickling outflow of a drainage pipe that carries the run-off from a small hill nearby in its place. This far from holy water passes under the modern bypass that borders the site of Nathalan’s alleged demise, unlikely to be of any assistance in the modern pandemic that is playing itself out across the world. But up until the mid-twentieth century, local children would go there to play, drawn, perhaps, by the tales of Saint Nathalan and the spring’s legendary healing power. 

Outside the ruined mausoleum, possibly built on the site of Nathalan’s church, erratic gravestones span the 12th through 19th Centuries: layers of time and burial, records of forgotten people with only a long-ago placed stone and a fading inscription to tell us they were once here. Among them is the sad and simple inscription for Isabella Gordon-Hunter who died at the age of three, joined by her parents many years later; the three children of Arthur Sangster and his wife Elizabeth Smith: George aged eighteen, Ann aged eleven and Robert aged just seven years, all dying in the year 1837, perhaps due to the influenza outbreak of that year. The earliest stones, stretching back into the 12th Century, are barely readable. 

Stood amongst the trees and the graves, I felt I was intruding on not only the privacy of the property owners, but on the silent, layered gathering of the dead. Their witness to time’s unstoppable cruelty felt pressing. How many lives have passed and never been known? How many absences are there in our histories? What is so compelling about these absences? Why is it that what is not there, what is not known, is more compelling than what is? Is it simply mystery: our innate curiosity that always seeks out a puzzle? Or is it something else? 

Perhaps it is simply the knowledge that something was but is no longer. Through living inside of time – constrained by it – comes a need to try to reach the past, to somehow gain a tangible sense of a larger and continual process of collective loss from the landscape. But what is it I hope to gain by visiting the ghost-sites of these places? Is there some secret message to be found in picking up on their atmosphere, their mood, their sense of place, as though the air or the ground, the trees, the crumbling walls, the grave stones, might be encoded with a form of language that, if not difficult to discern, is like the sighting of a ghost itself: quite probably just a figment of imagination? Is there some additional information available that cannot be gleaned from a map and google? 

Presence in absence - knowledge of what was - however that’s communicated, imbues the landscape through a combination of imagination and literal sense. But what is it that we sense? We sense the air, feel the breeze on our faces, see the same contours in the hills and fields that others now absent once did, and this connects us through imagination. We begin to sense that the past is somehow more present, as though almost coexisting alongside our own time. It is like standing on the far side of a precipice that we wish to cross, and find there is a half-standing bridge that, while it doesn’t allow us to cross fully to the other side, closes some of the gap, brings the two sides of the divide closer together. 

In the book Senses of Place, the philosopher Edward Casey tells us that ‘space and time come together in place,’ by which he means that places are defined by event. They are simultaneously the where and when of things, and in this way they draw space and time into them. Experiencing them brings us closer to those who went before. We see their absence, but we feel their presence. We begin to hear their voices across the precipice of their time and ours. Perhaps it is time itself that I am grappling with, finding its most poignant expression in place, the unstoppable forward motion through which we perceive the world leaving me with a feeling of wanting to hold on to time, to pause and to dwell outside of its relentless march. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and as well as previously featuring on Elsewhere, is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

Misty Morning at Ash Slack

By Patrick Wright:

Mists of the East Ridings
through two embracing ash trees.
The moon was out, a pamplemousse moon.
Under black buds of nuinn
where moorland bled to slack,
I found lots of bird’s-foot-trefoil,
scented lily-of-the-valley –
my birth month flower –
and felled trees gone back to nature.
Seeds dropped to mulch near a disused railway line
where orchids grew.
Mysterious happenings. 

The grass didn’t grow
perhaps because of the industrial past.
Two embracing ash trees over a gate –
a kissing gate. A bicycle could fit.
It was Millington Wood
where every time I looked at the same bark
I saw a different face.
I assumed it was ghosts from
the Conservative Club who roamed
to and fro.
A well-managed wood with a burner,
wood sticks ricked around it,
dying Scandinavian oak, an Ogham book.  

Two ash trees embracing on a path –
Giacometti-like –
as I listened from my parrot cage.
Haunting canyon sounds.
By the trees was a beautiful ruined building
as if fallen off the sudden edge
of a moorland cliff.
Some of the structured bits could be sat on –
an agility course – steps to a steppe.
Black thickets of space,
hot burnt heather,
charcoal for miles and miles.

Patrick Wright has a poetry pamphlet, Nullaby, published by Eyewear (2017). A full collection will follow in 2019. His poems have been published in several magazines, most recently Wasafiri, The High Window, and The Reader. His work was also included in The Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 anthology, judged by Maggie Smith. He teaches Arts and Humanities at the Open University, and is studying towards a second PhD in Creative Writing.

Murphy Ranch, California

By James Horrox:

Tangled in the undergrowth of Rustic Canyon, a couple of miles’ walk north up the Sullivan Ridge fire road from the manicured absurdity of Pacific Palisades, lie the ruins of one of L.A.’s more unusual landmarks. Not much remains of Murphy Ranch these days – just a series of crumbling concrete foundations, twisted, burnt-out skeletons of abandoned buildings, and a weird atmosphere. For while the graffiti-tagged wreckage of yesterday’s industry is no rarity in the hills around the Los Angeles basin, cradle to so many wacko cults, failed utopias and botched attempts at the American dream, this is a ruin with a peculiarly ugly past.

Acquired in 1933 by one Jessie M. Murphy — presumed to be a pseudonym, given the absence of any other historical trace of such a character — during the 1930s the site was home to a group of Nazi sympathisers, led by a mysterious German known only by the name of ‘Herr Schmidt’. Convinced of the imminent fall of the United States to the forces of the Third Reich, so the story goes, Schmidt enlisted wealthy L.A. couple Norman and Winona Stephens and persuaded them to bankroll the construction of a self-sufficient stronghold in which they and a group of fellow travellers would sit out the war and prepare for the arrival of the conquering German army.

Nothing is known about this ‘Herr Schmidt’. Details of the Stephenses are hazy, but it seems that Norman was an engineer who had made a fortune in the Colorado silver mining industry, and Winona a Chicago heiress. A devotee of the occult, Winona was apparently enthralled by the mystical powers Schmidt purported to possess, and throughout the 1930s she and her husband shelled out millions of dollars on landscaping, architectural plans and construction to make his vision a reality.

Even from the ruins that remain today, overgrown and unkempt as they are, it’s clear that what Schmidt and his acolytes managed to create in Rustic Canyon was something quite astonishing in scale. Narrow concrete staircases snake up and down the hillside, once terraced and irrigated to harvest nut, fruit and olive trees, now thick with impenetrable undergrowth; a driveway lined with eucalyptus and cedar sweeps down through the estate from elaborate wrought iron entrance gates; lodged in the hillside at the base of the canyon is the arched exterior of what looks like a Mediterranean villa, the iconic façade of what was once a double-generator power station, now boarded up and plastered with layer upon layer of graffiti. Behind it, twisted in chaparral and vine, the rusting wreckage of a steel fuel tank towers thirty feet or more into the forest canopy.

The whole area – maybe a square mile or so – is scattered with foundations: raised gardens, outbuildings and other, unidentifiable structures of concrete, metal and stone. Much of the foliage consuming the ruins is conspicuously not native to this place: incense cedars, usually found higher up in the mountains; white oleander blooms; huge ornamental cacti, and the brilliant red bursts of bottlebrush growing out of cracked concrete terraces. Overhung with coast live oak and sycamore, the slumped, rotting carcass of a burnt-out stable building cuts a terrifying figure.

All this, however, was only the beginning of a much more ambitious enterprise. Over the course of the 1930s, several different architects from the Los Angeles area, including Welton Becket, designer of the Tower Records building in downtown L.A., and the African-American architect Paul Williams, were employed to draw up plans for what has been described as a “self-sustaining ‘utopia’ with a mansion fit for a world leader”. Their drawings, preserved in the Lloyd Wright collection at UCLA’s Young Research Library, contain elaborate designs for a palatial, four-story mansion, with numerous bedrooms, libraries and dining rooms, an underground gymnasium, an indoor pool and a communal area built around a grand central hall. The plan, some historians contend, was to build a Californian Berchtesgaden, in which to wait out the war and greet the Führer personally.

What exactly went on behind the compound’s barbed-wire perimeter during the 1930s is still a matter of speculation, but oral histories from local residents recall armed guards patrolling the canyon dressed in the uniform of the Silver Shirts — a white supremacist pro-Nazi group modelled on Hitler’s brownshirts, which had local chapters throughout southern California — and weekend gatherings during which the sound of gunfire and military exercises could be heard echoing through the canyon.

Whatever plans Schmidt and his associates had for Murphy Ranch were thwarted when, in 1941, following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the ranch was reportedly raided by federal agents and dozens of its 50 or so inhabitants arrested. The subsequent fate of the community’s members remains unknown, but whatever happened, the mansion was never built. By 1948, the Stephenses were living above a steel garage, nearing bankruptcy, and desperate to rid themselves of the property.

This was the conclusion of UCLA professor John Vincent, who purchased the site from them that year on behalf of the Huntington Hartford Foundation. With L.A. architect Lloyd Wright at the helm, the buildings were renovated and several new ones constructed, and in 1951 the complex opened its doors as a retreat for artists, writers, poets and musicians. Andrew Wyeth, Max Ernst, Charles Neider and Mark Van Doren would all at one time or another call the place their home. Ernst Toch composed his “Vanity of Vanities” at the retreat, and Ruth S. Wylie refined her String Quartet No. 3 there. The essayist Max Eastman was a resident for a while, as was Edward Hopper, whose painting “Western Motel”, now hanging in the Yale University Art Gallery, was completed there in 1957.

The Hartford complex closed in 1965, and the estate was subsequently put to various uses until, in 1978, it was ravaged by wildfires and finally abandoned. In the decades since, the ruins have become a playground for taggers and local pot-heads, hikers, ghosthunters, amateur historians and Nazis, and the air hangs thick with the stench of spraypaint and weed. Despite the City’s repeated threats to bulldoze the place, only a handful of structures have so far been demolished. The rest remains for time and nature to reclaim, a crumbling monument to the eternal return where wealth, hubris and the urge for mastery collide.

James Horrox is a freelance editor, originally from the north of England, now living on the coast of Southern California.

Am I Alone In Dreaming Of Rubble

By David Lewis:

I am walking through a blunt triangle of empty terraced streets, dominated by a long low red brick church, closed and boarded up; a hole in the boards allows local children to once again play in the church porch.  It is starting to get dark.

Twenty years ago, in a period of deep, isolated research, I began to have dreams about Liverpool.  I was studying the city’s churches, curious about how they define the city; how their spires contribute to the roofline, how their architecture dominates a street, how the city is changed on the date of their demolition.  I worked alone, spending weeks in the city’s Records Office poring over memoirs and old street plans.   Days were spent immersed in the stark and beautiful photographs of Liverpool in its Victorian prime, and in the dark and destructive 1960s when many of the city’s older churches were demolished.  I took many long journeys to find the sooty, bruised survivors, only to discover that this destruction was ongoing.  In some cases I arrived only days after the final clearance, to a raw slash in the urban landscape, a sense of wounded stone and dust settling.  I began to see all buildings as temporary, as part of a rolling history of the fabric of the city.  Lines began to blur. 

And I started to dream.  Carl Jung famously dreamed of the city; mine were more prosaic. They have always been short and in black and white, and fall into two categories.  In the first, I can see small details of the city - street corners, ruined walls, unnamed streets reduced to fields of rubble.  Some districts appear time and again; Edge Hill, Toxteth, Netherfield Road, places that have been in a radical process of decay and regeneration since the 1960s. I started to record the dreams as accurately as I could, in a staccato, notebook style.  Sometimes they help me remember more detail; in other cases they are all that is left of the dream. 

Unknown derelict dockland streets, ironwork, weeds, tall closed warehouses.  A steep cobbled street called St George’s Place, behind a railway station. Early morning. 

The dreams were fuelled by the photographs, but I came to realise that they were also reviving memories.  The Liverpool of my childhood was a city partly in ruins, and blitz-memories were still strong.  Older people talked of evacuation to north Wales, of nights in air-raid shelters, of bombers over the city.  The destruction continued after the war, when in a spurt of self-loathing the city demolished with a frenzy, and on car journeys to visit relatives in the northern reaches of the city I saw miles of cleared terraced streets.  In those days all gaps in the landscape were known as ‘bommies’, a word which meant bomb sites but also bonfires; urban folk memory overlapped urban function.  I had a recurring dream of a large square black building in the middle of a demolished city, a composite view of the boarded-up churches and barely-open pubs I saw on the disappearing streets of north Liverpool. 

In the other dreams, I see residential areas associated with my grandfather’s family.  Vincent Lewis was born in 1904, and grew up surrounded by family in the working-class streets of Liverpool 8.   As a child I knew many of the streets with family connections, and as an adult it was these places that began to appear in different dreams; sometimes in ruins, sometimes full of people, sometimes just streets of alleyways and tall brick walls. 

Cockburn Street in the early morning.  There are no cars and the street is deserted but I can see down another cleared street to the Mersey below me, gleaming silver.  Tall walls behind me. 

I came to realise that all these dreams, these blurrings of old photograph and old memory, are a creative response to the demolition of my grandfather’s city.  The books I have written on Liverpool are an attempt to understand and articulate the Victorian city that is gradually disappearing.  Yet the pace of urban evolution is so quick that one day all our familiar places will have gone or been radically changed and everyday memories, however commonplace, will have become history.  I still walk the vulnerable city as often as I can, exploring and recording amputated streets, stretches of cobble and redundant warehouses.  Often after these long walks I dream once more of the city in ruins, feeling now that our rubble dreams tell us more than we know.      

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

The War Memorial in the Sea

By David Lewis:

On a grey summer’s afternoon the Crosby beach is busy with holidaymakers.  The waterfront of Liverpool follows the great curve of the Mersey as it pours into the Irish Sea, but at Crosby the urban sprawl runs out of enthusiasm and is broken with open spaces – playing fields, parks, farms.  At the end of the long promenade there is a Lifeboat station, an ice cream van, a car park.  Here the long beach starts, the hard sands that run along the coast to the Lune river estuary fifty kilometres or so north.  This is a raw coastline.  The Irish Sea is a cold expanse of water, emptier than it once was, although the slow container ships still slip quietly in and out of Liverpool.  There are cruise ships now as well, vast white hotels drawn by the renaissance of the city centre.  Haunted by the cries of gulls, the coastline sprawls beneath vast mutating cloudscapes and feels wary and unpredictable. 

Beyond the Lifeguard station a low flat field of broken stones runs for two hundred, maybe three hundred metres along the shore.  At the beach’s edge the stones are slippery with seaweed; pools form among the stones, limpets colonise the surfaces.  It looks like builders’ rubble and most visitors ignore it in favour of Antony Gormley’s famous Another Place sculptures and the great expanse of hard golden sand.  But there is deep history here, old stories in these stones, there is remembrance, and there is forgetting.

Close up, this is unusual rubble; Victorian bricks dissolved by the salt water into gritty, lumpy, mosaic sand, chunks of sea-glass worn pale-grey and smooth, ancient bleached china electrical fittings. But the clue to this landscape does not lie in the bricks.  There are larger pieces; not uncut stones, not quarry-refuse, not landfill.  They are architecture. 

Some of these pieces are small, a metre long, but others are quite large – the size of a sofa, say, or an upright piano.  Some are hand-carved sandstone, deep flowers fading into sand; others are granite, untouched by seaweeds or limpets, as sharp as the day they left the mason’s yard in the 1870s.  Some have letters carved into them, a teasing suggestion of names and landmarks.  I have often wanted to identify the buildings they came from, through old photographs and architects’ plans.  Would it be possible to separate these small piles of loss back into individual buildings and fit them together like a sea-worn jigsaw puzzle?  Ultimately they could be restored to the street; the cornices and friezes, words and titles once again seventy feet above the pavements.  But what would this achieve?  Standing on the shore, this dream no longer seems possible or even desirable. 

These ruins were taken from the cityscape of Liverpool and especially Bootle, cleared after the terrible blitzkrieg unleashed by the Germans in 1940 and 1941.  Once these fragments were parts of banks, insurance offices and hotels, buildings which added dignity and strength to the streets.  Every stone comes from a bombed building, every brick comes from a bombed house, perhaps from a house where people died.  And so this long field of stones and bricks is a war memorial.  Not a solemn classical monument at the heart of the city, but a war memorial nevertheless.  4000 people died in Liverpool in the Blitz, and Bootle alone lost over 400.  This is an informal war memorial open to the elements, a war memorial washed twice a day by the tides, a war memorial covered in seaweed. There is no forced solemnity, no guards, no flags, no eternal flame.  No Dulce, no Decorum.  Children scramble over these ruins, they hunt for shrimps in the pools among the weedy stones, sit on the warm sand with their backs to giant lumps of the city.  Adults take pieces of brick as souvenirs, perhaps to remember the dead, perhaps remembering the war itself.  Most do not know the history of these fragments, these splinters of city.  It is irrelevant.  Nothing can be done to them without heavy machinery, no amount of souvenir hunters can damage the integrity of these stones and bricks.  Three hundred metres long, but how deep?  Without massive human interference, only time will fade these ruins.

At dusk in the summer the beach is clear.  This is not the Mediterranean; the cool air from the Irish Sea means that on the warmest day the heat does not linger.  The lights come on in Wallasey three kilometres away across the Mersey, and the ruins fade into the dusk again, as they have done every night since the late 1940s.  I do not think that this memorial-landscape should be formalised, protected, solemnised; this should be a quiet place to remember our unknown dead in a very Liverpool way, informal but never unserious, to the lament of waves running across the evening sands and gulls crying in a grey sky. 

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Ruin Renewal: Manchester's Upper Brook Chapel

Photo: Mark Dyer

By Mark Dyer:

Nestled amongst the busy hum of traffic and surrounding car garages, I noticed the crumbling remnants of the Upper Brook Chapel when I first moved to Manchester in 2014.  Recalling a ruin from a Turner painting, the roofless Neo-Gothic church never failed to strike wonder in me. As unopposed vines and vegetation encroached upon the sandstone columns, the elements mounted a relentless assault upon the exposed innards of the building. The open husk of the nave, like the splayed ribcage of a fossilised whale, provided ideal nesting space for winged critters, whilst the intact rose window hinted at its former glory.

A fascination with ruined structures is nothing new. Like the above-mentioned painter, I never fail to recognise the poignancy of man’s futile attempts to defy nature and time. It is a sentiment that fascinated the early modern period when confronted with the remnants of antiquity, through to John Ruskin and the Romantics who contemplated man’s relationship with nature. It could be said that my reaction to the Upper Brook Chapel was commonplace, expected even, or, simply, inevitable.

Then, in early 2016, development work on the Chapel began. According to the aptly named website ‘Saving the Chapel,’ [1] Manchester City Council agreed a proposal from developer Church Converts to renovate the building into micro flats. This involved relocating the Manchester Islamic Academy, who were leasing the attached Sunday School from the Council. By mid-2016, the scaffolding that would support and surround the structure during these developments was erected.

However, the east-facing façade of the Chapel, which I frequently passed, was bedecked with a denser layer of intricate metal. This method of scaffolding is known as Double Scaffolding and is commonly adopted for stone masonry to avoid drilling into the walls. This criss-cross thicket, belted on like a muzzle, transformed the humble chapel ruin into an iron basilica. From the pavement, I was confronted by a fortified cathedral whose stockade loomed above passing pedestrians and would-be invaders. Indeed, the St George’s flag raised on top of the monolith in June 2016 cemented the image of a battle-weary and battered bastion.

We might liken the braced edifice to more modern trends in architecture. Consider Fritz Höger’s Chilehaus, Hamburg; or the Grundtvigs Church, Copenhagen, designed by Peder Jensen-Klint and Kaare Klint. The bare metal of the scaffolding in particular evoked in me a dystopian imagining of Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, Paris, as if the glass had melted away in some unknown catastrophe. Whether a fortified citadel, a fragment of expressionist architecture, or the future bones of one of our cultural houses, the Upper Brook Chapel had certainly been transformed from its Gothic origins.

So, through the preservation and development of one ruin, we are presented with another, very different, sort of ruin. Robert Smithson conceived the idea of ‘ruins in reverse’ [2] whereby the apparatus and detritus of construction work will grow out of ruin into the finished building. But Upper Brook Chapel was already a ruin and has been made more ruinous, so how might we articulate what is occurring here? Ruin regeneration? Ruin renewal? Ideologically, we might understand such an activity to be part of and run in parallel with urban renewal and cleansing. Aesthetically, however, it appears to work in contrary motion. Presented with such a dichotomy, my interpretation of the Chapel was more nuanced than before the development work began. The preservation of heritage has resulted in a temporary ruin that is somehow more commanding, more socially engaged, and more representative of how ruin can challenge us in the 21st Century.

Illustration: Mark Dyer

Then, one evening, during the full throws of development, I chanced upon a particular sight. In the wake of fading twilight, where the inky sky provided a fitting backdrop to the obsidian basilica, a lone construction site lamp warmly permeated through the vacant double lancet window and surrounding labyrinth of iron. This simple scene, serendipitously witnessed, instantly transformed the imposing ruined monolith into a tender and reverent sanctum.

The gentle glow amidst the darkness gave an air of solemnity that the Chapel had not hosted in years, though this prompted an image of private worship or individual spiritualism as opposed to the institutional congregation.  Consequently, I was reminded of those forced to worship in secret, away from persecution in its many guises. Post-Reformation? Post-Referendum. A sanctuary for the minority, the unwanted, the forgotten. The St George’s flag erected during the EU vote now cast a more sinister shadow across the windswept parapet.

This asylum buried in the stone masonry in turn reminded me of Lud’s Church, Staffordshire, England; a natural chasm in the rock that provided a safe place of worship for the Lollards in the 15th Century [3]. Similar to Upper Brook Chapel, this cleft in the Peak District features towering columns of Millstone Grit rock festooned in lichen, a dizzying open skylight and a quiet aura of solemnity. However, instead of being carved by and into nature, the Chapel has been formed as a result of additive manmade processes to form a composite structure whose social and contextual recollections are multifaceted and era-spanning.

When the development work of Upper Brook Chapel is complete, the church-cum-mosque will host plush apartments for students and young professionals, lining the pockets of shrewd property owners, if not the Council itself. Whilst I appreciate the importance of preserving our architectural heritage and history, as well as the financial viability of sustaining derelict buildings for non-commercial purposes, should stone and mortar be prioritised above existing religious and social networks and relationships? Where will these people now seek sanctuary?

About the author:
Mark is a composer of concert and installation music. His primary artistic focus is the ‘musical ruin’: the quotation and fragmentation of existing music, that might elicit a feeling in the listener analogous to that experienced when visiting an architectural ruin. Mark has worked with ensembles such as Psappha, OUT-TAKE Ensemble and Collective31, and has published in the new music journal Tempo. In September 2017, Mark will begin a PhD in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, supported by an AHRC scholarship awarded by the North West Consortium DTP. Listen to his music at http://www.markdyercomposer.com/

Notes:
[1] Czero Developments. (2017) Saving the Chapel. [Online] [Accessed 27th February 2017] http://www.savingchapel.com
[2] Smithson, R. (2011) ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,’ In Dillon, B. (ed.) Ruins. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, p.49.
[3] Cressbrook Multimedia. (2017) Lud’s Church. [Online] [Accessed 28th February 2017] https://www.peakdistrictinformation.com/visits/ludschurch.php

The Great Ruins of Love Lane

Image: David Lewis

By David Lewis:

Cities are in a permanent process of evolution, fast or slow, and districts within a city change at different speeds, depending on investment, need, attitude.  Nowhere is this more evident than in Liverpool, which is no longer the crumbling monochrome city of the early Beatles photographs, but a modern holiday and conference destination.  Confidence roared through the city again from the late 1980s, building luxury hotels and celebrity-chef restaurants, revamping museums, opening new visitor attractions and developing the huge Liverpool One shopping development complex, a shopping mall in the heart of the city. 

A slower, more varied pace of change can be seen in the 1840s docklands north of the city centre, which have evolved since 1945 through bomb damage, obsolescence and redundancy.  This has left a bruised landscape of old warehouses and railway yards, closed pubs and overgrown vacant lots.  There is silence here, and sunlight, and huge empty skies.  The Mersey is never far away.

It is precisely this neglect that makes the docklands vulnerable to development.  Slowly, with altered attitudes, the pace of change is quickening and the confidence is spreading northwards.  New uses have been found for giant survivors; Jesse Hartley’s Stanley Dock buildings have become the Titanic Hotel, and the hulking Tobacco Warehouse next door, once the largest brick building in the world, is being converted into urban apartments.  

Image: David Lewis

I walk these streets now with a new sense of urgency.  Blackstone Street, Cotton Street, Saltney Street, Dublin Street - I am at home here, clearing street dust to discover cobble or street railway, granite kerb, a softness of old sandstone.  These ground-level Victorian ruins add colour – rusts and steel blue-greys – to the streets.  Old Liverpool is a city of brick, and walls snake through the old districts; ubiquitous and invisible, shiny red or gleaming hard blue-grey; heavily sooted, organic, hand-made.  On the oldest warehouses the brick folds into narrow doorways and narrow barred windows capped with sandstone or rusted iron.  The bricks and mortar have flaked away after 170 years of river weather, but these structures add fluidity and definition to the city and warm colour – chalky reds, dark blues – to the streets.  Each brick was hand-laid decades ago, on bright days or damp days, sooted with river fogs and steam-smuts or laid in warm sunshine as the city roared north along the river; brick by brick, wall by wall, street by street.

This hinterland is full of oddity and unexpected glories.  Gateposts, fragments of walls, arches in stone or brick, monolithic survivors like ruined sandcastles left behind by the tide.  Some have found new uses and stand, silent and dominant, in new fences, new boundaries.  There are also ghost places, vacant lots full of buddleia and butterflies which once housed large railway yards or churches, their histories forgotten.  Nothing survives of the Martyrs’ Church, St. Augustine’s on Chadwick Street; nothing survives of the giant goods stations of Waterloo, Great Howard Street, or Canada Dock, apart from stumped walls and fragments of story. 

Ruins can be invisible here.  Love Lane lies beyond the huge railway arches carrying commuter trains up the coast, and is connected to whole streets of redundancy, truly empty places, scenes for a car chase or a clandestine meeting, film sets for unmade films.  Sprainger Street, Little Howard Street, streets of walls and graffiti, windows and doors bricked up, more buddleia and more grasses, silence, a beautiful decay.  Nobody seems to be here. The air smells of rotting rubbish, vegetation and illegally-dumped engine oil.  At night the few streetlights illuminate the darkness rather than dispel it, sending a weak light spilling across the cobbles to create great polygonal slabs of velvet darkness.  These lost streets are dominated by the amputated, hacked remains of another railway viaduct, overgrown and crumbling, a lost route to the lost station of Liverpool Exchange.  The bricklayers’ art has created great swirls of brick, smooth and close-fitting like dragon scales or armour.  These arches are muscular, seeming to crouch, tense and full of unexpressed energy.  They have the deep calm of gigantic Roman ruins, solid and seemingly permanent. 

Image: David Lewis

And yet these old walls, these folds of brick and obsolete arches, are increasingly vulnerable.  A grandiose, long-term plan called Liverpool Waters is promising apartment blocks, and open squares of bars, restaurants and shops along the waterfront.  Everton Football Club have confirmed a £300m move from Goodison Park to the Bramley-Moore Dock.  At ground level, the Ten Streets project will deliver new work/living spaces, renovated buildings, more public space. 

I believe that cities need dark streets and grey areas, places of awkward, disjointed history and ambivalence.  Cities need to regenerate periodically, but they also need the old, the quiet, the derelict, a sense of faded history.  Is it not possible to have rough edges to our cities, dark corners, un-developments?  We should be able to discover something of our cities for ourselves; not everything should be signposted.  Perhaps these old streets are where the city has most potential, perhaps these scraps of buildings and stumps of walls remind us that all things are possible within a city; perhaps without decay there can be no sense of potential, and ultimately no regeneration.  Our ruins should be left to their decay. 

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter