A drift around Paddock

I recently read Farley and Robert’s Edgelands book which is an excellent account of familiar but forgotten spaces which are neither part of cities or the countryside. The Edgelands are in fact the ‘spaces in between’ places … The writers Farley and Roberts argue that the Edgelands tend to be ‘ignored or misrepresented’ in much of landscape writing (2012: 8). I really like their poetic and artistic response to these Edgeland spaces and it inspired me to go out on a walk around the outskirts of Huddersfield to find such spaces … It was an usually hot summers day and I started walking up the high street of Paddock. You may ask … Why Paddock … Well why not? I hadn’t been there before and so I decided to go for a walk there…to walk out of Paddock to see if I could find any ‘Edgelands’…

I wasn’t intending on going in any fixed direction (as this was meant to be a disorientating drift after all). I walked up the main road of Paddock and then down and around the top of the mini roundabout for quite a while. There were a lot of pubs that had closed down and were ‘for sale’. I walked around a bit more and then went back down the road near to where I had started the walk.

Then I took a left turn as that seemed to be the easiest way to get off the beaten track. No sooner had I turned off the main road and I came across an abandoned building …

At this point the road began to descend downhill, away from the main road and towards what looked like an industrial estate, a block of modern looking flats and a shed …

Then I walked uphill for a few brief minutes … At this point the pavement disappeared and I had to avoid oncoming car traffic! Then I spotted a beautiful old house which appeared to be abandoned …

I arrived at another main road and found myself in Lockwood. I walked for a few minutes down a road and on my right was a graveyard of refuse …

By this point on the walk I had been walking around for about an hour and I felt quite thirsty. So I decided to go for a coffee. End of walk.

On that note I’ve decided to do further investigations of ignored and forgotten spaces. Maybe this can be part of a larger project to document buildings and spaces that have been forgotten and abandoned and are simply being left to rot and decay. I would also like to do further projects to document the ever increasing neoliberalisation and consumerisation of the landscape …