Strange City: Thomas Willson and the Primrose Hill Pyramid

Artwork: Laura Haines

By Dan Carney:

In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, increased migration into London and rising fertility rates caused the city’s population to almost double, from 750,000 in 1760 to 1.4m by 1815. Burial space was at a premium. London’s graveyards, generally centuries old, were already foul smelling and disease-ridden, overpopulated and unfit for purpose. Bodies were buried on top of others, with older corpses sometimes even exhumed, then scattered, in order to make space for fresh ones. By the 1820s, with the widespread implementation of cremation still several decades away, it was clear that the problem had grown too pressing to ignore. A lively public discussion was underway regarding the reformation of interment practices. 

A popular idea was the building of large out-of-town garden-style cemeteries - something first considered over one hundred years earlier by Christopher Wren - but architect Thomas Willson suggested an alternative solution. Inspired by the craze for ancient Egypt that was sweeping Europe, Willson proposed the construction of a vast pyramid mausoleum atop Primrose Hill. With a 40-acre base as large as Russell Square and a height of 1500 feet (four times the height of St. Paul’s), the 94-storey, granite-faced structure would contain 215,219 storage vaults, arranged honeycomb-like along concentric corridors, accessed via ramps and hydraulically powered lifts. There would be capacity for five million bodies, as many as could be interred in a more conventional 1000-acre “horizontal” cemetery. At the summit would be an astronomical observatory.

Willson first exhibited his idea at the Kings Mews exhibition space at Charing Cross in 1828 before publishing the plans in full two years later. He described his pyramid as a “coup d’oeil of sepulchral significance unequalled in this world”. It would “teach the living to die, and the dying to live forever”, and be the centerpiece of an ornamental site, where families coming to pay their respects to loved ones could picnic on the grass outside. It would also offer investors the chance to make a killing - freehold vaults would cost between £100 and £500, depending on size and location, with further income generated by leasing additional vaults to parishes. Willson estimated that, once filled - at a rate of around 40,000 burials annually for 125 years - his structure would bring in a profit of almost £8.2m. He set up the Pyramid General Cemetery Company in order to promote the project to interested parties. 

Reactions to Willson’s ideas were mixed. The London Literary Gazette was unequivocally hostile, writing: “This monstrous piece of folly, the object of which is to have generations rotting in one vast pyramid of death… is perhaps the most ridiculous of the schemes broached in our scheming age.” One prominent figure in the burial reform movement, John Claudius Loudon, was impressed with the capacity but also had reservations. Writing in the Morning Advertiser, Loudon feared the expulsion of foul-smelling gasses – “mephitic exhalations” - and was also perturbed by the idea of bodies being buried away from the earth, in “…any way which prevents the body from speedily returning to its primitive elements, and becoming useful by entering into new combinations – vegetable, mineral, or even animal, in aquatic burial.”

Willson’s plans went as far as being presented to parliament in 1830, but interest ultimately petered out, with planners and architects favouring the idea of garden cemeteries. Willson, however, persisted, resurfacing over two decades later at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851 with a model of a “Great Victoria Pyramid” mausoleum, earmarked for Woking Common but similar to his previous plan in most other ways. The project received favourable press coverage and another attempt was made to find investors, but interest again waned. Willson’s last sepulchral pyramid-related activity appears to have been in 1853, when he was accused of defrauding a young man called James Sykes, who had offered a £200 inducement loan to anyone offering him employment. Willson hired Sykes in the office of a “British Pyramid National Necropolis Company”, and had received the money, but had fired him several months later with no sign of repayment. Willson died in 1866, but his idea endured, at least in his own family. His son Thomas, also an architect, submitted a plan in 1882 for a pyramidal mausoleum to house the body of the recently assassinated US President James Garfield. Garfield’s widow was, however, unimpressed, and chose another design for her husband’s final resting place.  

Although the likes of Kensal Rise, Highgate, and the City of London demonstrate that the garden cemetery enthusiasts won the argument, Willson’s abandoned plans offer an intriguing insight into an alternate London, one in which his pyramidal sepulchre – taller than The Shard – would be the highest building in the city (and third highest in Europe), one of its most debated and controversial structures. The designer Laura Haines offers a glimpse into this parallel world in her 2016 project Metropolitan Sepulchre, envisaging the vast structure amidst the Blitz, then surviving as a tourist attraction, dominating the modern skyline. 

The Egyptian theme may have been a voguish peculiarity of the era, but with burial space running out in cities all over the world, particularly those high in populations for whom cremation is taboo, the idea of vertical burial structures in London – or its vicinity - may one day resurface. Some boroughs are now completely out of space and are “recycling” existing plots, back to burying fresh bodies on top of old. Vertical burial methods have been used in other cities for a while. The world’s tallest cemetery, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos, Brazil, opened in 1983 and hosts around 16,000 burial units over 14 storeys. Current extension plans will see it rise when complete to 32 storeys, with space for 25,000 units. Echoing Willson’s vision of his pyramid as part leisure destination, the building also features a tropical garden, with turtles and a waterfall, as well as a classic car museum. 

In Petah Tikva, Israel, a 22-metre high structure at the Yarkon cemetery offers space for 250,000 bodies, with Judaism’s requirement that bodies be buried in earth cleverly fulfilled by dirt-filled pipes inside the building’s columns, technically connecting each layer to the ground. The six-storey Kouanji Buddhist temple in Tokyo requires mourners to use swipe cards to have their loved ones’ remains delivered to them via a conveyor belt system. Ideas for vertical burial structures have also been seriously discussed in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Paris, Oslo, Mexico City, and Verona. It may be that Thomas Willson’s ideas, usually a strange footnote in articles on unrealized buildings or 19th Century Egyptian Revival architecture, were simply slightly ahead of their time. 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked as an academic psychology researcher, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Between the Years

Photo: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

We were supposed to leave on Boxing Day, but the waves raced in off the North Atlantic, crashing against the harbour walls and rolling over the loading bay where the fishing boats had been pulled on wheels out of the ocean’s reach. There was no ferry that day, as there hadn’t been since the 17th December, and the forecast was not good.

For two further days the wind and the waves hammered at the island. São Jorge is a thin sliver, a line of volcanic peaks falling away towards the ocean. If there is flat land to be found it is often on lava debris fields at the foot of cliffs, where villages were built that, for centuries – and in some cases still – are only accessible by foot. Across the channel it is possible to spy the neighbouring islands of Pico and, from the right vantage point, Faial. But if the winds and the waves are high, it does not matter how close they might be. No boats will leave the harbour, and no planes will rise from the airstrip.

We hunkered down, waiting for the break. At a local surf shop, the owner looked at the same website as the owner of our guesthouse had shown us on his phone. A line of coloured boxes, filled with numbers. The website is hosted in the Czech Republic but is apparently bookmarked on every browser in São Jorge. The surf shop owner translated what it meant. High winds. Big waves. We weren’t going anywhere.

Each evening came and with it the message that the ferry was cancelled for the following morning, until one evening when it didn’t. Our guesthouse owner was hopeful. Tomorrow, you can sail. But he promised to leave our beds made just in case. We were to message him only once we left harbour. Only then, would he know we had finally checked out.

At the port in the morning a trickle of passengers became a tide. It was more than ten days by now since the ferry to Pico and Faial had run. In that time, Christmas had come and gone, although the decorations were still up in town and festive songs were still playing through the loudspeakers that had been erected some time in December. Passengers checked in their bags and waited in the terminal buildings. 

Others lined up their cars, waiting to board. At the check in counter, a woman delivered a parcel that would travel on the ferry without her. A man did the same. A taxi driver delivered three boxes and then queued to pay for the transportation, before driving off to work the next fare. The weather forecast for the next day was bad, and for the day after too. This might be the only chance.

Photo: Katrin Schönig

We sat on deck and watched Velas and São Jorge slowly retreat. It would take two and a half hours to reach Faial via Pico, and the island remained in view throughout. It was a long farewell. The first crossing was rocky, the second was rough. Perhaps they wouldn’t have made the crossing if it hadn’t been more than a week since the last one. We stayed on deck and watched the horizon. Some passengers slept, laid out across the plastic chairs. Others headed inside and tried to ignore the motion, watching films on their phones or tablets. 

In the channel between São Jorge and Pico, in the central islands of the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, the internet connection was better than Berlin. We weren’t surprised.

We were between the years and between the islands. In the channel between Pico and Faial a windsurfer raised alongside the ferry, flying above the waves that we were crashing through. The waves seemed to grow bigger the closer we got to Horta and our destination. The spray reached the top deck. Gulls hovered above. At least one passenger was sick. The time between the years is usually when nothing much happens. As we approached land and the rise and fall of the ferry seemed to intensify, we wondered if there were any more surprises left. 

At Horta harbour, where sailors from around the world have left their mark in colourful murals on the harbour wall, and where the first transatlantic seaplanes used to land between the boats, we felt solid land beneath our feet. That evening in Faial, we would still be able to hear the ocean breaking against the rocks below where we were to sleep. We could still feel the motion where we lay. And we could see the dance of the white horses as they broke between the islands behind our closed eyes.

Outside it was calm. The sky had cleared and the stars shone down on the islands and the ocean. Tomorrow, the sun would shine. But the waves had been growing, and the colours and the numbers on the Czech website were not good. The messages had been received. The ferry for the next morning had already been cancelled. 

Photo: Katrin Schönig

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His latest book is In the Pines, a novella of the forest with photography by Eymelt Sehmer, and published by Influx Press.

A Hidden Glen

By Ian Grosz:

We returned to a cottage we’d first rented twenty years before. Hardly anything had changed. There were a few modern scatter cushions on the same old armchair; a new washing machine and sink unit, but it was the same bowed, pinewood ceiling and the same, thick stone walls; the heavy lintel above the fireplace; the same broken clock and faded landscape pictures on the walls; the same, old map of the glen hanging by the stairs up to the mezzanine bedroom. On the shelf beneath the sash and case window looking out to the pines that line the rushing burn coming down from the hills, was a guest comments book still with our entries from twenty years previous. We sat there, reading messages from ourselves from another lifetime. 

The cottage was once the laundry for the main house of an estate belonging to the Ogilvy family, hidden away down Glen Prosen with the evocative name of Balnaboth. Like most Highland estates, with farming and shooting no longer bringing in the revenues they once had, many of the properties had been given over to holiday lets. Even the house itself was now on Airbnb; but when we had first come here the family still lived in one of the two main wings. Their dogs would come to the cottage and scratch at the glass panes of the door to take us for a walk in the mornings: an eager west highland terrier named Una and a low flying, long-haired dachshund whose backside was always tangled up with pine twigs and fir cones.  They’d take us on a tour of the grounds, chasing the resident peacocks and barking at the squirrels. The dogs are long-since gone, but the scratches from their morning wake-up call on the glass of the door are still there, revealing themselves when caught in the low autumn light filtering through the trees. 

There was a thick mist when we arrived, the estate’s trees materialising out of the landscape as we followed the long, single-track road that winds its way up the glen from Kirriemuir, a small country town of red sandstone and the birthplace of the Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie. Barrie had returned frequently to spend some of his holidays away from London in the glens, and was buried in the town’s cemetery. Arriving at the cottage we settled our things; the years rolling back with that curious feeling of never having left. We jammed our weeks’ worth of food into the small fridge and, remembering the dogs, we took a stroll around the grounds to re-familiarise ourselves; the mist clinging to our clothes as we walked back down the track, past the now empty main house with its bright orange-yellow wash of lime rendering and its accumulated memories.

There has been some form of house at Balnaboth since the thirteenth-century, its original name stemming from Baile nam Bochd – the Stead of the Poor – but in its present form is thought to date from 1815 when Donald Ogilvy made a series of improvements, conjoining and adding to earlier buildings after taking over from his father Walter, whose Jacobite brother was exiled in France after the defeat of 1746. Barrie spent time at the house on his retreats from London literary life, meeting here with his ill-fated friend Robert Falcon Scott and later, the Scottish politician Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald was the first Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority labour government for a short term in 1924 and again at the turn of the decade. He later headed a coalition government with a conservative majority during the early thirties, leading to his dismissal from the Labour party.

It is odd to think of a socialist being entertained at the tucked-away grand houses of the landed gentry, with associations that included the writer and high society hostess Lady Londonderry, wife of conservative cabinet minister Viscount Castlereagh, Secretary of State for the Air during the nineteen-thirties. He was central to pushing through the iconic Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft to replace an outdated fleet in preparation for the war everyone knew was coming, but he had openly antisemitic leanings and known sympathies for a burgeoning Nazi Germany and was forced out of the cabinet in 1935. He died after a series of strokes in 1949, still with a porcelain figurine of an SS flag-bearer on the mantlepiece of his smoking room: a gift from Hermann Göring. 

MacDonald was demonised as something of a traitor due to these associations and in his role with the coalition government during the Great Depression; the government having pursued a policy that protected the currency over maintaining assistance to the poor and unemployed. He was seen to have put his career before his principals in aligning with the Tories, but in his own eyes was putting his personal politics aside for the national good at a time of crisis, holding the country together through a dark period in history. He was a founding member of the Labour Party, with a strong reform agenda, and for the time, held some radical socialist views that looked to redress the inequalities of British society. I wonder how much he might have confided in his friend Barrie in the years leading up to the difficult period of the Depression. 

Born out of wedlock to a farm labourer and housemaid at a farm in Lossiemouth and into a culture of strict nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, he got off to an inauspicious start. The prejudices of his religion would set tongues wagging, but the class system and the inequality of the British state was a very real barrier, there to keep folk in their place and the ruling classes in theirs. His parents never married and he was brought up in the Free Church, but became a teaching assistant, enabling him eventually to move to Bristol to take up a position with a philanthropic clergyman. He later moved to London where, after a period of unemployment, he took up a position as a clerk and deepened his interest and involvement in socialism. 

In 1887, he witnessed the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of Trafalgar Square, when marchers protesting against unemployment and coercion in Ireland clashed with the British Army, inspiring a later career as a freelance journalist that began with an article in The Pall Mall Gazette entitled ‘Remember Trafalgar Square: Tory Terrorism in 1887’. Throughout the late eighteen-hundreds he continued to educate himself at The Birkbeck Institute, now the University of London, and in 1888 took employment as private secretary to Thomas Lough, a wealthy tea-merchant and a radical Anglo-Irish politician, opening doors for MacDonald that would secure his own, later political career. 

In MacDonald’s early courting of celebrity and his frequenting of the grand houses of the Tory heirs, I saw perhaps more than a move to influence and maybe a lingering deference to the upper classes; a need in him to prove his ascendancy; to gain approval and validity from those in the very establishment he wished to reform. He was a supporter for Home Rule in Scotland, declaring in a paper published in 1921 that ‘the Anglification of Scotland has been proceeding apace to the damage of its education, its music, its literature, its genius, and the generation that is growing up under this influence is uprooted from its past.’ Wandering around the old estate grounds a hundred years on, his legacy felt increasingly present. 

We crossed a low wooden bridge spanning the burn, which was full and fast and courses its peaty way down from the hills like a torrent of frothy Coca-Cola. Following a muddy path through mixed woodland up a short rise into open ground again, we arrived at the old glass house that lies in ruin on a slope overlooking the burn, its timber frame mostly collapsed into its lower brickwork. A few panes of glass were still in place, but its interior was overgrown with tall ferns; a young tree reaching up through its roofless frame. An old wheelbarrow lay at rest under the shade of a nearby fir tree, as though the gardener who had once tended to the vegetables had simply downed tools and walked away. 

A sense of time and time’s passing was all around us; a sense of decay, and yet it was a comforting sort of sadness held within the crumbling walls of the garden and in the collapsed frame of the Victorian glass house. It felt deliberate, almost staged in its picturesqueness, as if arranged for the sentimental eye of the romantic; the grounds slowly but surely giving way to nature and its landowners democratising a once private estate. I felt it was part of the appeal of the place, this fading grandeur; a reminder of the inevitable certainty of time and change. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. Drawing largely from the landscape, he is published across a range of magazines and journals both in print and online. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in January 2022. Ian is currently working on a personal, narrative nonfiction book-project exploring the ways in which landscapes shape a sense of place and identity. 

Dispatch from Olsztyn: My Two Towers

By Marcel Krueger:

In 2019, I was selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and lived there for six months. I wrote about my experiences on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala) and also for the Elsewhere Journal. This November was the first time since the start of the pandemic that I made it back to the city. 

It is cold as I arrive under a low-hanging November sky. As I alight at Olsztyn Zachodni, the former Westbahnhof of Allenstein, the light over the city resembles dusk, despite the fact that it is 2pm. This is the first time since February 2020 that I'm visiting the capital of the Polish voivodeship Warmia-Masuria. But I know my way around, just like my family knew their way around before me. Up the road from the station is the red-brick Jerusalem Chapel from the 16th century, and a cross commemorating the 1866 cholera epidemic is set in front of the entrance. Opposite the chapel is the steep Królowej Jadwigi – Queen Jadwiga Street. Until 1945, this was Pfeifferstrasse, named after now-drained Pfeiffer Lake at its bottom. House number 10 was built in the late 1920s, an unassuming yellow building with two floors. This used to be the house and office of my grand-aunt Ottilie and her husband Emil Pomaska, who ran a haulage firm here. At this house in 1940 my grand-uncle Franz Nerowski, a spy for Poland, was arrested by the Gestapo and led away to incarceration and execution. But I’m not going there today, and instead shoulder my bag and set off down the street on the other side of the station, towards the city park and the ever-rushing Łyna river, the large red-brick castle from 1353 looming over it, and to my favourite building in Olsztyn: the Wysoka Brama.

What makes us haunt a place? A sense of familiarity, of knowing our way around? An extended network and community, the knowledge that we have friends in a place far from home? Or that a place is providing us with inspiration, with food for thought, and allows us to discover new aspects of it - and ourselves - every time we visit?

All of the above is true for me in the case of Olsztyn, but maybe the strongest allure of the city for me is the fact that I am forever drawn to places with multiple identities, where simple nationalistic stories and touristic whitewashing are absent. The port city of Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, is also a border town, called "El Paso" during the conflict in Northern Ireland as it had strong Republican ties and the IRA used it as an R&R area, but for centuries before that it was the last outpost of English might in Ireland, protecting the Pale from the Ulster Irish. Its colloquialisms and idioms are mostly of English nature, brought here by migrants from England who came to work as part of the military or for the administration. On my street in Dundalk is a reminder of that, so-called Seatown Castle, which is actually the tower of a Franciscan abbey founded around 1240. The abbey was ransacked by invading Scots in 1315, and the majority of what remained of its buildings were destroyed in the early 17th century. The grey-green, lichen-covered tower of Seatown Castle is the only remnant of that abbey, today looked after by Dundalk City Council. Whenever I want to be reminded of the fractures and fault lines of Irish history, I take my tea mug to my back garden and look at it. 

Just like in Dundalk, I have a tower in Olsztyn. During my time as writer-in-residence I lived in an apartment in the old town, and from my living room window I was greeted every morning by the red brick gate of the city. The Wysoka Brama or Hohes Tor or High Gate is the only remaining gate of the three medieval city gates, originally built in 1378 and brought into its current form in the 15th century. In 1788, it became an armory, in 1858 it was converted into a prison, and in 1898 became a police station. Until 1960, one of the tram lines of the city passed through it. Today it also has a glass mosaic of the Mother of God facing the old town, given to Olsztyn by pope John Paul II when he visited in 1991. And just like Seatown Castle, it has lost its original purpose - there is no city wall any more, and you can even walk around the gate to get into the old town. 

But like Seatown Castle, for me it represents the many layers of history here: Olsztyn was founded by Teutonic Knights in 1349 on the hills above the Łyna, became part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1466 and, after the first partition in 1772, part of Prussia. The French defeated a Russian army in and around the city in 1807 and Napoleon paid a visit to the old town, and in 1871 it became part of the German Reich and the province of East Prussia. It was home to a multicultural community of Germans, Poles, Jews, Warmians, one with its minor conflicts of course, but one where the divisions of nationalism were maybe not as acutely felt as elsewhere. That all changed with the Nazis in 1933, and ended with a half-destroyed city and the flight and expulsion of many Germans in 1945. Today however, the city is a pleasant place, and I feel a sense of familiarity and, yes, joy, as I walk to my holiday apartment that coincidentally also has a view of the High Gate. I feel that Olsztyn, a place that was a military and working class city when it was Allenstein in East Prussia, a place that did not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretended to be more important or better than, say, Danzig or Königsberg, is again an administrative and working class city today, one that does not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretends to be more important or better than, say, Gdańsk or Warsaw.  

In my garden in Dundalk, I can smell the ocean and feel the weather coming in from the Irish Sea. The fact that I live on an island is then often extremely clear to me, and with it comes a sense of security and detachment, a feeling that I am in a good place that is somewhat benevolent towards me and keeps the worries of the world at bay, for the moment. Dundalk lies on an old flood plain and will not fare well in the future floods of the climate catastrophe that seem to be almost certain at this moment. From my holiday apartment in Olsztyn, I looked out at the Wysoka Brama on the night of my arrival. It was illuminated by spotlights, but the cold fog of November crawled in over the old town down from the Łyna and diluted the brightness, made the rest of the world seem detached from the place I was in. There and then, in the old medieval town on a hill and in the shadow of its tower, I felt the same insularity as I do in my old town by the sea in Ireland. I was safe up there, for the moment. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Canal walk, reflections

By Anna Evans:

The canal is a great mirror. The stillness of the water reflecting the landscape, with barely a ripple or movement. The trees and the hills are echoed in the water. The clouds are a floating canopy, creating another dimension, a sense of the infinite, a continuous merging of land and sky. 

It is an idyllic day in early summer as we embark on a walk along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. The sky is a carefree blue, the clouds dance through it. Along the towpath, dappled light and shade falling from the trees, stretching onwards and ahead in measured distances, marked for walking. Looking back towards Marsden village, to the backdrop of the moors, wanting to absorb, not to miss a single view. The houses and hillsides framed serenely, with wildflowers and thickets, patches of heather on the moors. The colour of the stone always feels like coming home. 

The telegraph wires suspended across the sky in lines. Ferns overhang the water, their elegant fronds distinctive, along with the branches, the dark shadows of trees. A tree spills its branches across the surface of the water, its reflection blurring impressionistically, ending there in the clarity of white clouds. The textures of the landscape layered in brushstrokes, like stepping through a painting. A picture framed in a pool of water below, dark hills above, a scattering of leaves and of light, propelled in a drift, into layers of colours. The pretty tree admires its image in the water.

A few narrowboats are moored, their coloured reflections surrounded by the trees; gypsy caravans on the water, landlocked but ready to move again. Here there are meadows and flowering trees, the scenic pause of a lock, painted black and white. A beautifully restored stone bridge, a cobbled lane leading away. I like these crossings, these intersections preserved in time. Each lock is numbered, and each bridge across. The sunken towpath passes underneath. It is damp under there and we bend our heads and lean towards the water.

The canal opens out wide, almost circular, before narrowing again into a lock entrance, towards which the water funnels. In this basin, the water reflects the clouds, the trees, the gates of the lock. The water level plunges so that it is like peering down into the depths of a dark well walled by stone. It is almost a surprise to see the water flowing, its force and light and movement. These locks of wood and iron turning cogs, using the measured weight of the water, to propel, to lift, to move. 

The path bends under trees, casting their shadows, leaning across and straying into the territory of the canal, as if swaying, bending, walking towards the water. The water has another quality to it, dark ripples shroud the reflections of the trees in mystery. They trail their leaves and branches through the mirror pool mingling with what is unsettled in the water, with a certain unexplained murkiness fragmented and immersed, stilled and agitated. 

Like much of the canal this stretch is wooded and the walls are mossy. A stream runs alongside. There are fallen leaves and hidden paths, the ground saturated by the recent rainfall. The trees bend gently obscuring the light and making it feel damper, the kind of mud that never dries out fully, dark with disintegrating leaves. Reeds and rushes grow thickly, and reflections of the trees make it almost impossible to see what’s below the surface. 

The water is densely covered to saturation with flying particles, seeds dispersed by the wind, blown across in sparkles of light and dark; a silver coated pathway travels onwards. A bright patch of light leading out into the dark canal, like a forest shaded in dark patterns of trees and light. The clouds darken again, shift their shapes in silhouetted, weighted light, outlined by the bright lines of sunlight emerging, changing the view. 

We emerge into the outskirts of Slaithwaite, a thriving Pennine village where people sit outside in cafés and bars near the waterside. The canal is a snapshot, like the cobbled streets and preserved architecture, a remnant of another time. Everywhere there are adaptations, an old mill building converted into modern apartments. Passing through the village, the towpath continues. The day has shifted and become more changeable as we cross into a part of the canal with a more industrial feel. The parts I remember most, that are indented on my memory. 

*

It is a walk I have been wanting to take for some time, to connect with my memories, with the impressions I carried with me. The canals were stilled space where once there was movement. A turbulent history mapped across the hillsides. A landscape reined in and tamed, saddened by overwork; lying forlorn and forgotten, waiting for a time when it might heal its scars. The spinning mills that were emptied and slowly given new life. Standing at the canal’s edge they overhang and overshadow; large windows in rows, reflecting the light.

I always wondered at the empty buildings left there, abandoned, derelict. The windows covered over, places of loss, places to avoid. I grew up around these buildings with their patched over windows and doorways. They followed me like shadows. Across these valleys they were everywhere. Desolate ruins blocking out the light and casting a reminder. When I close my eyes, what I picture are the shells of dark stone lying forlorn and forgotten, empty buildings and broken windows reflected in the dank still water. The shadow always remaining, the ghosts of what has gone before. 

The canal was always there in my memory. Sometimes a lonely desolate place, sometimes the sunny light feeling of walking along by the water. You could walk for miles of changing landscape, along its edges and lost waterways, crossing countryside and the hidden parts of the town. From the windows of a train travelling across the valley to Manchester. From the window of my school bus, as it wound its way through the outskirts of the town. Where the chimneys remain, when the clouds hang across the Colne Valley, the canal looks back at me.

*

The day has shifted, and the quietness is palpable. Each corner, each bend, each stretch of the canal seems to bring a new feeling, a difference to the walk. The canal becomes narrower here and the trees start to feel like they’re concealing something. There are high walls, moss-covered, ferns grow along the banks, and the trees bend closer over the water looking down on their reflections. I turn my camera towards the water and the sky lengthens out into a narrow passage of light, pulling towards the edges of the frame, a tunnel of soft, white light. 

The water feels closer, it is eerily quiet in some places. A sense of neglect, broken windows, barbed wire, and corrugated iron. The bank of clouds darker, overhanging. An abandoned building by the water’s edge, the dark symmetry of the windows reflected, slightly distorted by the water, deep and unbending, unmoving. The texture mimics a solidity the water cannot have, so that I start to wonder what it is about that part of the water that sets it apart?

The trees start to ascend the side of the building, its solid walls refuse to yield. Inside, its empty frame, the windows bricked over to conceal what lies discarded within. Through a web of tree branches, another empty structure, broken windows, semi-hidden. The trees beginning to cover the frame in shadow. Its empty soul lies reflected in the water. 

The canal feels like an intruder into the landscape, that many years later is starting to be claimed back. Over time to reflect and to blend with its surroundings, its edges to soften and become less clear cut, less distinct or separate. Blurring its lines, the hard edges cut from the land are overrun with ferns, with dandelions and grasses. Where the seeds, the falling leaves, and trailing branches corrupt the surface of the water.

Yet I think it always resisted, always retained its other quality. The one that is given away by that tendency of the water: to stand still, to resist the inevitable movement of wind and currents. There is something vacant and still, another quality to this water, as if it had a presence. In some places it looks like another surface, no longer water, lying still and undisturbed. 

We are approaching the outskirts of the town and the towpath seems endless. There is something concealed and desolate about these parts of the canal that intrigued me, that I remember. I am trying to work out where we are, where we will emerge when we leave the canal. The water churned and disconsolate from this angle. Empty buildings reflected in the water. Dark bridges and hidden pathways. In the windows, reflections of other ruins. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blogThe Street Walks In.

Epilogue

By Ian C Smith:

Walking in early light, wetlands a short drive from home, where, like the rest of the world, all is quietly closing due to this ravening plague, part of my way parallel to a usually busy highway. I think of another road, traffic-choked, in my distant past. Figuring the year I last drove it those miles ago, I reach back, meet my younger self who casts several glances at my now thin hair, assessing the ruin.

His surprise at where I live now sweetened knowing how long he shall last, he thinks the nearby gas fields recently discovered that he read about must be the reason: employment. All he has known so far is an expectation of work. I paraphrase how, why, I landed here, both linked to my late education, love, work, try to explain about these three life effects felt by most. Stunned, even excited, by where his life leads, he now wants to hear of my health, journey. Happiness.

He knows about the Spanish ‘flu, read that, too, seems more fascinated than horror-stricken by brief news of today’s scourge, but he is young. His skin fascinates me. I tell him everybody would be relieved if this present canker’s naked statistics we absorb like poison, minus the personal misery, grief, and despair, doesn’t exceed that post-WW1 mortality rate. He mentions being concerned for nothing about the nukes, thinks self-isolation, overrun intensive-care facilities, the end of sport, non-electric entertainment, connection – this propels his interest into overdrive – sounds like a fantastic movie script. He loves dystopian themes. I tell him there are more coming. I know from inside knowledge he prefers damaging news told straight, yet want to protect him, protect hope, that lifeblood. Is he too young to be thinking of worldwide virulence?

I cross the highway listening for the odd vehicle, move deeper into the salutary peace of the natural world, but see few birds. Even they seem to have shut up shop, except for a lone pelican, its exquisite wake. Cheer up, my young companion urges, slowing for me, you did so much, although it sounds like you stuffed up a lot. Ah, the chirpy ignorance of youth. How should this end? Endings trouble me.

***

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

Capturing the forest – the photography of Eymelt Sehmer

By Paul Scraton:

It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.

The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.

‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. 

In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.

To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next. 

What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?

First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.

When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?

The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.

Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well. 

Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.

In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?

Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.

Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.

My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.

So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?

I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc. 

In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.

It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.

Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?

Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.

I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends. 

I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.

Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press

Five Questions for… Igor Tereshkov

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

By Sara Bellini 

Igor Tereshkov refers to one of his works as “a visual anthropological exploration”, and no label would fit more suitably. Non-places, surveillance, post-soviet urbanism, the interrelation of natural and built environment are among the themes he delves into in a variety of medium spanning from documentary photography to visual art to performance.. 

His latest project consists of extra large cyanotypes examining our relationship with nature and waste. The idea came to him a few years ago when he was collecting plastic litter near water zones with Greenpeace. “It’s in some way a homage to Anna Atkins’s work about diversity of algae and in another way a documentation and didactic enumeration cataloguing the types and ways of using plastic in our everyday life.” 

The next step in the process consists in exposing the images of the discarded plastic on the leaves from the very bushes and trees where he had found them. “All this in order to convey an idea that plastic is made, not grown [...] This is kind of a remake to the slogan of the famous ketchup, which claims that it is grown, not made, which can’t be said about the plastic bottle in which it’s often packed - as well as many other products”. 

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

Experimental photographic techniques and the anthropocene are recurring elements in Igor’s creative practice. In 2018/2019 he went to Western Siberia to document the environmental destruction caused by petrol extraction from oil companies in the region inhabited by the Kanthy people. 

The result is a collection of beautiful yet eerie black and white shots covered in dark stains, obtained by developing the film in water containing traces of oil he had previously bottled on the spot. The oil randomly corrodes the film gelatin, in the same way it damages the land, endangering the Indigenous People that had been living there for centuries. By mixing water with oil in the development stage, Igor literally allows the subject to become part of the creative process.

To accompany this interview, Elsewhere is publishing previously unseen pictures Igor took on a trip from Poland to Germany two years ago. “I had two rolls of film and a bottle of wine, later I soaked the exposed film in leftovers of wine and called this series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup... Later I lost the film in the lab and all I have is just these forgotten scans.”

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

What does home mean to you?

Home for me is usually a place to regenerate and to find balance so, more often than not, for me it’s more likely not a place but a process. And of course, speaking of home, I always want to mean safety, clarity and love. I have a firm feeling that I haven’t found yet my home at 100%,  rather a place for a respite.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I think it’s Ai-Petri, the peak of Mount St. Peter in Crimea. It’s not so big or world famous but I’ve spent many summers there during my childhood. With the whole family we would ride on a car across the peninsula and the Ai-Petri was always a special place. Every time I watch an old VHS family record it always makes me feel a special connection to that place and my childhood.

What is beyond your front door?

Four stair steps and a blue spruce, after ten footsteps there is a hammock and after twenty more footsteps a large and old spruce that would take three or four people to embrace completely. For the past three years I’ve been living in the Moscow exurb in my old family dacha.

What place would you most like to visit?

I hope one day I’ll have an opportunity to visit California.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

Right now I’m reading Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience by Alexander Etkind , watching the new season of The Walking Dead and listening mostly to Tycho while running.

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

Igor Tereshkov's Website
Igor Tereshkov on Instagram