An Industrial North

an industrial north wes foster

AN_INDUSTRIAL_NORTH_ Wes_Foster_2017

A North built on industry, the remnants of which stick out; wastelands and relics in a modern age of digital. Warehouses and yards, dotted around certain areas of the city, between the old freight lines and the canals. Long forgotten as the last of them are shut down. No longer will these places become a thriving hub: the few that remain only exist because of cash in hand business ideas, scattered few and far between, illogical remnants of yesteryear - it’s no longer possible to call it an industry. Decimated by the neoliberal swing, perhaps we can stop blaming unemployment on population, instead blame it on the ripping out of employment for the largest class.

A new area hangs over these wastelands; described by manufactured steel, clean cut lines, and an ever present overhanging regeneration, visible distant in the eye. There is no getting away from the past and future here - it is all as one, the slow march of office space, white collar work and young professional ‘no-trouble-from-children’ properties is relentless and the renovations will not stop at city centres. Division of communities into solitary flats, non-speaking residents, flattering themselves in flash apartments.

White, empty corridors create a sanitised replacement for a home.

This is a space outside of society, outside of the norm. It is a space full of what once was, and yet full of an anarchistic to come, beyond society’s norms, and a way in which we now idealise as the way to live. A sense of discontent, and a sense of loss as most of us progress towards a false economy based upon simply being content, obsessed with the working for the future - not the now.

A small firm renovates portakabins in a yard. A few hundred of the rusting, beaten containers stand there, organised row by row like supermarket aisles. Ex-offices, football changing rooms and canteens bear the marks of a temporarily lived in space, sacked for anything valuable.

Maps, documents, glasses, penknives, pens, desks and tyres remain.

Horizon lines are dominated by the peaks of social housing, brutish but beautiful they peer over the wastelands, hopeful and yet removed from a landscape which is not theirs. Man made shapes constantly describe the skyline, square and angular, two-dimensional compared to the depth and anarchy of nature. Shipping containers and fairground rides jut out, the cheap land is filled with them.

Empty car parks are cut off from the roads. Weeds and bushes and trees grow in them taking back the concrete which once constrained them. Tramlines cut them off from any further possible use - areas are lost completely to the regeneration which supposedly improves, and once lost they’re left, never to be touched again. They no longer have purpose or place.

The remnants of small camps remain - large buckets for washing stand by horizontal beams for drying, the odd car and gas cannister still stand, burnt out.

Outsiders, looking for a new way to live, and a new way to be, an alternative to the usual.

Building supplies and overgrown estates; each left just as they are. No motivation exists without some form of profit.

Pockets of yellow movement creep into the skyline, jutting out violently. The levelling of land is constant, the preparation for a regeneration is eternal. Grey concrete flattens the city into a new partially blank canvascanvas.

Nature is stranded in small scatological enclosures, usually helped along by a ditch or river running through the centre. Standing defiant, it’s only in the most difficult, wet, landscapes that it remains.

A brief break from, but still within earshot of the city it acts as a strange fake respite, the briefest of escapes from reality.