Cities in embryo

And what Kington made me think of was the evolution of cities. Kington, like our nearest town Presteigne, is an old town with modern elements. Kington I think is medieval - lots of narrow sunny alleyways and bulging old wooden buildings - which was modernised in the Georgian era - 1700 - 1850, say - by slapping classical facades on medieval townhouses. And then the modernisation stopped, so although there are twentieth century houses and new buildings, the town centre feels stopped in time. This is its appeal to visitors, of course, especially Presteigne which is much quieter than Kington.

This north Herefordshire area is famous for the 'black and white villages', where the modernisation or rejuventation of the villages stopped even longer ago. Somewhere like Pembridge is essentially a whole town built between 1350 and 1600 with newer infills. The Georgians/Victorians didn't modernise it as by then it was no longer important, so these beautiful villages look much as they did five or six centuries ago. It occurred to me that not only villages looked like this, so that these places are 'cities in embryo'; Liverpool looked like this, so did Manchester, so did London, before streets were widened and straightened and old houses demolished for newer ones. These small towns show an urban progression stopped at some point, in the Middle Ages in the case of Pembridge, the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in the case of Kington and Presteigne. Had they stayed important they would have grown, their medieval buildings would have become Georgianised then demolished or Victorianised and only odd survivors would still be around. Fossilised towns, cities in embryo...

Rural urban

I suppose inevitably writings like this become a journal or have journal elements. A week of warm sunny weather broke tonight with a crashing thunderstorm that blew up out of nowhere; the sunlight failed and there were strong winds and then torrential rain, and thunder and lightning. And then of course it is gone, the air fresher, the garden saturated, the rainwater dripping off the trees. Now it is mistier, the trees disappearing into a fine rain/haze.

To Kington this morning to collect some advertising leaflets for h.Art week in September. I sat in the car and looked at a small Georgian cottage and thought about the connections between landscape and association. The cottage was on the main road through the small town, with a very small front garden and an ornate porch, cast iron with a tent-like roof. Sash windows, old brick, slightly shabby and overgrown. I'd hazard a guess that it was built between about 1780 and 1820. Such places remind me of the Romantics, especially Keats; there seems something domestic and settled about these buildings, the setting for firelight and conversation and creativity, like Leigh Hunt's house on Hampstead Heath. I can imagine wild travellers being dropped off by the stage coach or a carter, open top coat bulging with poems and journals, the knock-knock-knock at the door, the golden light spilling out into the dusk. My romanticism! Today they are the epitome of the English country cottage, and yet when Keats was alive they would have been brand new and would not have had these associations. Is it the association of creativity and domesticity that I like? The visible landscape of another time? It occurred to me that the lives of famous people are a way into their time for us, their stories become a way of understanding their history. So Wordsworth's time on the Hindwell becaomes a method of examining the history of that valley. It's vague, this and I'm getting off the point. But the rediscovery of historic landscape through the lives of famous people I find interesting.

July

A warm and sunny day, after a week of grey days and cool nights. Today was how July should be. The landscape around here is subtly changing colour, the softer greens looking washed out and the wheat ripening to gold. Against the thick green of hedgerow trees, the fields look totally bleached out, like sand or dust, so it looks hotter and drier than it really is.

One thing I should think about is landscapes of time. I have no real awareness of the turning of the year, the lengthening and shortening of the days. Moon phases pass me by. Living out of the city has subtly shifted that but I should still be more aware. I am as unaware of this as I was of tides when I lived in Liverpool.

Edmund Blunden

'So November is at an end, and I discover that I have been quite outrun by this aged month...'

Edmund Blunden is an undeservedly forgotten Great War poet and writer, who wrote some excellent landscape books. His war memoirs 'Undertones of War' are superb. 'Cricket Country' is a slow journey around fields and pitches and cricketing stories which even I enjoyed - like Arthur Ransome's 'Rod & Line' which is about angling it is more about the mood, the landscapes and the participants than the sport itself. He lived until the early 1970s and had a successful literary career, publishing, editing, producing anthologies and teaching for many years in Tokyo. His book 'The Face of England' is an account of a series of journeys through England in the 1920s, a country he revels in for its gentle pastoral landscapes but a country he feels is irreparably scarred by the Great War; gradually of course the reader realises it is the author who is most affected by the recent war. I found this passage recently which made me think I should re-read the whole book.

The pale light of a mild winter afternoon, which touches a forlorn scene so aptly in its true condition, has rested on many ruins, and identified them with us in a strange degree. It may be merely fancy, or an accident of associations; but I would trace a relation between this spirit, rather than light, and the decline of places. In this sympathetic crystal, so transient, I look at this grove that was once a house, and naturally find the scene transformed into far-off wounded towers, and ramparts, and colonnades of trees, and red loopholed roofs, standing alone aong unpeopled marshy plains, towards the winter evening of their friendly and intimate lives.

Perspectives

I read an article recently where a painter was talking about 'assembling' landscapes, something I have heard before with relation to painters. They manipulate landscape - move bushes or trees, shift a spire - to heighten drama and perspective, to make the painting stronger than the real landscape.

Her approach was to consider foreground, middle ground and background or distance, in layers perhaps like the old 18th century landscape painters who had rules for the drama of paintings. I have found it interesting when photographing cities how much of the city is relegated to the middle of the picture, so that the foreground is occupied by river or road and the top half by sky; the complexities of urban life are squeezed into the middle third of the picture. But this artist was talking about depth of image, not vertical structure. It has always intrigued me how a picture can only record what is seen, not what is felt or heard or smelled, or even tasted. Writing about Liverpool recently I remembered the salt-grease-varnish taste of the thick wooden handrails of the old ferry boats; memory and landscape intertwined.

But beyond this is a different approcah to landscape. My landscape ideas are inevitably associated with memory and memory of place, especially with my urban work where the physical presence of the city IS the landscape, and so are far more abstract in mood than a physical representation of a landscape. They are both more and less 'representational'. And I suppose that a writer is far more a part of a landscape than a painter/photographer; the landscape is seen far more through the writer's eyes, so perhaps I manipulate as much as the painter does.

The Bald Hills

A drive over the Radnor hills from Presteigne to Knighton. Mostly we spend our time in the valleys here as this tends to be where the towns and villages are. And the tops of the hills here are often forested, so the views are restricted. Over towards Knighton the landscape - the hillscape - opens up and the forests are dark patches of dense trees on the sheep fields and fields of wheat. The sheep grass is clipped short and the hills look like velvet, a real 'patchwork' of greens and black-green forests. And the clouds up there are amazing, huge tumbling shapes on a high silent wind, patches of unexpected blue, I could lie on those fields forever watching the clouds. It has been a week of grey days and grey rain clouds, so the blue and white clouds are all the more welcome.

Hindwell Thoughts

I am putting together an idea for a performance/exhibition about William Wordsworth. His cousin/brother in law Tom Hutchinson rented farms here for twenty odd years, and William and his sister Dorothy came here many times.

Wordsworth was a great walker and I am intrigued by the idea of shadowing him on possible walks from the farm at Hindwell, which is still a working farm. One idea is to follow the Hindwell river from its source at the farm to another Hutchinson farm at Broadheath, and maybe on to the confluence of rivers in this valley, where the Hindwell joins the Lugg. This would mean walking the whole river.

The point of the project is to try and see the landscape as Wordsworth saw it nearly two centuries ago; Tom H first rented Hindwell in 1809, so if we try and make it happen next year it will celebrate two centuries since their involvement began. Some walks are obvious, such as the Hindwell walk, or the walk to Old Radnor church, where the family worshipped. There are other Wordsworth sites in herefordshire/Powys which could be visited to ground the project in a broader 'Wordsworth landscape', as if his vanished presence can still influence life today. As it does for me, of course.

An Archive of German Cities

A recent article in the paper about a large archive of photographs of German cities, taken on Hitler's orders in 1942/43. They show the centres of many German cities, ancient medieval streets clustered around town hall or cathedral, essentially landscapes three or four centuries old in cities that are a thousand years old. The idea was to document how the cities appeared so that after Germany won the war they could be rebuilt as they were. The photographs show Leipzig, Stuttgart etc - and most poignantly Dresden - as they were after a 'small' amount of bombing. They show cities with cleared districts, small 'patches' of streetscape near to the centre having been flattened and then cleared. They show a city landscape and a country at a time of transition, when German cities were being bombed but the authorities could still assemble gangs - often slave labourers of course - to clear the rubble and the streets. The photographs are snapshots, slices of history, landscapes in the process of being transformed. They are photographs of a present looking back into a past, as if (because the assumption is they are doomed) they are already slipping irrterievably backwards into history. Hitler tried to record the present already becoming the past.



They reminded me of a similar German book I bought many years ago, a collection of photographs of German cities before the First World War, another time of enormous civilian upheaval and change. They show elegant men and women promenading on the wide empty boulevards of Munich or Berlin, the dusty streets next to them only occupied by a few horse-drawn carriages and wagons. The text is in German and written in Gothic, which I think was banned for a time after 1945.



These images of essentially vanished landscapes remind me of similar images I have seen many ties of Liverpool; lost streets and horse-carriages, Victorian and Edwardian street scenes, commonplace city-memory. This seems like a Sebaldian curiosity, this awareness of history and time, especially with regard to the melancholy history of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. I found looking at the 1942 photographs a sad experience, fraught with the knowledge of immediate destruction. We bring too much weight to landscapes and they can seem to produce all sorts of emotion.

Rainclouds in the Valley

A number of jobs to do in the early evening and then I hoped to sit outside with a drink. But I could see the rain clouds moving down the valley, first obscuring the Radnor hills, then a general haziness in the air, then large drops of rain on the bins and the car. But it is warm so they fade/evaporate almost immediately. Then the rainclouds pass over into England and the sun comes out. This is a good place for clouds as we can see a mile across the valley and so we have a mile of sky above us, going up as far as we can see. One of the gardening presenters once said that with gardens you can always go up, grow things vertically; and it is also true of bigger landscapes. Cloudscapes and the journeys of clouds would be a lifetime's study on their own; but not meteorology, more a poetic sense of size and insubstantiality and fragility. They look so solid, so angry, yet they move with the slightest breeze.

First Thoughts

I suppose this work carries on from my Spring Journal but is less of a diary and more focused on writing about landscape; the words we use, the meanings we draw from it, the weight of association we bring to it. I feel that my written work is moving further away from pure history and towards a poetic appreciation of urban and rural landscapes, and want to experiment with ways to describe landscape and talk about it. Some of it will be diary entries, descriptions, observations. It will have no ending but there will be times when I won't write, as I have nothing to say or no time to work. If/when it finishes I hope to be left with a body of work that explores ways of writing about landscape.