Aggregate

Terms and abbreviations from the map of a suburban area measuring ten by ten kilometres: ‘TQ26, Ordnance Survey 1:25000 second series’. Each kilometre square is superimposed; the accumulative interference isolating each locational term from relationships within its own territory. The index records occurrences within the hundred squares. [1992/94]

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The geography—a hundred square kilometres that are part of the London Boroughs of Sutton, Merton and Croydon—is the area where I spent my childhood. It includes the schools, parks, libraries, etc., I went to, and the type of place with which I was most familiar during my first twenty years. Ten or fifteen years later, when I was living in central London, I would travel out to this area and walk from one familiar place to another. There seemed to me to be specific ideas of connectedness, a psychological understanding of the way one location is related to another. Places are linked by roads and people mainly travel from here to there by car, the bits in-between largely filled with houses and gardens, all making a particular mental geography of the suburbs. This can perhaps be best understood in contrast to another isolative perceptual geography: that of a single feature related to its particular topography, as in the case, for example, of a hill farm in a rural landscape.

One part of this suburban landscape seemed anomalous, its ‘identity’ could be perceived as an ‘inverted wilderness’: a large flat area bordering Mitcham, Carshalton, Croydon and Wallington—a square mile or so—of officially private common-type land, gravel pits and ex-sewage workings. There is a network of paths and the whole area is fenced-off (unofficial access is available about every few hundred yards). The area is used for riding motorbikes, rabbiting, watching birds*, etc.; that is, marginal activities. Bounded on all sides by arterial roads and a railway line, from within the fenced-off area there is a feeling of detachment and in effect, invisibility. From a car one is aware of the perimeter and the power lines that cross the area, and five miles away, on the horizon, you can see the buildings of central Croydon. It seems to correspond to the opposite of the land beyond the medieval town walls—this perimeter containing the town and keeping out the land, whereas here the ‘wild’ is an island within the suburban. Some largely hypothetical ideas of orientation in landscape were provoked by being in this place—that there may exist a sort of historical and acoustical ‘depth’ in the place, a pre-electrical radio of invisible/inaudible sound.

* “...because of its undisturbed nature it is one of the best places for birdwatching in London. Although the fields are no longer regularly flooded... the ditches and settling tanks enable lapwing and redshank to breed there, whilst the fields provide winter feeding grounds for gulls, lapwings and starlings.”
The River Wandle, a guide and handbook, Sutton, Surrey 1974.