A long time ago, Myra Connell wrote a short story about a woman sitting in a railway carriage imagining the lives of those around her and dreaming thoughts of turf and territory, of land and home, as the wheels sped through the countryside.
Of late there’s been a bit of a buzz about psychogeography. To some extent, all the very best of the modern wave of landscape photographers are telling their life stories, their autobiographies. Not the pretty picture landscapes, not the sunscapes or the stunning mountain views. Although perhaps them too, yes.
One wet day this winter last, in an attempt to find some of the houses where I used to live, a sudden storm blew gusty rain into my eyes and this piece was found, later.
As a representation of the house, of a certain style of suburban architecture, Google Street View surely does it better. But this day, this night, photographing on that corner, in that rain, is personal. This corner once looked upon, looked into my personal space, where I slept.
This is where I first heard that Diana had died, where one night I fell and knocked myself out cold on the staircase, where my son hit an emotional and traumatic high. Things happened. Big things, life changing. Irrevocably, unalterably, nothing would be the same. It was a house of the cusp, of the tipping point.
This one isn’t my house. I never lived here. It’s in Scotswood in Newcastle, where the council has torn down street after street of graceful Victorian terraces because it didn’t like their inhabitants.
I once lived in house like it, though. And its destruction is a better metaphor for digging where we all were then, than the other neat double-fronted with its grassy verge. One theory was that if you had a patch of grass between the pavement and the road in your street, then you’d really made it. Scotswood has all grass and all pavement now, and bright sunny days filled with emptiness. Nobody made it.
This is the first in an occasional series where I’ll dig where I am. It might be rooted in the now, or in place far off in time, or in geography. Like Myra’s train journey, we are not dependent upon a sense of place, but place might define who we are in some way, tangible and intangible.
We shall see.
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