Edgelands

On Thursday night, Spokes ran a bookstall at The Bluecoat to accompany a fascinating and entertaining talk by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (the latter of whom has just won the Costa Poetry Award for his collection 'Drysalter') - and I went along to help her out. She sold out of copies of their book 'Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness' and no wonder!

The book describes and celebrates the liminal 'non places', neither urban nor rural, which tend to be passed by, unnoticed, by most of us - most of the time. Landfill sites, motorway, rail and canal-sides, standing water and scrubland, abandoned industrial areas, retail parks and ruins. Spaces where 'phone masts and yards full of pallets, dumped mattresses, fences and razor wire rub shoulders with an abundance of flora and fauna - buddleia tends to feature heavily!

Today, inspired by what we had heard, we joined a walking tour of the Wirral's Edgelands led by local writer, artist and historian Colin Dilnot. From Birkenhead North station via Bidston and Leasowe to Moreton we took the paths less travelled and discovered an amazing amount of information about the local area. Just one of the things I learnt is that there was a shantytown constructed on marshland at Leasowe in the 1920s populated by people with nowhere else to go following the First World War. I'd heard of the Hoovervilles in the USA during the Great Depression of the 1930s but hadn't been aware that there'd been anything so similar so close to home.

The marshes where the shantytown once stood have now been dredged, drained and shored up by embankments - much as is now planned for flood hit areas of the country in Somerset and elsewhere. And so the Edgelands expand, contract and shift.

Lately, I've been struggling to take any photographs at all most days. But today I had several I wanted to blip... In the end I've gone with this shot taken beneath Junction 1 of the M53.

I think I'll be going back along today's route before too much longer to bring you more images of the Edgelands!