Will Self - In praise of industrial estates
Will Self balks at the crowded and ‘pre-packaged’ outdoors of Britain’s beauty spots, recommending the solitude of an ‘unlovely’ urban walk instead
A couple of years ago, the writer Nick Royle and I decided that we would undertake the Three Peaks Challenge. We’d get another rambling writer to join us, raise sponsorship and give the proceeds to charity. However, it transpired that there were grave environmental concerns about the peaks. The sheer numbers of sponsored walkers clambering up Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon were leading to catastrophic erosion, denudation of flora, scaring off of fauna – not to mention the large quantities of plastic water bottles that were left behind by these charitable folk.
In truth, I’ve never considered doing a sponsored walk since my age reached double digits, but I liked the idea of three writers/three peaks. I suppose it was naïve of me not to have realised the extent to which these eminences would’ve become a magnet for people who would never normally go walking. After all, I’ve been a walker all my life and I’ve noticed that the words ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’ attract Gore-tex the way sugar does wasps.
Perhaps the best example of this is when I walked from my house in Stockwell, south London, to Newhaven on the Sussex coast. For the first two-and-a-half days, apart from the occasional dog walker, I saw no one who was walking at all. But when on the third day I reached the South Downs, they were crowded out with ramblers and students doing geography projects. To me, the Downs weren’t markedly better walking than the High Weald, the Ashdown Forest or the North Downs – it’s just that they’d been better advertised.
I’d go further. For me, supposed ‘natural beauty’ has become a positive turn-off, guaranteeing that you will be subjected to the whole panoply of the leisure industry: its signage and its infrastructure. Last time I walked up Kinder Scout, they were building a stairway to the top! If only those who led the mass trespass in the 1930s could see how double-edged their success has proved. For, while large areas of the British countryside may now have open access, it’s notable how few locations the masses actually visit.
I blame the English Romantics and their sanctifying of the picturesque. While Wordsworth was still alive, tourists were already visiting the Lake District, carrying with them purpose-built frames that they would then hold up so as to view the landscape as if it were a living picture – this belief is now enshrined by a million brochures, noting down viewpoints and recommending routes. It doesn’t matter
if you walk around the Lakes, or drive, by flocking there, you’re buying a pre-packaged idea of the outdoors just as much as someone in a fast-food outlet is buying a pre-packaged idea of food.
Moreover, it’s this official aesthetic standard that leads people to so neglect the places where the vast majority of us actually live: our cities and towns. They are ugly because we leapfrog over them in order to visit unequivocally lovely places. Localism is as important for the walker as it is for anyone who wishes to consider sustainable modes of life. It’s no good feeling virtuous about walking for your recreation, if you drive, fly or even entrain to walk, for, by so doing you’re subscribing to the hierarchy of landscape that’s got us into this mess.
Anywhere you can walk is, by definition, a good place to walk, because by so doing you reclaim it for the walker. That’s why I tend to walk from my house, even though this involves many miles of ‘unlovely’ city and suburbia. Of course, the paradox is that through concertedly seeking out the interesting from such unpromising peregrinations, I’ve ended up finding them much more enjoyable than walks in traditional beauty spots. If I were to undertake a charity challenge now, it would be to walk round the three biggest industrial estates in, respectively, Scotland, England and Wales in a day. Now I wince when I read of plans for urban regeneration. After all, if successful they’ll rob me of a beauty that I’m free to enjoy, in solitude, in the midst of the crowd.
- This entry was posted on: Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 12:14 am
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