Affective Edgelands: Wildness, History, and Technology in Britain’s Postindustrial and Postnatural Topographies

Abstract

Geography has wielded a signifier for the urban phenomena, edgelands: “the interfacial interzone” between urban and rural.1 As Frances Spalding notes, the term is new, freshly brandished by innovative spatial discourse; however, this type of space has subliminally registered in the British imagination for some time: Somehow we know immediately the meaning of “edgelands.” The word evokes zones where overspill housing estates peter out or factories give way to black fields or scrubland; where unkempt areas become home to allotments, mobile-phone masts, sewage works, cooling towers, dens, places of forgetting, dumping and landfill.2 The authors of Edgelands consider England’s canal networks as one of these spaces, transformed from the highways of commercial carrying during Roman occupation of the south of Britain to the inland arteries of industrial expansion and colonial relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of which over 2,000 miles of navigable canals remain today. In their analysis of the “double life” of canals— adopted as natural features where they cut through the countryside, dumping grounds when found in urban spaces—Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts question how this “broken network” can be “reconnected and revived.”3