Development Site - Landscape after industry

I abandon the car amongst detritus from morning commuters and the thick dust from passing freight lorries adjoining the dual carriageway. Navigating a small gap in the trees, through what seems a conservation barrier, sits the site of a former major iron works that closed in the 1960’s. Here, amongst the hostile roadside environment, a certain nature attempts to resist an encroaching capitalist order of things beyond.

I am drawn to these liminal spaces that exist between past and present, rural and urban. Sites that deep-topographers or psychogeographers would describe as an inter-zone, or perhaps what Richard Mabey termed The unofficial countryside. Places of non-conformity that harbours traces of a desire to experience such.

Perambulating this site with a camera is a playful act. I enjoy this small resistance against the preoccupations of a landscape on the verge of commodification. The photographs aim to question the notion of a desire for the spectacle and organised experience, instead promoting the freedom for playful opportunities for creativity and leisure amongst the overlooked everyday landscape, where the constraints of modern life are forgotten, if only for a short while.