The cross in the Edgelands

Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully managed wilderness areas and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists, places where ruderals familiar here since the last ice sheets retreated have found a way to live with each successive wave of new arrivals, places where the city's dirty secrets are laid bare, and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside our nostalgia for places we've never really known and see them afresh.

I've just finished reading Edgelands, a wondrous contemplation of England's peripheral places by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. Given that the territory of these two writers is the same arena through which I have done so much wandering in my life -  the  edgelands between Liverpool and  Manchester, the post-industrial wastes  beside the East Lancs Road, Manchester Ship Canal, M62 - I was bound to enjoy it. It's a lovely book, its brief chapters each meditating on a particular edgelands theme: among them cars, paths, dens, containers, power, pallets, hotels, retail.

I was taken by the story of the young man they saw carrying a full-sized cross in the outskirts of Manchester, an act of Easter witness but with no one there to see it, now 'an act of unobserved endurance':

What keeps them going through the edgelands? The lure of their destination? It should be more than that, because the Crucifixion was essentially an edgelands story. The Bible suggests that the site of the Crucifixion was 'outside the city wall', and historians now believe that the Romans favoured such edgelands as their place of execution. Golgotha, it seems, was more than likely a place with two uses - working quarry and city rubbish dump. The Via Doloroa is an edgelands path.

The young Mancunian was (knowingly or unknowingly) following a path well-worn by the American evangelist Arthur Blessitt, whose forty-plus-year cross-bearing journey around the world is outlined by the authors: 'He has carried his Cross through warzone, wasteland and wilderness.' They quote him as saying,

'The Cross has been turned away from being left overnight at more than half the churches requested, but has never been turned away from spending the night at a bar or nightclub in forty years around the world.'

The publishers say, 'England, the first country to industrialise, now offers the world's most mature post-industrial terrain, and is still in a state of flux: "Edgelands" takes the reader on a journey through its forgotten spaces so that we can marvel at this richly mysterious, cheek-by-jowl region in our midst.' More than that, it's a wonderful resource for helping begin to make imaginative sense of it all.

Comments

[Kathie McCrimmon]

What a thought-provoking and meditative post... Has left me with a lot to think over today. As ever much appreciated.

[360pier]

I've had this suspended in my Wish List for a while. I was deterred by Crabman's article http://tinyurl.com/62wn7pz
with its damning comparison to Nicholas Crane...

[John Davies]

Yes Roy, that was a rather mischievous comparison for Crabman to make. I wouldn't let that put you off The Sardine Street book, though.

[EdgeAManAlone]

Got a Sardine Street, it's excellent. (Roy again btw) :)