Mercury Delirium, Exodus, Wauluds Bank and the Cursed Earth: The Cracked Ballad of and South

The warden led a prisoner down the hallway to his doom And I got up to say good-bye like all the rest Then I heard him tell the warden just before he reached my cell ‘Let my guitar playing friend do my request.’

‘Won’t you sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make my old memories come alive And take me away and turn back the years Sing Me Back Home before I die.’

I recall last Sunday evening when a choir came in from town And got up to sing a few old gospel songs Then I heard him tell the singers ‘There’s a song my mama sang. Would you sing it once before we move along?’

‘Won’t you sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make my old memories come alive And take me away and turn back the years Sing Me Back Home before I die Won’t you Sing Me Back Home before I die.’

— Merle Haggard / Gram Parsons Sing Me Back Home

I hear the sound of an incoming message. My friends NRK Mohammad and SOS Newsrod are in St. Michael’s Avenue, and the whine of outdated country music is faintly audible from a car’s cassette player. They’re asking for my old address in – a small town situ-

  ated a few miles outside of Luton just west of the m1 – or a his name was written under the road bridge.) description of the house where my parents have lived since We decide to go for a drink in the Arndale Centre, at 1969. For some reason they want to pay a guerrilla-style Robby’s Tea Bar, which has probably been in the same visit, perhaps have a quick cup of tea, terrorise the locals place since the centre was built. My cohorts seem keen and then hit the road again. I press a button on my mobile to visit this café. The original plans for the Arndale were and they’re gone. made in 1966 as an attempt to rationalise Luton’s town Somehow I’ve felt this whole situation’s happened centre. At the time the site was a complex arrangement before, and for a split second it appears like a momentary of small streets that contained a market and a myriad of glimpse from some half remembered past. Twenty years all sorts of other great stuff. Even though the Arndale ago when I was living in South Bedfordshire I used to destroyed the original town centre, as a kid I always have regular dreams that were reversals of the past and the remember being excited about going there – it seemed future, or fleeting visions of events waiting to take place or huge and exciting, like the centre of the universe. be re-staged. They’ve recently started to return with a star- Before we’re even seated nrk and sos describe the rea- tling frequency, the latest sudden flash-like stains coming sons for their journey. There are many contributing fac- in the form of a vision of the future, where the old house is tors, one of which includes a recent poll to find the worst altered irrevocably, where everything and everyone from a town in the country resulting in Luton being given this certain point in my personal history is either gone, or has dubious honour. Yet this and other reasons are perhaps strangely started to reappear. For example, I heard that beside the point now, and have begun to be eclipsed by the Steve, an old school friend who had also long since moved evidence and photographs they’ve already accumulated. away, was recently found by neighbours swaying in an They start to bombard me with digital images and the alarming state outside of my parent’s house, asking of my stories behind them. whereabouts. This happened around the same time as a Our conversation initially gets onto the hat industry. school reunion that I didn’t attend. I’m pretty certain that The origins of the phrase ‘Mad as a Hatter’ comes from this isn’t the sole cause of my recent dreams, but I’d like the millinery industry that was centred on Luton and to find out more so I returnnrk ’s message. We arrange to South Bedfordshire in the nineteenth century. Mercury meet and I’m in Luton town centre within two hours. was widely used in hat manufacturing, while madness and Waiting outside ’s barriers, nrk clinical psychosis were linked to the destructive effects of and sos look strangely agitated. nrk’s eyes are glinting this chemical on the nervous system and brain. In reality and sos appears nervous. They tell me they started to see a this might be more characteristic of the felt industry prev- series of signs late the previous evening… something about alent in the Manchester and Stockport area, rather than the stars being in alignment, and a mish-mash of other his- straw-hat production in Luton. Similarly, the Mad Hatter torical and cultural phenomena converging. It’s as if they of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is widely associ- felt they had to get to Bedfordshire quick sharp, so as not ated with the effects of mercury on behaviour. Erratic, to miss some impending event. nrk had seen a star to the flamboyant actions, excessive drooling and mood swings north and they had set off soon afterwards. As they drove, were the most evident indications of the substance’s pres- the stars and signs had aligned, especially where the A1 ence, while victims also developed uncontrollable muscu- met the m1. (Apparently at Junction 11 sos also noticed lar tremors and twitching limbs, called ‘hatter’s shakes’.

  Other symptoms included distorted vision and confused the situation’s not that dissimilar to the Mad Hatter’s speech, while advanced cases suffered hallucinations and tea party in Carroll’s book. nrk and sos have been up other psychotic symptoms. The fact that there were more all night and their rambling over-excited conversation is asylums around Luton at that time than anywhere else manic to say the least. in the country must have been a real consequence of this The area has also got more of its fair share of eccen- phenomenon. trics, and perhaps even Eric Morecambe, the comedian Now that these institutions have all closed, it’s evident who always played the mad hatter, who was a director of that The Arndale Centre is the new home for Luton’s the football club (themselves often described as a comedy contemporary insane, and, at this particular moment, team) in the 70s, are more than balanced out by sinister Robby’s Tea Bar seems to be a central focal point for this groups like the Madcats. This gang of Hells Angels used community. Strangely enough, present company included, to congregate at The Blockers Arms pub, selling badly cut drugs. Allegedly, one of their members once dropped an enemy from a second floor window with his legs bound so they’d shatter on impact with the pavement. We decide to leave the café, and as we walk through the indoor market – where sos buys a straw hat with ‘c’mon you hatters’ emblazoned on the ribbon – they take me through the rest of their journey. Leaving the m1, they’d taken Mohammad’s car – a battered yellow beetle fitted with a 1600 engine – straight to the Luton and hospital, where all of us were born, and paid homage to the building with a strange ritual, before security had become suspicious and they’d been asked to leave. From there they’d driven straight on to the surrounding area of ; to , Stranger’s Way, , Farm, and finally to Houghton Regis, where I had received their call. Perhaps possessed by some ancient spell, the information they’ve started to collect on the area ranges from their initial photographs of posters and graffiti, to random documents and horrific accounts of local abjec- tion and brutality. (One image – a newspaper cutting that was displayed in a shop – reports on a rogue dog that had been caught shitting at random in neighbour’s gardens. The dog turned out to be owned by the shopkeeper, who’d written ‘that’s my boy’ in felt tip on the picture frame.) Judging by their demented enthusiasm, I realise that I’m not going to avoid being coerced into joining them, so

  WELCOME

we decide to embark on the second part of their visit, which is turning out to be a kind of ‘Fear and Loathing in South Bedfordshire’ designed by sleep deprived gonzo archivists. First off we visit St Mary’s Church, which is situated smack bang in the centre of town. The building’s clock has been stuck at 11.55 for as long as anyone can remember. Technically speaking, if we see the time of mid- day (or midnight, as the case may be) as a symbolic centre point, this clock becomes a potent emblem of deficiency, or represents a moment that’s just about to happen, but is never fully reached. Apart from the quote that tells us ‘even a stopped clock tells the time twice a day’ – from the classic yet slightly hackneyed filmWithnail and I – the THE FORMER church, which dominates the surrounding area, also pres- ents a pause, which to us seems to usher in an impending sense of disaster. As a symbol of a place that always fails to reach its full potential, it’s hard not to be deeply affected by this building. so we take it to The Clarence pub to look through its con- We decide to walk back through the Arndale and down tents. As we sit with the locals – who all look as if they’ve George Street, past the town centre and out to the west. As been drinking all their lives – we sift through images and we pass the Town Hall at the end of George Street, I find documents that describe historical events connected to a discarded file in a skip. It’s dusty but full of information, municipal buildings in the area.

  Among them there’s a short description of the Town pany songs such a ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ in Hall, which has a strange history all of its own. The cur- front of the biggest bonfire that Luton had ever seen. rent building was completed in 1936, but the best story is At around midnight, supported by reinforcements from of the original structure, which was burned down in 1919 London, the police read the riot act to the crowd, which during the victory celebrations at the end of the First by now numbered several thousand. Just as the Town World War. Apparently after the Peace Treaty was signed Hall clock struck one, the bell – which perhaps has an in June 1919, Luton Town Council planned processions unusual parallel with the stopped St Mary’s church with brass bands, floats, entertainment for children and a – crashed to the ground amid a pile of debris. The fol- fireworks display, which were to be followed by a Mayor’s lowing morning Luton looked like one of the ravaged banquet. The cost of this last event was to be paid from cities of World War I, with steel-helmeted troops stand- civic funds and invitations were strictly limited to the ing guard amidst the burnt-out embers of buildings and Mayor, councillors and close friends – none of who had looted shops. served in the armed forces. As a result the ex-servicemen We stare out of the pub window and contemplate the scene withdrew from the activities and planned alternative cel- ebrations in the nearby , but the Mayor and his Council refused this. The story goes that on July 19, a procession of soldiers, many of them maimed and injured, arrived outside the Town Hall, where they halted in heavy rain whilst the Mayor read out the proclamation of peace. With thousands of old soldiers booing and heckling his speech, one councillor POP MUSIC PERFORMERS called for three cheers for the ex-servicemen. This gave rise to greater howls of derision, and the crowd surged forwards, causing the Mayor and his entourage to beat a retreat into WILL NO LONGER APPEAR the building. The crowd swiftly swept inside, the premises were ransacked, bonfires were lit and the riot started. Later that evening a crowd of 20,000 gathered in Luton’s Popes Meadow for the advertised fireworks dis- AT THE LUTON A B C play, but the rioting and looting at the Town Hall – which had taken on a carnival atmosphere – turned out to be a more powerful attraction. A nearby garage was raided for petrol, which was added to the fire, and the Town Hall B quickly became a blazing inferno. Apparently a man was C hit so hard by a fireman’s jet that he was hurled through a music shop window. In a comedic moment, the crowd that went in to rescue him emerged with three pianos, which were dragged into the road and used to accom-

  of the events that took place eighty-seven year’s earlier. After another round of drinks we look at the next entry in the abandoned file, which reads ‘pop music performers will no longer appear at the Luton abc’. This comes in the NO MORE form of a flyer, which must have been created around the time of a notorious incident in early 1965, where the singer PJ Proby split his trousers with repeated ‘lewd’ gyrations, causing national uproar. Various pieces of ephemera refer PUNK MUSIC CONCERTS to this piece of pop history, which happened just up the road at the Luton abc on George Street. The cinema has WILL BE HELD AT THE long since closed, but we are all old enough to remember seeing films in the venue when we were kids. One of the classic facts about Proby was that, at one point, he had the LUTON TOWN HALL longest hair in pop, and was only outdone slightly later by certain members of The Pretty Things. One of the entries in the file is a newspaper cutting taken from theDunstable 23 April 1965 reports on Proby’s subsequent performance Gazette on 2 April 1965 shortly after Proby’s ‘shocking’ at the California Ballroom – a now legendary venue that performance. It reads: hosted concerts in Dunstable between 1960 and 1979 – and speaks of the singer as a mystic, prophet or preacher: P. J. Proby Coming to Dunstable P. J. Proby, the controversial pop singer who was banned Meanwhile Proby was belting out his numbers with the from appearing at either abc or Rank cinemas two months fervour of a revivalist preacher – a fervour matched and ago, is to appear at the independently owned California surpassed by his audience. With his long hair about his Ballroom, Dunstable on April 17. face, and an exhausted, agonised expression, he really puts Miss Edwina Green, for the ballroom’s management said a lot into his act. Proby had the look of a Biblical prophet it was understood that Proby had ‘cleaned’ up his act. in spite of his costume. This impression was heightened by He was ordered off the stage at the Luton Ritz Cinema the reaching of hands to touch him… some mystic healing in January.’ power? […] Proby has disciples rather than fans, I think. The file that we’ve found seems to be suggesting a series of The final entry in the file provides a mass of material on sardonic monuments to places long since gone. Through another incident that took place sixty years after the post the flyers contained within it – which refer to the graphic ww1 riot, in April 1979. This time the event was a punk language of funereal notices – the collection of material ‘riot’, which followed a gig at the Town Hall by uk Decay, memorialises the places we frequented as adolescents, and who went on to reach minor fame as a post-punk band. speaks as much of the myths that surrounded these sites, As a Luton-based band, uk Decay was formed out of as it does to the way that time has changed everything the ashes of another local ensemble called The Resistors. around us. An initial single released with two tracks from uk Decay Another entry taken from the Dunstable Gazette from and the band Pneumonia was damned in the NME by

  Danny Baker and Charles Shaar Murray who described and how this has changed with time. Even though our them as one of the worst punk bands of all time. Just reaction to music has altered, we can still get a glimpse before the time of the gig at the Town Hall the band’s of that initial exhilaration from time to time. There’s guitarist ‘Abbo’ moved to vocals after the departure of something great in the visceral excitement of how certain their singer. However he soon found this new role diffi- bands, and the culture that they belong to, can provide cult, so staying on vocals he poached guitarist Steve Spon you with an immense energy or desire to be involved with from Pneumonia. This was an inspired move and the new a wider culture in some way. We were all too young to line-up clicked instantly, with the chemistry in the band have witnessed punk by a long way, and are quite glad to coming dramatically to life. The other bands that were have missed it. For nrk and myself, for better of worse, supporting on that night were The Statics, Pneumonia, our time was most definitely the1 980s. For sos, it was the The Cinematics and The Clips, and a quote from guitarist 1990s. Our conversation gets around to asking if the sense Steve Spon describes the events: of distance we had in the 80s from mainstream culture has diminished, and if the political polarity at that time was It was at Luton Town Hall. By the end of the show in the partly responsible for our desire for something else. midst there stood Abbo, in this 35-degree sweatbox, fully As we’re passing the square next to the library, two dressed in a long heavy Macintosh coat shouting “necro- pieces of paper pasted onto the wall grab our attention. philia!” There was definitely a vibrant rapport between us, They consist of a drawing of three naked female figures, even though the show ended in a massive riot, which was together with a page of lyrics for a song dedicated to quite common for us in those days! Luton. The first seems to speak of the erotic potential of After this concert – during which a toilet was slightly dam- life in a small town, while the second says something about aged – punk was banned from all council premises, echo- the fear potential of life in a marginal place. An additional ing the events surrounding the long-haired gyrating Proby list of hand-written notes describes the various thought fourteen-year’s earlier. processes involved in the making of this drawing and its We sit for a while, digesting this information, and admir- associated lyrics. The act of reading these documents is ing the desperate pace of life in The Clarence. What wor- incredible and each speaks of a sense of alienation so acute ries us most is that we’re starting to feel at home here. that, as a whole, they present an almost psychotic decen- It’s as if we’re slowly sinking into our seats, the comfort tred view of the world. In the same way, our love of music, devouring us. There’s a guy sitting at the bar who hasn’t which rendered us incapacitated with excitement, relied moved at all in ten minutes. Another man wears a classic on this emotive dissonance. We wonder if it’s still possible tattoo on his knuckles. The fingers on his right hand con- for this to happen. Does libidinal desire still take the same tain the text ‘ltfc’, and on the other is ‘esuk’. Put them route? Perhaps it’s more relevant than ever. We can’t help together – with one hand in the other – and you get ‘LeTs thinking that the shifting culture or historical distance of FuCk’. Clever stuff indeed – a nightmare hangover from the last twenty years may have seen forms of alternative the 80s. Exiting out into the fresh air, and feeling slightly culture mutate dramatically. giddy, we throw the file back into the skip and head off Just as the product of the excitement we experience is once more in a westerly direction. informed by a recognition of our alienation, the flipside We start to talk about the effect that music had on us, of this is addressed in terms of this fear and eroticism.

  The drawing of the naked women – who are positioned fied self-actualisation, where we define ourselves negatively. in the rain – appears to be entitled Luton or Combination This image speaks of photographic moments, of striking a Looks. We read the most coherent section of the notes pose, of fashion photography, of a debilitating neurosis and carefully… resignation that comes from hanging out in a place lacking imagination. At once there’s a melancholy quality of the Combination looks… which use looks to describe emotional Pierrot about the picture that can’t be enjoyed. There’s a states… Bad Weather seems apt for Luton as it seems to com- female rawness or bold nakedness in these figures’ group bine boredom/stasis under duress with erotic potential (to be defiance that’s something like the antagonistic togetherness found in nakedness in adverse weather conditions)… small of a dance at an alternative disco. town mentality is oppressive (my experience in the eight- The accompanying lyrics speak of the relationship ies)… what would go down a storm in London was derided… between the fear potential of the city and the provincial. Things are different now the ideal of Individual Expression The overall impression we get is that all of these things can has been successfully commodified… Things seem more het- be reduced to a look – a good look, or a bad look – which erogeneous + cosmopolitan [in a small town]… London has doesn’t operate in terms of the dandy or the flâneur, but Shoreditch, which is its own little provincial town. It nurtures through femininity, of being out there in the world, of its own little parochial ‘in-ness’ and ‘smugness’… Anonymity transvesticising your body, mistaking shyness for arro- allows for perversity? Are there more circle jerks for married gance, and of using ‘the look’ to the nth degree. men in i.o.w. or in London? You guess that any creativity or innovation, which takes place in a boring town, is unlikely to be commodified by the creator unlike in London where the ambitious people go to make (cash in) their living out of their creativity… If you don’t leave the boring town it is just spent and unrewarded – and/or vilified. We deduce that these notes speak of the failure of the mostly ignored and sometimes brilliant creativity in small places that can result in insularity and self-destruction. The drawing that accompanies these notes renders its figures in a fixed petrified state. Based on fashion mannequins, they’ve been altered and worked on, paradoxically to pres- ent them naked yet stylised. Their positioning is such that they speak of the stasis that comes with severe forms of self- consciousness, of a hyper-awareness of one’s own manners and indebtedness to certain styles. Because of the accel- eration of alternative cultures being assimilated into the mainstream, we might have a new form of stylistic reticence and a generational shift: that of dressing soberly as a form of drag, or self-expression as a performance of commodi-

  We walk on past more posters and images and finally come to the underpass that leads out of the centre of town and into . In the distance further up Crawley Road, we spot two figures walking towards us that look familiar, and for a moment we’re transported back in time fifteen years again. The people approaching us look like Andy and his brother Tim, but as they get closer we realise we’ve been duped by our overexcited desire to believe that the past might still hold true in the present. Andy was in Thrilled Skinny, a Luton band that suffered from such low ambition that they made an art form out of it. Just as their name suggests, the thrill of music at the time rendered everyone incapacitated with excitement, and in a similar way to the posters we’ve just seen – which speak of a fear that can render us petrified and undead – this band also represents the flip side of this coin. Despite periodic wan- derings, the core members of the band are still resident in the town and have formed The Knockouts. Luckily nrk is in touch with them. He calls them up and they agree to send us an update on their activities, together with a few images that represent their love/hate relationship with their hometown. We receive a text and a few images of their favourite parts of Luton later on in the week:

  bits and pieces fell off. This was despite the band consoli- dating and improving their ‘commercial appeal’. The last gigs in ’91 were memorable for a stabbing in Swindon, strip lighting, train drivers and fizzy lager in Luton, and a poorly timed outing for the Chicago Brothers in Bedford. Thrilled Skinny finished of its own accord, although none of the band members were finished. From their home town – whose very cultural deprivations was one of the main moti- vations for getting together in the first place – they departed to points North, South and West, kept in touch and did musical/drinking/visiting things every now and again. The Knockouts was an idea involving three Thrilled Skinny members and their only consistent hanger-on. It was initially based around the concept of talentless hicks trying to play incidental music which might work in a 60s spy movie. And taking band pictures, which at the time was more important than the music. The first two Knockouts’ rehearsals were in 1993. In truth, most of the music sounded like poor Status Quo. The band, however, maintains that ‘no, actually, these are vibrant re-workings of some of the tracks from the cult tv programme The Prisoner’. Bits and pieces from these two afternoons were released on compact cassette. The next rehearsal was in 2000, and soon after that, in 2001, all four band members accidentally got together in the same rehearsal place at the same time. The Knockouts started recording and releasing material. In some ways, the ethos of the band is different to Thrilled Skinny, and in oth- ers it was pretty much the same. The Knockouts is an older Thrilled Skinny to The Knockouts 1990 – 2005 band, which says nothing, goes nowhere and protects their There was never a plan with Thrilled Skinny. As far as the inner child by remorselessly mocking it. They parasitically drummer remembers, the band was about four people thrive on their surroundings and comfortably survive their finally escaping childhood/adolescence and converting the lack of drive and talent precisely because of the cultural huge amounts of energy they had at their disposal. It was exhaustion around them. certainly nothing to do with creating polished pieces of Bury Park is the area that’s home to the town’s Muslim music. Community and also to its football club. Outside the After an initial spurt, the recordings improved, although mosque there’s a sign – ‘no more clothes please, thanks’

  – referring to the recent earthquake in Pakistan. In early sos was a Luton fan as a child and we notice a stained 2005, a local Muslim, Haji Abid, became Luton’s young- glass window with an image of Joe Payne on the wall of est Mayor at 31. Despite this moment of equality, the the bar. On 13th April 1936 Payne scored ten goals in area has had its more negative and unsavoury moments, the club’s 12–0 record league win over Bristol Rovers. like the incident where the mosque was desecrated in This represents the most goals scored in one game by 1982, when a pig’s head was left on top of the building. any individual player in the history of the football league. Amazingly, it was demolished and re-built in six-months Payne has become an almost mythical character to fans of flat. Much to nrk’s amusement, sos is showing signs the club, and nrk’s camera comes out to document this of discomfort with the extreme nature of religion in the image, which is shown on a ‘holy’ light-box. It’s only later town. His denial is undermined constantly because there that we notice a small glitch in the resulting photograph, a are reminders of the Islamic faith everywhere. We walk up dark stain in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture Oak Road, and towards the top, the slogan ‘Remember that reveals a reflection of sos in the glass, an uncanny Allah!’ is spray-painted on an advertising hoarding on the Turin Shroud-like portrait that hovers on the picture’s side of the football ground, right next door to The Eric surface. Morecambe Suite. sos notices the graffiti and contin- It’s now mid-afternoon so we decide to head back and ues to mutter uncomplimentary things about ‘organised collect the car, which is situated in the Arndale multi-story religion’, so we decide to buy him a drink at the Bobbers car park. As we arrive, we get another great view of the Club bar to divert his attention. Unfortunately the con- stopped clock on St Mary’s Church, so we drive around versation gets back around to belief systems in the form the top level repetitively, admiring it from a number of dif- of Christian fundamentalism. We quickly change the ferent viewpoints, before we head up the a6 to visit nrk’s subject again. grandmother in a small village north of town. We talk about the surrounding area. The village is situ- ated just east of a beautiful spit of land that used to belong to Bedfordshire, but was taken away by Hertfordshire, who made it the high seat of the county to avoid it being stolen back again. The small towns or villages of Barton, Westoning and Flitwick spread out evenly to the west of this area. The only one of these places to have a railway station is Flitwick, which used to have a foreboding piece of graffiti situated under the bridge as you came in from the south. I remember a crudely scrawled Doctor Martin boot with the word’s ‘Flitwick boot boys kick to kill’ paint- ed onto the bricks with a brush. It appears that no one really knows anything about this gang, but everyone knows the graffiti, which struck fear into a number of people who grew up in the town. nrk’s found some material on the place, a collage homage, or a

  personal history of the area, which appears to be made by Guide to imagery, clockwise from top: a former resident: ‒ Flitwick Boot Boys tag on the tunnel between my home and school.

‒ Drawing of half-remembered effigy I made after read- ing a Dennis Wheatley book I buried in the founda- tions of my dad’s shed.

‒ Fading signs complaining about the increase in park- ing on residential streets by those using Flitwick Station. An example of understated local venom!

‒ The millenary or hat imagery is taken from a num- ber of old books my dad brought home when Kangol shut up the factory in Luton and he was made redun- dant at 54. He has not worked since.

‒ The original stained glass window in Flitwick church, where the town crest was taken from.

‒ The scout hut crest. It’s difficult to see here but the cement crest has expanding foam oozing out. It used to worry me as a child that some kind of blob alien was growing in the loft.

‒ I was digging in the bottom of the garden and acci- dentally dug up our old cat.

‒ The two black leopards of the Flitwick crest. My dad told me that he had seen these creatures prowling the graveyard after a funeral, and I spent endless eve- nings there as a terrified child hoping to see them.

‒ Another effigy I made from dead chicken bones.

We’re not sure what to make of this, but the collage’s abject

  and uncanny quality gets us around to talking about the in the series Judge Dredd from the publication 2000AD. nearby Ampthill and Millbrook, small villages surrounded Although kitsch in its adolescent fixation with 80s car- by the Bedfordshire countryside. nrk’s grandmother pro- toons, it’s as if everything’s suddenly starting to fall into vides us with tea, and after listening to our conversation place in the form of the stark geographical semblance to brings in a picture she’s had hanging in a frame in her hall- the ethos of this myth. way for the last twenty-five years. At first sight the drawing The story goes that, following the Atomic Wars of 2070, looks like an imagined landscape, but according to nrk’s most of the usa became a radioactive wasteland. With gran, it has its origins in the area around Millbrook. It only the three Mega-Cities surviving, the remainder of represents a primordial, entropic scene; one that could be the country became known as the Cursed Earth, a huge somewhere around 15,000 years in the past, or 1,000 years area of flat wasteland outside of the post-apocalyptic ahead in a post-apocalyptic future. metropolis. Although considered unfit for human habita- During the last glaciation around 10,000 years ago, this tion, the Cursed Earth was populated by all manner of area, like much of Britain, was left with a diverse range creatures, scraping a living in a tough environment. The of landscape. For instance the glacier that shaped the area was just far enough from the city to be safe, beyond a Chiltern ridge of hills, situated around thirty to forty miles protected zone, and was populated by animals, outsiders, north of London, drew a huge arch, and from today’s per- criminals, psychopaths and anyone else who had trans- spective, it’s as if this range of hills form a natural barrier gressed the law. Since the Atomic Wars, genetic muta- of defence, or the lip of a huge bowl around the capital. tions had appeared, but mutants were banned from living On the other hand the area north of the Chilterns spreads in cities, so were forced to make their homes there. The out in a massive plain-like prairie. After the ice-age pro- communities were mostly poor, rural groupings with no cess that created this area, the landscape was colonised industry, often dominated by quasi-religious movements. by birch-pine woodland, so we cogitate that perhaps the All of these people had been cast out into the vast lawless picture in nrk’s gran’s house is a bizarre speculation flat plains and swampland. about the area around this time, but realise that the image – which has both the quality of horrific labyrinthineww 1 trenches and a tropical swamp – is too desolate for it to be connected in this way. In historical terms, there was a land bridge during this period that stretched from East Anglia to southeast England that connected Britain to the European continent, which was occupied by hunters. In effect, this area was open to Europe, but by 6,500 bc, Britain became separated from the rest of the continent by the English Channel. Several hunting camps had been found in the area around Luton, but in effect, the land- scape became more and more isolated. sos comments on the image’s similarity to a mythical landscape called the Cursed Earth, an area mentioned

  In a similar vein to the subject of small town petrifica- the open sepulcher. After this, Christian is greeted by three tion, excitement and fear, the people in this place were ‘shining ones’, who offer him peace, new garments, and a forced to exist in a kind of no-man’s land. In more extreme scroll as a passport into the ‘Celestial City’. cases, these communities became cults organised well Just as the allegory of Pilgrims Progress speaks of a deliv- enough to threaten Mega-City One as a revenge for the erance from burden, we’re experiencing a huge perspec- way the city had treated them as outcasts. Within our pic- tival shift by considering the change in this landscape; ture, it’s as if there’s a symbolic ‘peripheral lawlessness’, an it’s as if we’re on our own pilgrimage, enacting our own image of an irredeemable landscape without hope where form of deliverance from the past. Memory, history and hoards of rejected lunatics roam unchecked. fiction… it’s fascinating to play with huge periods of time, The next village to the west is Harlington and, in terms religious fervour, the landscape, and what does and does of cults and religious movements, there’s a parallel with not actually exist. the story of John Bunyan, who was arrested just outside Thinking back again to the time of the glacier, the this settlement on 12 November 1660 for holding a rogue image of cursed earth makes us consider the huge effect service in a private house. Just a few years earlier he’d that the ice had on the landscape. sos mentions Robert been called ‘a witch, a Jesuit, and a highwayman,’ and was Smithson, whose discussion about the effect of glacial charged with various crimes including keeping ‘his miss- shifts with Dennis Oppenheim and Michael Heizer during es,’ or ‘having two wives at once,’ groundless accusations December 1969 and January 1970, resulted in a conversa- that came from a mistrust of his preaching. tion that was published in the New York based art journal Bunyan famously wrote Pilgrim’s Progress while impris- Avalanche in 1970: oned in 1675 for violations of the Conventicle Act, which Geologists have found evidence of five periods of glaciation punished people for conducting unauthorised religious ser- in the Sierra. The first began about half a million years ago. vices outside of the Church of England. The book consists The glaciers left prominent marks upon the landscape; they of 108,260 words and, within each of its two parts, isn’t gauged out canyons, broadening and deepening them into divided into chapters, but reads as a continuous narrative. U-shaped valleys with steep headwalls and then advanced The allegory tells of the character ‘Christian’ who makes onto the plain. They built up high parallel ridges of stony his way from the ‘City of Destruction’ to the ‘Celestial debris called moraines. There are all sorts of things like that. City’ of Zion. An insight into allegorical burden is given by The Mono craters are a chain of volcanic cones. Most of the character ‘Help’, Christian’s rescuer from the ‘Slough them were formed after lake Russell evaporated. That’s why of Despond’: ‘This miry slough is such a place as cannot I like it, because in a sense the whole site tends to evaporate. be mended: it is the descent whither the scum and filth The closer you think you’re getting to it and the more you that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and circumscribe it, the more it evaporates. It becomes like a therefore it is called the ‘Slough of Despond.’ Christian’s mirage and it just disappears. burden – or the weight of the conviction of his sin – has caused him to sink into this ‘slough’, and he is only relieved In a similar way, the closer we get to the heart of this area of this burden at the ‘place of deliverance’ (allegorically, the – and discuss the evidence we are uncovering – the more cross of Calvary and the open sepulcher of Christ), where we start to feel we are circumnavigating our intended site the ‘straps’ that bind it to him break, and it rolls away into of exploration. Something is always lost or missing. Like

  Smithson, who speaks of a dislocation with the environ- ment, the idea of a mirage, or things appearing and disap- pearing, becomes central, shifting things into the present. Combining the religious fervour or utopianism mentioned in Bunyan with Smithson’s investigations also serves the idea of ‘site’ as a ‘non place’, or a ‘no place’, a term that is the literal meaning of ‘utopia’. Here past, present and future all become as unpredictable as each other, and ‘non place’ starts to exist in a kind of ‘non time’ as well. Another idea we discuss is situated around a contem- porary form of entropy that exists within the changing geology of this part of South Bedfordshire. It’s just been pointed out by nrk’s gran that London has no sites left for its huge amounts of waste material, and that Bedfordshire is providing a service by becoming a huge tip or landfill project. On a local level (in terms of the geographic scale of London’s population, and its overrunning of resourc- es) we decide that, if we project ourselves forward into a future where ice-age destruction has returned in a differ- ent form to level the land in a cycle, we can see this area as a huge primordial landfill, or as a monstrous formless post ice-age flatland. We say our goodbyes, jump back into nrk’s old yellow bug, and travel full tilt back down the a6. It’s incredible that we can’t hear the car’s engine, let alone each other speak. We shouldn’t be surprised about this – the stretch of road is notorious, a Godforsaken tract between Luton and Bedford that struck fear into people hundreds of years over the flattened plains below, and commands clear views ago. It’s the only route through the Sharpenhoe Clappers along three sides of the Chiltern hills. and one of the steepest ridges in the area. The pass was The point at the top of the steep incline provides a view- an ambush point for highwaymen in the seventeenth and ing point for crop-circles that appear from time to time in eighteenth-centuries. Cassivelaunus, a British Chieftain the fields at the foot of the hill. If one was to believe the who resisted the Romans, in 54 bc, used the hill as an supernatural dimension behind their existence, it serves outpost; and as a Promontory Iron Age fort located at to heighten the mythology behind the ridge, and in a simi- the edge of the ice sheet, fierce battles took place between lar manner, it’s alleged that the wood is haunted by the ancient tribes. Covered by a dense wood and situated ancient Cassavilaunus in the form of a cloud, or with his about five miles north of Luton, it rises more than500 feet presence masked by a ‘cloak of invisibility’, with which he

  could formerly hide his army and escape Caesar’s invad- way, travelling at crazy speeds back to London. ing forces. We arrive home late, and I collapse into bed, but for As if spooked by this – the place always makes you want some reason I can’t sleep. At around eight in the morning to turn tail and run – nrk puts his foot down and suddenly I trudge into the front room and click the tv on, and what we’re travelling faster. He says the Clappers are indicative I see makes me tremor. Buncefield oil depot near Hemel of wind and speed. The phrase ‘going like the clappers’ Hempstead in Hertfordshire has just exploded, just a few comes from the fear of the area: to avoid attack in the hours after we’d sped past it on our way back down the m1. seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, stagecoaches flew The live images, and the way they’re being reported have down this stretch of track, through the sharp valley. The the same apocalyptic impact as the visions of the future we wind that blows between Dunstable and Hitchin passes discussed earlier, and a huge plume of smoke is spiralling through this valley at speed, and ‘blowing like the clappers’ into the atmosphere. This may have been the imminent is a similar variation on this phrase. (The name ‘clappers’ catastrophe nrk and sos had seen in their premonitions originally came from the medieval rabbit warrens that are a day earlier. What we are witnessing is pure entropy still there, and derives from the Latin term ‘claperius’, through the total deterioration of order. meaning both a rabbit hole and ‘a pile of stones.’ Rabbit warrens provided a constant supply of meat and their skins were a large part of the economy of the time.) After a while we slow down and stop. The sunset is incredible, like a scene from the beginning or end of time. We step out and the wind’s subsided, so we sit on the bon- net of the car and listen to more obsolete music on nrk’s stereo. Soon afterwards we are back on the main motor-

  I call my father. Even though he’s just a few miles away, and despite the fact that the explosion was heard in France, he’d slept through the whole thing. I decide not to worry and go back to bed.

* * *

Flash forward. This time it’s Christmas Eve 2005. I’m walking up Dog-Kennel Hill – a remote path that leads between Houghton Regis and Dunstable. The track avoids any of the roads and has a minimal link with civilisation. I’m on my own this time and heading towards the library. Once you’ve passed all of the houses in the original vil- lage, you are led up a steep hill until the path levels off and ago. What is surprising is that we’d met each other at all turns into a long straight run into Dunstable town centre. so long afterwards and that the subject of our home had I used to play on this hill as a kid. One comedic memory come up. It takes me a surprisingly short time for me to is of watching my bike being stolen, while my friend was find the newspaper. I make a copy of it and bring it with riding it, by a skinhead in a Crombie with a red hankie in me to the Vernon Tea Rooms across the road. his breast pocket – and of my father going out to look for It’s a classically provincial story of minor crime – it him in his van armed with a pickaxe handle. It was prob- turns out that Ross’ dad had been driving a dodgy scooter ably just as well that my bike got stolen – I remember com- when he realised there was an old Panda car behind him. ing off and landing on my nose just before I lost it (after A chase ensued and uncannily, he’d made his escape down attempting to jump a huge mound of dumped earth). the path that I’d just walked along to get to the library. It’s As you get to the top of the hill there’s a set of factories the type of thing that used to happen all of the time when on the left that are all used by small businesses, which I was growing up. The area around the car factory and the occupy the site that used to be owned by Vauxhall Motors track between Houghton Regis and Dunstable were par- before it was shut down. Fifteen years ago the place was ticularly unpredictable places, a no man’s land between covered in half built cars and trucks. Once I get into two small towns where gangs of mad kids would roam. Dunstable I head straight for the library to leaf through I’ve always thought that this area has something spe- archive copies of the Dunstable Gazette. I know what cial about it, a mixture of mad energy, pure cynicism and I’m looking for – my friend Ross has told me about his unparalleled romanticism. Even when I was young we father’s escapades in the 70s, and I want to try and find figured that the place was rough. At one point in the 80s the evidence. children from Houghton Regis were banned from attend- The reason why this interests me is that I met Ross for ing schools in Dunstable because they were meant to be the first time recently, and it turns out we were brought too disruptive, so a weird class system was imposed on the up on the same street, albeit at different times. We don’t area. Now even the old school in Houghton – where every- recall each other, and that’s not surprising, it being so long one had to go without choice – has been closed down.

  in 2002). Unfortunately this seems to have had a similar effect to the hat industry in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and a dysfunctional madness is starting to creep in. The high street is looking grim despite the economic gloss that has affected most other places in the country. I walk along Church Street and turn left down Boscombe Road. It’s slowly started to be colonised by a few busi- nesses, but there’s still an eerie atmosphere to the place, with the odd car driving past half reconstructed pave- ments – it’s all oil, sand and car parks. I walk further and see a discarded piece of paper on the pavement, covered in black marks and gravel. I pick it up. The ink has bled slightly, but I can read most of the text:

Local boy in bittersweet, early morning odyssey It might say Luton on my birth certificate but that’s just a cheap deceit for those who don’t really understand the architecture of South Bedfordshire. When you’re turfed out of the crucible that is Luton and Dunstable Hospital you make your choice. Turn left? Turn Right? I went right, that makes me a Dunstablian, simple as that. So it turns out to be the last Christmas I’ll spend in my hometown of Dunstable. My parents finally get around to getting divorced and it’s the end of me being the only one of my friends whose parents actually live together. It’s what we do here, after all this is the town that invented divorce all those years ago, this is our greatest export and our gift to the world. I spent Christmas night round at my younger sister’s place drinking and what have you, and around midnight a couple of the more ‘up for it’ guests decide to head off for Exodus. For some reason, perhaps sensing the forthcom- I decide to walk around to the other side of what used to ing domestic Armageddon, I decide to go back to my Mum be the Vauxhall car plant to see how things have changed. and Dad’s place instead. Back to the little room in which I’d After the closure of Bedford Trucks in 1986 a huge swath spent most of the first eighteen years of my life. The familiar of the area was turned into a redundant ghost town, and autopilot walk home, then sneaking up the stairs, which for more recently further closures have meant that Dunstable some reason has no carpet, instead just those fucking strips has followed Luton into decline (the car plant there closed

  of nails to stop the carpet, if there was one, from slipping Downs, no joy. So on to the warehouses along the disused and instead of holding that hypothetical carpet in place they railway tracks (remember this is the biggest town in Britain act like a spiteful cattle grid puncturing my stockinged feet. without a railway station and in fact is quite possibly the big- Rocket fuel for my sailor’s mouth. Hopefully I won’t repeat gest town in the universe without a railway station) and on last year’s performance and try to piss in their cupboard. to the warehouses and vehicle pounds and then towards the I’ve never been a good sleeper and predictably by 4 fields behind the leisure centre and Dunstable College. o’clock I’m awake. Inevitably still drunk, and I must be, I’d heard before that sound travels in a strange way but because I actually think, at least for a while, that I might get I’d never really experienced quite what that means. In the back to sleep. And it’s exactly then I hear it. Out there some- space of a hundred yards it would shift from high Db to where, somewhere past the double-glazing and the rows of absolutely nothing. Now, I’ve been walking an hour and the single garages. Boom, Boom, Boom. residual alcohol levels are dropping and I’m beginning to No it’s not the future calling. No it’s repetitive beats, suspect that my big entrance isn’t gonna happen. I’m also which in this town must mean its Exodus. It’s somewhere beginning to run out of options for venues because this town out there and judging by the volume it’s pretty close. So I’m really doesn’t have a vast supply, yet I still can’t believe that lying there and sleep’s not happening and all the time there’s sound is travelling all the way over from Luton. This then is the boom, boom, boom. So eventually I get up and ener- my last chance. gised by the kind of guilt reserved for those who go home So along then to the overgrown tracks at the base of the early, and a slender chance for redemption (I’m gonna turn huge, redundant, Bedford Trucks plant. This area is the up at a rave at five in the morning!), I begin my search for dark heart of this particular town. This is the place to be Exodus. mugged or raped. A place populated by horrible tales of On the streets the sun’s up, there are no people and it’s doomed schoolgirls, glue bags and random configurations beautiful. When you live in a town like this, you sporadi- of bigger kids. In fact it was here that exactly such a gang cally find yourself in this situation. Out on your own, or in tried to make the ten year old me and my friend ‘bum’ each a ragged couple out on the streets much too early, because other because they did it to each other all the time. Anyway there’s nowhere to go, not at this age, you can’t go home not I digress. So I’m walking around this wonderful place, think- to mum and dad, all wild eyed and wearing the obligatory ing this is definitely my last chance and the sound just van- film of chalk and mud. A quarry coating. If you’re up and ishes and that’s it. There’s no happy ending, no wonderful out at this time you’re up to something. closure, just me tired wondering what I was thinking with a The sound drops in and out but it’s still there. So I start long walk home. Unfortunately for me my parents bought towards it using my intimate local knowledge of suitable sites a house, which is only about six feet into the town, so tradi- in that direction. First I head towards nearby Blows Downs, tionally I always have the longest walk home. which is in fact a set of hills above one of our premier estates, Later in the day I speak to my friend Derek, one of the the brilliantly named Downside. You might think that a hill adventurous duo who had gone to the ball, and guess what, does not seem a likely location for a rave but you would not the rave had been on the industrial estate near the factory, be aware that the Downs, an even bigger set of hills on the and I had been a predictable hundred yards away. Never other side of town, was home (allegedly) to an infamous mind. So that’s it, my last Christmas in a family home, in my (at our school) Spiral Tribe event. However, back at Blows hometown unsuccessfully looking for Exodus. I never really

  liked Dunstable, I mean why would you, but when I first Way that leads over the Chilterns, together with a made the short and inevitable move to London and things list of surrounding towns and villages. Titled ‘South Beds started to unravel for me, I still clung to the fantasy of walk- Hardcore’, it looks like it could represent the territory ing up the Edgware Road, straight up the m1 and home. covered by a marauding but well organised subculture from the early 90s. A second diagram, emblazoned with the text ‘Immediate

Further along I come to other pieces of discarded printed effects of a 150kt Air-burst’ represents a personal order of material blowing across the road. The few I rescue, before actions in Dunstable. It’s telling that these speak of the they’re cast into water or through gaps in nearby wire threat of nuclear war, and it sounds as if the individual fences, appear to contain diagrams and lists that speak who’s created these plans must be old enough to have of half-forgotten events and cultural phenomena. They experienced the prospect of this reality. I remember just remind me of new-age symbols, pentagrams and occult the previous week nrk telling me of a four-minute warn- paraphernalia, conceptual art diagrams, which contain ing siren that had gone off by mistake in a nearby village an unexpected form of mysticism. The first is a map of during the early 80s, causing untold psychological dam- Dunstable, which shows its position at the meeting point age to the locals who heard it. If you were of a certain age of the Roman road of Watling Street and the ancient around this time – born a couple of years too late, it would

  have passed you by – you either got the full force of the robber, Dunn, who gave his name to the town, ‘Dunn’s trauma attached to the threat of nuclear war, or missed it stable’; the second is that it comes from Anglo-Saxon altogether. Dunstaple, meaning ‘Hill Market’) has an unusual amount Within this picture, ‘Number 1’ represents instant anni- of pubs that are concentrated in its centre around the hilation, while ‘Number 10’ stands for third degree burns. ancient crossroads. This is because the town was a day’s First on the list, near the epicentre of the blast, is ‘Pink ride from London and a place to spend the night – The Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones’, who all Sugar Loaf in High Street North, and The Saracen’s Head played in the aforementioned California Ballroom – or on High Street South, for example, still have coaching ‘The Cali’ – situated on Whipsnade Road at the foot of gates to the side. One could say that this heavy concentra- the Dunstable Downs. This was out on the western edge tion of drinking establishments led directly to the events of Dunstable during the 60s and 70s. The venue was the in the summer of 1990 when a few hundred angry fans site for so many important events that it’s incredible it spilt out onto the street. The fact that the ancient roads was ever closed. As was also the case with The Queensway and the area in general is said to be host to a number of lay Hall. This modernist civic centre was bulldozered more lines also provides these skirmishes with a touch of neo- recently in 2000 after being built in the early 60s. It host- Situationist or psychogeographical inevitability, as if the ed some great concerts (and bizarre events such as ‘The area is laden with a kind of cursed power. International Tattoo & Body Piercing Expo’, also included The final image comes in the form of a diagram or ‘map on the diagram’s list at ‘Number 8’). of the known universe’ that tells us to read its contents Although the town’s famous for hosting the divorce from the bottom up. Just like the individual who made proceedings of King Henry viii and Catherine of Aragon, this image, the map’s perspective is skewed with a form which led to the separation between the Church of of beautiful provincialism. Luton and its surrounding vil- England and the Roman Catholic Church, the other illus- lages are shown in opposition to London on an ‘ancient’ trious thing about Dunstable is its penchant for sporadic 80s map, and the two sites form a topography known football disturbances – even though it’s situated approxi- only to the local tribes that populated the area. Outside mately five miles from the nearest league ground. When of Luton’s demography – as if surrounded by a huge city the England team were knocked out of the World Cup wall – is a void inhabited by ‘The migs’ and ‘Inertia’. ‘The by Germany in 1990 the ancient crossroads at the centre migs’ or ‘Men in Gear’ were, and to some extent still are, of town, which at the time was home to a double traffic the football club’s undesirable element. The group’s tag roundabout, became the stage for one of the biggest riots used to be written all over the place, especially twenty that has ever followed a televised football match. Perhaps odd years ago. these brief disturbances of 1990, like the Poll Tax riots of This drawing is like a contemporary version of Dante’s the same year, held only a slightly more minor impact for Inferno, with London as ‘heaven’ and Luton and the sur- the fate of the country, compared to events such as that at rounding towns and villages – such as Houghton Regis, ninth place on the list, ‘The first skirmishes of the English Caddington and Studham – as ‘hell’. Just like the pre- Civil War’, which also took place in Dunstable. vious text, it speaks of a progression from suburban or Dunstable or Durocobrivis in Latin (there are two stories semi-rural estates – out on the periphery of small towns behind the town’s current name: firstly there was a famous – towards a form of ‘culture’ of the urban, and perhaps an

  escape from the barbarous nature of certain environs. It Flash – forward again – this time it’s Christmas Day. speaks of the magnetic pull of the big city, and represents I’m awake and I’ve just had the most ferocious night- a seed or bulb that’s flowering into a glorious rose. Yet it’s mare. A kind of stroboscopic gothic vision stain from hell. strange that the diagram is inverted. Which is really the Somehow the Co-op in Houghton Regis had transformed true north or south? Which is heaven or hell? itself into a black industrial church covered in erased graf- fiti. Inside disturbing films were forcibly shown to me, by a * * * strange and sinister presence, perhaps as a form of indoc- trination. Yesterday seems very unusual and far away now. It’s still early, so my father and I decide so go for a walk to get some fresh air. I’d like to erase the still fresh afterim- age in my mind. We go to the nearest range of open space a couple of miles away. We’re soon walking high up on the Dunstable Downs, just along from a car park containing a closed refreshment stand. There’s clear weather and we can see for a good fifteen miles over a large section of south Bedfordshire, with the villages of Totternhoe, Edlesborough (with its small church standing prominent above its houses) and Eaton Bray all clearly in view. Further to the east, the outskirts of Luton shimmer in the distance. Down below us, a glider landing strip, which appears like a miniature toy construction, is completely inactive, and up on the hills there’s just the odd kite and a bunch of shell-shocked people recovering from the already heavy festive atmosphere. This area is laden with history, and the Ridgeway – again the Icknield Way – was formed by around 700 bc as the major trade route between East Anglia with central southern England. The location has a strange pull, where the aforementioned lay-lines and tracks converge with beacons and monuments, and the range of hills spreads from west to east. Further in the distance to the east, the local geography takes an extraordinary turn. At Leagrave, the estate at Marsh Farm hosts three high-rise blocks called Wauluds Bank Flats. This area is the one that NRK Mohammad and SOS Newsrod had found themselves so powerfully drawn to in their adrenalin-powered dérive a few weeks earlier. The site effectively collapses ancient and modern histo-

  ries together in one moment, with the buildings on the immediacy in the here-and-now – and perhaps seeing the estate forming their own memorial to the ancient Wauluds site and its monuments as lost moments functioning as a Bank, a monolithic henge monument, which was the only portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future. known Neolithic structure of its kind in the Chilterns, built Imagining Marsh Farm in this way would turn the his- between 2,500–2,000 bc. The site near Leagrave Marsh tory of the place on its head. I remember coming here after surrounds one of the springs feeding the , and the riots in the area in the summer of 1995. It was a strange the original monuments were located at the crossroads of scene; driving up to the estate and walking around while the north Chilterns, just north of where the Icknield Way a small gospel choir – the only other people apart from forded the river. At the time an eighteen-acre d-shape myself on ground level – sung their hearts out beneath the area enclosed an earth bank and external ditch, over two tower blocks, surrounded by the odd burnt out car. metres deep and five metres wide, with the ditch being In one respect imagining the area as a mirrored portal dug to provide the material for the bank’s construction. doesn’t intimate either a messianic redemption that might By analogy with other henges, there may have been large be connected to Walter Benjamin, or the idea of the past of circular wooden structures within the enclosure, and the W.G. Sebald’s modern world that is so devastated by history monument was probably a meeting place where ceremo- that it appears ‘after nature’. Perhaps any profane illumina- nies and religious gatherings could be held for residents in tion into historical change or the possession of revolutionary the Luton district and elsewhere in the Chilterns. energies is replaced by something subtler. It’s still interest- The transition of this henge monument to a row of tower ing to look at the perspective of Sebald, because it would be blocks – from an ancient site to a utopian communal proj- easy to see the inhabitants of this area occupying a ground ect – embodies within it an unanticipated reversal towards similar to that of his ‘ghosts of repetition,’ or the Marsh the dystopian that’s typical of most housing projects of Farm estate’s palimpsest of the ancient and modern as the its kind, but in a very precise way. One could see these ultimate ruin. But perhaps with a humorous twist, it’s also buildings as tomb-like structures, as constructions with possible to look beyond any melancholy despondence into a sacred quality, living embodiments of entropy involving something more radical. As Smithson has said in ‘Fragments the transition of the ancient to the modern, and subse- of a Conversation’ from 1969, ‘Geologists always talk of the quently through to modernism’s failure. An equivalent of earth as “a museum”; of the “abyss of time” and treat it in what Smithson again, in the context of Land Art in the late terms of artefacts. The recovery of fragments of lost civiliza- 60s, saw as the tension between the rural and the urban as tions and the recovery of rocks makes the earth become a a ‘calamity in preparation.’ If the present that we’re now kind of artifice.’ Perhaps what we need is a move that would living in is what he imagined in his vision of ‘the future as circumnavigate the ‘historical’ as an excavation site, or as a catastrophe’, then this particular example is the most poi- construction site, and deal with the past as the virtual in the gnant we’ve seen to date. But we can also take things fur- present. Perhaps if we see Wauluds Bank Flats as more like a ther if we envisage a revaluation of this failure by looking at mirrored monument or shrine with a separate sense of dura- this estate and its surrounding park through the idea of the tion, then we could reach a more interesting place, a ‘non aforementioned ‘non place’ or ‘utopia’ by trying to imagine place’ that embodies the tension between stasis and speed, the area as being constructed in the same way as a work between the site and the reflected non-site: something or by Smithson in the 60s or 70s – as embodying the same somewhere like light itself.

  Going back to the riots of 1995, it’s interesting to see how they were calmed. The previous three days had involved intense fighting, which had ignited when hundreds of kids had spilled onto the streets around the estate. The result of fermenting social discontent and boredom, these events had seen indiscriminate burning, looting and fighting with police, with the only thing finally bringing peace to the area being a rave organised by the local group Exodus, who were very active in south Bedfordshire in the early 90s. Apparently this served to redirect local anger and bring the trouble to a close. The Exodus Collective publicly accused police of inciting local people to riot by behav- ing like an occupying army. Although throughout their history the group have attracted a fierce reputation for their actions within the local area – from organising ille- gal raves, to storming and taking control of local benefit in ensuring new modes of thought are created as a form offices (they once arrived mob-handed at the Dunstable of social responsibility in itself. dss to demand correct payments) – they are also known for Getting back to Wauluds Bank. My friend Andrew their stance made on behalf of social welfare. Tenants since Hughes remembers visiting his auntie who has Down’s December 1992, Exodus bought all seventeen acres of the syndrome in the flats in the1 970s. I met him a few months Long Meadow Community Free Farm on the outskirts of earlier in the Arndale Centre, and he told me about his Luton in December 1999. Situated just up the road from memories of the Marsh Farm estate. He said the area Marsh Farm and flanked by the m1 and the main railway has really sad associations and fills him with melancholy, line between London and Bedford, the farm was once used that when is auntie moved there, he’d visit from his home as a rubbish tip during its years of dereliction. in nearby Flitwick, and the place would have a strange The group also developed a place called Haz Manor, alien quality, which was even worse when she lived in the a former derelict old people’s home that initially used low-level housing in the shadow of the flats. Her move to money from raves, and by pooling housing benefit. Wauluds Bank was a form of redemption, but perhaps a Squatted in 1994, and then licensed from Luton Borough false one, because she was fond of hoarding things and the Council, by 2000, Haz Manor housed 40 people, with a place was real mess. Andrew remembers an emotional cor- communal crèche, workshops and permaculture garden. relation between his own image or memory of the estate If the group are responsible for working directly with the and the mood within the building itself. community in an outrageously straightforward way that While we were talking about old times, he also mentioned involves direct action situated among the ruins of failed Johnny G., who I can’t remember. At the time he was, and social projects, then the effect of their practical efforts even now still is, a mildly amusing mythical Luton character seems to have some relation with the creation of radical named after Johnny Guitar, who was into 50s style clothing. new forms of subjectivity, and could be seen to operate Just like the jettisoned archival material we’d found in the

  Town Hall’s skip, this story speaks of the characters in small cement works closed in 1971. For a while between 71 and towns, which grow in magnitude over the years. 76 – unusually the void-like period between the 1960s and Back over to the west from the top of the Downs is punk – these huge monuments on the landscape repre- another eerie site, where a number of old chimneys used sented a real form of redundancy and stasis. to rise from the Blue Circle cement works. The works Back on the Downs, we walk up from the car park and out into a westerly direction until we come to a hand- made memorial attached to a fence. Made of flowers and cards it resembles the site of a road accident, yet this is in the middle of a field. Confused by this, we decide that, instead of walking on, we’ll head off back to the car and drive up to Ivinghoe, which is the next hilltop on the horizon and part of a series of beacons, which were lit as a primitive form of communication. We drive as far as we can and then make the rest by foot until we reach the summit. We can see the Dunstable Downs spread out in front of us, forbidding our passage to the south, and perhaps protecting the south from us. The old chalk lion carved into the side of the ridge has seen better days, but it’s still a surprise to see it appear in the used to occupy a large part of the area between Dunstable distance. We survey the quiet and unusually calm area for and Houghton Regis. If we were to have looked out from another brief moment and make our way down the steep this same position on the Downs in the early 70s, we’d be incline towards the flat plains below. It’s strange, but I’m able to see them as clear as day. I remember these huge more than happy not to go back to London for a while. structures only vaguely. Old family photographs show them hovering over my parents’ garden fence, and at a certain point they disappear from view. A few people I have spoken to remember there being three chimneys in total, when in reality there were only two. It’s as if there’s a collective amnesia about them, and it may be something to do with an excessive overcompensation of memory filling in gaps due to a lack of clarity. Fiona Lumbers, for example, who grew up in Toddington, has exactly the same problem remembering these tall brick constructions. Eventually one chimney was blasted during a big ceremo- ny that may have been connected with Dunstable carnival, while the second was demolished gradually with the aid of an enormous steel ball. This happened in 1976 after the

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