Crossing the fence: The Trespass app and oral history

PHOTO: Sarah Sparkes

Freeman’s Wood is an urban edgeland on the outskirts of Lancaster, northern England. For decades local people have been using the wood for recreation, until it was recently closed off by its owners. The offshore private property company erected a metal fence, barring locals from entering, and threatening those that attempted to gain access to the wood with trespass laws.

In reaction to this, the artists Layla Curtis has developed an iPhone app that provides users with an oral history of Freeman’s Wood, via a series of interviews with members of the local community that she recorded whilst walking inside and outside of the wood. The interviews reflect on the impact and importance of this place on their lives, as well as speculations as to what the future holds, and the memories and insights create a series of moving narratives about boundaries and the shifting meaning of ownership and common land.

The key to the app is, however, that you need to be on those walking routes to access the stories. Once you are nearby the app uses geo-location to identify where you are in relation to the boundaries of the wood, and indicates the starting points for the thirteen walking routes. Crucially, to access all thirteen, you need to choose to trespass… across the fence and into Freeman’s Wood. We caught up with Layla to find out more about this fascinating project.

Listen to a sample from the app:

Can you tell us a little more about the origins of the idea?

I was invited by John Angus of StoreyG2 to visit Freeman’s Wood shortly after the steel security fence was erected around the site in 2012 by the current landowner (a property investment company registered in Bermuda who had recently begun the process of gaining planning permission to build on the plot). Members of the local community were investigating ways in which they could continue to legally use the land, protect it from potential development and bring it into public ownership. An application to register the land as a Town Green had been submitted to the local council, along with requests for three of the footpaths that crossed the space, to be officially recognised as Public Rights of Way.  John had begun a research project about landownership and its effects on local people inspired by the situation at Freeman’s Wood and invited me to be part of it.

Freeman’s Wood is industrial wasteland, now partly overgrown with mature trees, gorse bushes and scrubland; it is a semi-rural, semi-suburban edgeland situated on the outskirts of Lancaster. I found the surrounding fence and the threatening ‘Keep Out‘ signs intimidating, however once inside I quickly warmed to the site itself. It was clear to me that this land was well used by local people, despite the restrictive intensions of the fence. At the time of my first visit a rope swing hung from a tree just inside the perimeter fence, elsewhere a den was visible deep in the undergrowth and there were BMX tyre tracks in the hardened mud of well-worn footpaths. I followed discreet arrows drawn on reflective ribbons tied to trees leading to a fire pit strewn with discarded empty beer cans and I imagined this place as an adventure playground where local children (and adults alike) could make and live by their own rules, escape and feel free.  

It was evident that someone was fighting back against the installation of the fence – I noticed several of the palings had been removed creating gaps and allowing access. Many of the warning signs had been graffitied with political slogans about landownership – some had been cleverly manipulated to subvert their intended meaning; ‘WARNING: Keep Out – Private Property – No Trespassing’ became ‘NARNIA: Kop Out – Prat Proper – Try pissing’.  This is a place of territorial tensions where the interests of a local community are colliding with those of global capital.

How did you find the stories?

The app contains thirteen audio tracks compiled from interviews I carried out with seventeen local people. The interviews took place in Freeman’s Wood, mostly inside the fenced off area. We discussed the land as we walked across it – the local people reflected on the impact the wood has had on their lives, and shared memories and personal accounts of how they have used the space for all kinds of recreational activities – bird-watching, foraging, cycling, dog-walking, den building and BMX biking are just a few examples. Some interviewees remember when the nearby linoleum factory was in use, and when the now-dismantled railway line, which cuts through the site, was still in operation. They discussed the landowner’s recent erection of the steel security fence and accompanying ‘Keep Out, No Trespassing’ signs, the emotional impact this had on the community, and how this has affected the way the space is now used and accessed. We talked about wider issues of landownership, trespass, territory, common land and activism, and speculated as to what the Wood’s future might be.

I mapped our walking routes through the Wood using GPS and plotted them onto the map in the app. Users of the app are invited to walk these same routes while listening to users of the Wood recount their experiences.

Why the limitation? What was the motivation for making the user commit the act of trespass in order to access the stories?

Trespass invites users to come to Freeman’s Wood in order that they can experience for themselves the place that is the focus of this work. Three of the app’s audio tracks can be listened to by anyone who has downloaded the app, however to unlock access to the other conversations, users must cross into the now fenced off area of Freeman’s Wood. On approaching the site users of the app are directly confronted by the physical presence of the fence and are therefore forced to consider the act of trespass. They must decide for themselves whether they will trespass the boundary to fully access the audio content (in the same way that local users are forced to decide whether they will trespass to access the land.)

While the presence of the fence and signs deter some long-term users of the Wood from crossing its threshold, there are several breaks in the fence and it is therefore a very easy boundary to cross. Despite the restrictions, well-worn footpaths still weave across the space.

Can you say something about the importance of place, or perhaps better space, to your work?

My practice focuses on the ways we perceive, navigate and make use of physical space and I am particularly concerned with how we map borders and boundaries, how we define territories and establish a sense of ‘place’. I was curious to meet the people who were suddenly labeled ‘trespassers’ for accessing land they had enjoyed for decades, and set out to investigate the impact the fence, and the actions of a property developer situated on the opposite side of the globe, was having on the local community.

Tell us a bit more about yourself? What are your main motivations as an artist?

My work has a focus on landscape, mapping, and the ways we locate ourselves, represent terrain and our movements through space. I am interested in the attempts we make to order the world, to chart it and the security that this brings; or rather the insecurity that results when we are unable to do so. Often I am seeking to understand place by examining its relationships with elsewhere - observing and revealing connections between locations which may not otherwise appear to have any obvious reason to be associated, such as two antipodal points on earth or those with shared place names.

So it is about the spaces we inhabit, how we define and map them, and differing cultural approaches to issues of land ownership, territory and access. I am interested in how architecture, space and the city can be subverted, re-claimed, re-imagined and re-experienced through practices such as psycho-geography, skateboarding, parkour and urban exploration /place-hacking - and how these practices (consciously or not) challenge the official demarcation of public verses private space.

I work with a variety of media: collaging maps to create fictional cartographical works; creating drawings compiled of text taken from atlases; and employing technologies such as thermal imaging cameras, mobile phone apps, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and video to create drawings and trace journeys.

My research explores how contemporary navigational, tracking or surveillance technologies such as GPS, drones, geo-location, hidden cameras, and infra-red might be borrowed from use in military, recreational or scientific contexts and appropriated to seek alternative artistic solutions for representing terrain, our journeys across it and our interactions with it. Through this I am attempting to push the limitations of these technologies, exploring how they might be hijacked and used as tools for drawing.

Trespass was conceived and designed by Layla Curtis. The app was programmed by Ron Herrema. Trespass is available as a download via the Apple Store

For more from Layla - visit her website

Trespass was commissioned by StoreyG2 and is part of the project LANDED (Freeman's Wood), an exploration of the issue of land  ownership, and its effects on people and places. Other commissioned artists are Goldin & Senneby, and Sans Façon. Find out more about the project on the StoreyG2 website.

Postcard from... the Elbe

By Paul Scraton:

At Torgau we stood by the river and watched as a group of soldiers in camouflage uniforms pulled the bright pink life jackets over their heads and climbed gingerly onto the inflatable rafts. The Elbe was passing quickly beneath the road bridge, the waters of Bohemia pushing on downstream, forward, ever forward, towards Hamburg and the North Sea. We watched as someone important in a motorised launch called out instructions through a loudhailer and a chilly-looking civilian snapped a few photographs and then they were off, the currents taking them around the bend and out of sight before they could even break the surface with their paddles.

We walked back up the quiet street, towards the castle and the sleepy town centre. It was Saturday but in small German towns the shops only make a token gesture at opening on the weekend before closing in order that their owners and staff can do something more civilised instead. In front of the castle a terrace looked out over the river. It was all that remained of the old bridge, the one that used to cross the river before the Second World War.  By the time Soviet forces approached the river from the east on April 25th 1945 the bridge was collapsed, half sunk in the high spring waters of the Elbe as it rushed through war-ravaged Europe. On the other bank they were greeted by American troops who had been pushing west. And so this spot, in the shadow of the castle, was where the Allied forces met for the first time as they squeezed Nazi Germany from either side. In Berlin, down in the bunker, the endgame was in sight.

As we watched the river and tried to imagine those scenes 71 years ago, as kids played on the steps of the memorial the Soviets erected to mark the spot. With texts in Russian, German and English, the Hammer-and-Sickle flag “flew” next the Stars-and-Stripes, both chiselled out of stone, for the entirety of the Cold War and beyond. Torgau would, after the famous meeting, find itself in the Soviet zone and thus the German Democratic Republic, to become infamous as a place political prisoners were sent. And throughout it all, the Elbe kept flowing. Now the tales of war and the divided country are told on information boards and in an exhibition at the castle. Meanwhile, in the town centre and with the shops closed, the locals warmed up in the coffee shop on the main market square. We took one last look at the river, and headed into town to join them.

The new edition of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, is out now. You can find out more and order your copy of Elsewhere No.03 via our online shop.

On Music and Place - The Magnetic North: Prospect of Skelmersdale

Review: Paul Scraton

As a young person growing up in West Lancashire, Skelmersdale always felt like an “other” place. With no railway station and no reason to go there unless you were visiting friends or family in the town, it was never on our radar of escape destinations on a Saturday from our own small town. We would go to Ormskirk or Southport, Preston or Liverpool. The train could take us to all these places. Or to Wigan or to Manchester. But not to Skem. So it was a place unknown and unknowable, and therefore a place where stories could be hung on it, whether true or not, and Skelmersdale could develop a reputation for people who had only ever passed by on the M58 at 70 miles per hour. A rough town of scallies. A place of roundabouts that offered no escape once you were trapped in those estates. An unfinished town, that never became what it was supposed to be. Poor. Rough. What else? Nothing else. In the surrounding towns, that was all you needed to know. The prospect of Skelmersdale was grim.

Skelmersdale is a town of nearly 40,000 people that was designated a new town in the early 1960s, where industry was lured with breaks and benefits that that did not last and by the late 1970s most of the big employers had gone, leaving behind a planned town that was never really finished. Failing was the word that was stuck to Skelmersdale into the 1980s, at exactly the time an influx of newcomers to the town arrived. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement had been looking for a place to build a Maharishi Village and Skelmersdale, at the heart of the country, was deemed the ideal place. And so a community was established, complete with a Golden Dome for Yogic Flying, school and health centre. A failing new town and the largest TM community in Europe… perhaps we should have shown more interest in our near neighbours.

Simon Tong, one third of the band the Magnetic North, moved to Skelmersdale with his parents in 1984. “My dad wanted to be part of the TM movement in the town,” he says, “he wasn’t ever a hippie; he’d been more of a beatnik in the ‘60s. Growing up in Skem as a teenager, I hated the whole TM thing. When I got to 16 and started practising it for few years, it worked. I became a lot less miserable and angry.”

Tong and his bandmates Erland Cooper and Hannah Peel turned their songwriting focus on Skelmersdale following their first album Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North which was inspired by the landscape of the islands and released in 2013. Cooper is from Orkney, and when it came time to think about a follow-up, it was Peel that suggested taking a look at Skelmersdale. The album Prospect of Skelmersdale is then, like Orkney, a sonic exploration of place, exploring the dual modern histories of the town in twelve songs, described by the band as “a dozen tales of hope and hopelessness.”

Now, I am not a music writer. I find it hard to describe albums, songs or live shows in a way that does justice to my experience of listening to music, especially when it is positive and there has been a strong emotional reaction. But I was intrigued by the idea of an album about a town that I had grown up near but not really known, and so I took it with me on a walk through northern Berlin, sleet driving down from the sky at dusk, aiming for a doctor’s surgery by the railway tracks, across the street from a shopping centre. The Schönhauser Allee Arkaden is not the Conny (for those who know Skelmersdale) but as I walked and as I listened I found myself transported back; to memories of my own West Lancashire childhood, and a snapshot of images of Skem, most of which viewed through a car window or the school minibus on the way to a football match.

The first track is titled ‘Jai Gurudev’ after the original guru to the Maharishi and features archive recordings from a speech welcoming visitors and new residents to the opening of the Golden Dome. In what follows the album takes us to the woods and through the estates, the dreams of both the planners of a new town and the builders of a new, alternative community. The music is often melodic, at times dreamlike and yet with moments of sharp focus. Ken Loach meets George Harrison. Some tracks, such as ‘Little Jerusalem’ and the final ‘Run Of The Mill’ are hauntingly beautiful.

Ultimately my reaction to the album is completely shaped by my own knowledge (or lack of) of Skelmersdale. I can picture the boy in ‘Death in the Woods’ going, in the words of Erland Cooper “to meet his mates on a crappy bus on his way to a crappy location, just being a kid,” because if I was perhaps not that boy, maybe I knew him. Sometimes with art it connects with us because of something that is already there inside of us when we come to it, as we view the painting, read the book or listen to the album for the first time. As ‘Run Of The Mill’ came to an end as I reached the door of the doctor’s surgery it felt like I had not only walked through the cold and soggy streets of Berlin, but I had been back home again.

On subsequent listens to the album I tried to remove my own experiences from my attempt to judge the music. Impossible, of course, but the more I listened, the more I heard the lyrics and built a picture of those twelve stories in my head (rather than it being a soundtrack to my own childhood memories). It became increasingly clear that this was music - great music - that had been put to the purpose of creating a true portrait of a place, its memories and its community. People often say that an album or music in general can take the listener “on a journey”. With Prospect of Skelmersdale, the Magnetic North allow us to explore the town, having created a genuine album of place, filled with story-telling, reporting, memory, myth, (re-)imaginings and descriptive beauty that the best writing on place contains, whether done with a pen, a piano, a guitar or a voice.

The Magnetic North online – website / Facebook / Twitter. Prospect of Skelmersdale is released on the 18 March 2016 and is available for pre-order here.

Film: Secretly sharing the landscape with the living

Secretly sharing the landscape with the living: A film by Martin A. Smith

Filmed on The Icknield Way, The Chiltern Hills, Buckinghamshire

Following in the footsteps of Edward Thomas

In 1911 Edward Thomas walked The Icknield Way, an ancient pathway that he called “a shining serpent in the wet”. It runs from the Dorset coast to Norfolk, although as Thomas declared “I could not find a beginning or an ending to The Icknield Way. It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness.”

This film shows a stretch of The Icknield Way that runs through the Chiltern Hills, near Princes Risborough. It is an area I know well, the path passes by a village where I used to live, and was filmed in the Winter of 2016.

Martin A. Smith is a composer, artist and curator whose work is concerned with the spirit of place and the creation and reflection of atmosphere. He creates immersive, multi-layered pieces that reinterpret or enhance our emotional response to the nature of place, memory and environment. He has created gallery installations and has written music for film, television, theatre and contemporary dance and is currently working on an audio/visual study of a small village in the South of France and a sound exhibition reflecting the English countryside.

Martin's website