Forgotten corners and the unfinished. Layers and textures in wasted spaces.

I’ve been exploring the neighbourhood in more depth with my children, specifically looking for overlooked corners, alleyways and paths that lead nowhere in particular. Through doing this I’ve discovered forgotten, neglected spaces with unfinished activities. There are intriguing layers and layers of clues where humans have been. A mix of man-made and natural materials, tangled and interwoven, abandoned buildings where a business has failed, gaps in fences to overgrown gardens, plastic mesh rolled up and left to disintegrate while dandelions push through concrete and grass that hides sheets of rotting plywood.

In and around my neighbourhood there is evidently a dissonance of community and underground reprobation. The local park is frequently searched by sniffer dogs and there are narrow paths that lead towards hidden spaces where dodgy goings on occur. Either sides of all walkways on the brambled hill are sprinkled with rubbish. There are people around, myself included, who voluntarily litter pick in an attempt to maintain a space that’s safe to roam around and pleasant to be in. Reminders of how the system fails many people in the UK are all around us. How our national government forces local councils to chip away at the resources that should tackle social issues all whilst barely maintaining public spaces. Empty buildings and unused car parks, places that hold so much potential, now stand forbidden for use because of inefficient red tape and doomed to decay.

I love the dichotomy of the orderly man made with the sprawling natural. How winter has stripped the trees and shrubs of their leaves to expose their delicate line structures. There is a corridor made by a chain link fence and a privet hedge, a garden fence that’s a made using disconnected materials, serving the purpose of a barrier without the luxury of aesthetic appeal. The sign has been taken from the old factory shop probably as a memento, leaving behind an X mark of the glue which once held it in place. Redundant signs are reclaimed for graffiti tagging. Plastic pipes are cut to ground level and left to collect rain water.