Just passing through
On edgelands and exclusivity
This essay was originally published in the first issue of Superstore Wilderness, a print magazine from the makers of The Ride Journal and North London Dirt. It casts a creative lens on the edgelands, places that are neither rural nor urban – the often overlooked spaces that sit on the outskirts of our towns and cities.
The magazine’s concept for me echoes Radar Hill (granted, RH is a bit more weird). Geographically, much of what we pass through every day is “kind of neither one thing nor the other.” In fact, “neither one thing nor the other” was how the magazine was described at its inception.
TLDR: In body, mind, and spirit, the edgelands are a space each one of us exists in, perhaps more often than we realise.
On edgelands and exclusivity
Is it a coincidence that the term ‘edgelands’ was coined by a woman? Pass through these spaces – under the flyovers, through the gaps between scrapyard and graveyard – and you meet very few women or people of colour. These are semi-wild spaces that straddle both geographical landscapes and our collective psyche; unplanned places of dubious legality, littered with unlit through-ways, disused developments and neglected utilitarian spaces. They are not destinations, but dumping grounds for things – objects, ideas, people – we’d rather not deal with; unsettling settlements where the menace of paranoia lurks.
No one feels entirely at home in these places, but some feel more alien than others. In her essay Edgelands, writer Marion Shoard defines our perception of edgelands as dual spaces.
“Huge numbers of people now spend much of their time living, working or moving within or through it. Yet for most of us, most of the time, this mysterious no man’s land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.”
And yet the clandestine hides in plain sight – rambling, post-industrial landscapes hum with the threat of unfinished business and off-the-leash opportunists, “The edgelands are raw and rough, and rather than seeming people-friendly are often sombre and menacing, flaunting their participation in activities we do not wholly understand.”
These overgrown, marginal landscapes and off-kilter passing places evoke both physical and psychological feelings of isolation, amplifying intersectional exclusivity for those who control the societal power dynamic. Whether by accident or hundreds of years of biased design, it is men, and people in cars, who move most freely through the edgelands.
Convenient parking
A 2023 study, Motonormativity: How social norms hide a major public health hazard from Swansea University and the University of the West of England, concluded that ‘car blindness’ creates “...environments that promote motor travel and systematically downplay the negative consequences.”
Professor Alan Tapp explains that these spaces,
“...overlook the needs of people who aren’t driving, often forcing them to make longer journeys or place themselves in danger for the convenience of people who are driving.”
Edgelands are often the by-product of this motornormativity, enclosed by major roads, and primarily privileged to motor vehicles. Only the intrepid venture on foot, whether staying above ground and mixing it with motor traffic, or stepping aside and utilising the litter-strewn, underutilised and unloved cycle paths that lead out of the suburbs and into the in-between. They are masculine places. The faces you see behind the wheels of the skip trucks, the Tesco delivery vans, the private cars heading to work are almost exclusively male.
Untethering
Here, there is freedom for the few, but it’s not without risk. In Edgelands, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts refer to these landscapes as both a spiritual home for landfill and fly-tipping, but also an unspoken lawlessness.
“Outside of urban centres and national parkland, regulatory frameworks tend to slacken and all forms of surveillance and policing are patchier. It’s easier to build things there, but also to throw them away, to bury them.”
Edgelands are ever-sprawling and shifting. Alongside an unchecked world of decomposition, your time of travel will change the mood. As the light fades, it seemingly raises the shadows – and stakes – felt by those who pass through alone. Edgelands are untethering. Should you move too far from society-bound safety, accountability becomes increasingly vague.
The domain of the feral
And yet on the brightest days, there’s joy in running down – and winning against – this scrappy landscape. Edgelands aren’t inherently malevolent. They’re benign, laissez-faire, ambivalent. Farley and Symmons Roberts call the edgelands, “the domain of the feral.”
Howls and echoes are off-record. They’re snatched by the wind or dissipate to a whisper beneath the constant hum of automobiles.
From Hollywood to Pinewood, the edgelands are the set of fights for territory, or even the survival of humanity itself. Law enforcement won’t be turning up until the final scene.
A literal battle for territory is happening across the ground now. The push-pull between suburban sprawl and encroaching nature defines the edgelands as a combative frontier, a place of ceaselessness. Shoard notes,
“Plants and animals being driven out of the countryside by modern agricultural methods often survive in the interface because farming is pursued less intensively here.”
Some of our most biodiverse ecosystems utilise the edgelands as their staging ground. Dumped soil, backfields, resilient breeds and undisturbed potential habitats are left unattended to find their own equilibrium.
Outer territories
A fight for dominance, and a willingness to thrive in the most inhospitable spaces characterises these edgeland ecosystems, and through a broader lens, this is why the ease of how we move across these hinterlands is subjective.
Questions around privilege of land access go back to enclosure in the 16th Century. The labouring class lost the right to wander without consequence, a theoretical razor fence erected against exploration. In The Mores, poet John Clare, laments, “Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye.”
The land owners? Wealthy and male. From the starting block, capitalist ideologies of access were traditionally masculine.
Today, gender, race and social-economic positioning all inform how we interact with the edgelands. These spaces are designed for no one, but their inherent intersectional exclusivity teaches us about past, present and possibility. They reflect our perception of how we’ve subconsciously built our outer territories and our perceived place within them.
These places are mostly benign, not malign. It’s only by expanding and normalising representation within them safely, whether as a group or individually, that we can continue to democratise access to nature at large.
Walthamstow Wetlands as the cover shot (credit: Simon Phipps)
N.B. Sneaked in a Modest Mouse-inspired subhead here (in terms of the edgelands as a creative concept, MM’s gotta be up there with Lynch).