Our towns & cities are most alive in the throes of their own degradation, in the untenanted lacunae between residential sprawl & business park & ‘sites of proposed development’: the weed-darkened spaces that the maps can’t show. Here Be Dragons. In vacant lots, garbled with heaps of shattered brick & nests of copper tubing, platoons of nettle & willowherb reclaim the land with the unapologetic moxie of an occupying army; smoke-clouds of buddleia billow from the gaping terracotta mouths of canal-side factory chimneys; whilst railway sidings in spring unfold like the pages of a vast unruly comic-book, a sizzling riot of goldenrod, toadflax, verbascum: building not a better world, but a different; making use of the fissures in this.
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