Radar Hill

Then, now and forever

My childhood memories aren’t semantic – with a definitive answer or conclusion – but episodic. They're a tapestry of moments, feelings and faded words that fit a loose narrative of what makes sense in the world today.

Mental movie reels are catalogued through space and time. That early trip to the beach when a seagull shit on dad. A party at home when we conga danced round the house. Happy days. 

But childhood wasn’t all laughing and dancing. There were times, and specifically places – many I share in collective consciousness with my siblings – that still don’t add up.

“To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.”

Henning Mankell

Our childhood home was a late 1970s new-build in a satellite commuter town, below the shadow of Radar Hill. The local nickname for the hill came from the huge radar dish that crowned its peak.

The radar disappeared almost overnight years ago. It seems no one can definitively say where it went or what it was used for.

The climb up Radar Hill – if you were a kid planning to sledge down or roll eggs (did we roll eggs at Easter? Possibly a false memory) – took about ten minutes. 

My sister remembers,

“I always thought the climb up the hill was hard and steep. I’m surprised when I drive past it now that it isn’t really that high. Maybe that memory still holds because I always wanted it to be steeper. Fewer people would climb it and it could always be somewhere that you had to yourself.”

Radar Hill wasn’t outright awe-inspiring, but it had a viewpoint. It was the Everest of our square mile.

The basecamp barrier to its path was a wide, heavy wooden gate separated from behind our house by a 70mph dual carriageway. Once you passed that threshold, you entered a portal from suburbia to otherness.

It was cross-crossed with electricity pylons, brambles, barbed wire and hidden bluebells. Blackberry picking was both a late summer pastime and an occupational hazard. The hill stood all seasons. Watchful, fruitful and semi-feral.

In the book, How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy, author Jenny Odell, talks about Calabazas Creek. A river that flowed behind a chain-link fence at the back of her childhood school,

“Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of mineral reacting and things being eaten away – all just the other side of the chain-link fence.”

Growing-up was always about crossing that fence together, to see what was on the other side.

Radar Hill’s pin on our childhood map was the early 90s. Before ‘edgelands’ – marginal spaces between city and country – were defined in a literary and environmental sense by Marion Shoard. 

If the mood of the space crossed our minds at the time, we didn’t have the lexicon to describe it. This was decades after Charley Says but years before Scarfolk, Stranger Things and general ‘vibes’ entered our collective universe. 

My sister recalls the lucid landscape of Radar Hill,

“I remember treading carefully through the wood at the back of the hill, I was so worried I might hurt the bluebells. They almost looked like plastic – they were too perfect.”

The area was surrounded by cattle-grazed fields, and being chased by cows was another genuine (or imagined) threat. 

She explains,

“This is a weird one. I still tell people that Max and dad got chased by cows on top of Radar Hill and had to jump a barbed wire fence to escape. I don’t know if it actually happened but I can’t change the story now.”

The equivalent of Odell’s Calabazas Creek ‘chain-link fences’ were scattered across Radar Hill decades ago. There were areas blocked off with Do Not Access signs, surreptitiously guarding fallow, pitted land. We’d sometimes (perhaps) ask around to see if Radar Hill was a military base or a radar testing site. We never got a clear answer. 

When Odell revisits Calabazas Creek as an adult – she takes Josh, a childhood friend,

“It would not have been the same if I had gone to Calabazas Creek alone. The moment that Josh and I combined the fragments of our memories into the same body of water, the creek came to not just individual attention but to collective attention. It became a shared reality, a reference point outside of each of us.”

Radar Hill exists like Odell’s Creek, in all its episodic iterations, not just because it’s a specific place but because it continues to live in the combined fragments of our memories as siblings.

My brother recalls,

“My earliest memory of Radar Hill (though it may have been a dream), was going with dad and his fishing rod to a tiny pond at the bottom of the hill, surrounded by brambles. There weren’t any fish then and apparently, it completely dried up over the years.

“I remember the bluebell woods at the back, which I always thought was an ancient woodland. It was always so loud with all the crows roosting there. We used to go up there to pick blackberries too. The view from the top on a clear day was amazing, you could see the Crouch Basin and Hullbridge beyond. 

“When we were really young we used to roll painted eggs down the hill at Easter. The ones that didn’t break? We’d throw them at a massive tree trunk at the bottom until they smashed. Weird, but it felt so normal at the time.”

Strange spaces of escape and otherness exist everywhere. I’ve adjacent childhood memories of Bradwell Power Station, the post-nuclear landmark sitting on the Dengie Peninsula at the mouth of the River Blackwater.

Dad took us night fishing a few times at Bradwell. The wind (I vaguely recall) was so loud we couldn’t hear each other speak. Learning to drive, I practised three-point turns and emergency stops in the sprawling semi-official visitors car park in the years before it was fenced off.

Bradwell Power Station was decommissioned in 2002 – coincidentally, the same year that Shoard coined the term ‘edgelands’. 

Behind today’s physical barriers these places still exist unchanged in our episodic and collective memories. I’ve come to wonder if formative experiences here – alongside magnetic fields emitted by nearby radars, generators and power lines – made these childhood memories what they are.

Research from Laurentian University in Canada back in 2011 reviewed general factors in geological environments that have been shown to be correlated with mental processes and behaviour. It concluded,

“There’s a profound link between human behaviour and geophysical and geochemical stimuli. However the correlation appears to have been concealed by their spatial complexity and transience.” 

What does this mean? That there’s something about geomagnetic variations in certain spaces that affects us, scientists just can't explain exactly what.

The World Health Organisation reassures us,

“It’s important to distinguish between perceived and real dangers that radars [or power lines] pose, as well as to understand the rationale behind existing international standards and protective measures used today.”

Laurentian University research implies that electromagnetic fields are not unsafe, but that they can affect a person's neurocognitive profile. The case-by-case specifics are unknown – and perhaps unknowable. 

There’s a famous anecdote that illustrates the streetlight effect, a type of observational bias that happens when people only search for something where it’s easiest – or most obvious – to look. 

The story: A policeman asks a drunk person searching for something under the streetlight what they’ve lost. The person explains they’ve lost their keys in the park but they’re searching here as, “this is where the light is.” 

The streetlight effect metaphor can refer to a personal search for meaning in the most appealing or exotic places. But perhaps looking just outside of the light (not far away, but back to where you started) there’s an alternative path to enlightenment.

Our childhood holds many unanswered questions. Do our stories, and their surrounding narratives, hold true? I’m so entwined in them, it’s hard to say. 

My brother on the future of Radar Hill,

“I’m genuinely upset that there’s planning permission to build on and around Radar Hill. It won’t exist as we remember it for much longer. Access to the top has been restricted for a while. You can only take the footpath along the bottom of the hill now which comes out near the bridge of the dismantled railway.”

The essence of Radar Hill – all plastic bluebells, pylons, fishless ponds and egg-splattered tree trunks – exists now only in the stories of where we began.

Revisiting these spaces in episodic, collective memory brings their weirdness into the light just enough for us to try and make sense of them.