KNOW YOUR PLACE. A day with Post Grad students of the University of Cumbria

It's been very good having Jamie McPhie involved in Soft Drive, he's course leader for the MA Outdoor and Experiential Learning degree at the University of Cumbria, having previously been lecturer for cultural landscapes and aesthetics, and he is here to  collaborate, to help contextualize the work we are doing and in particular to apply some critical rigour to the thinking behind it. 

We decide that Jamie would  bring his students to the cottage as part of an exploratory day within the course's Know Your Place module, which promotes detailed enquiry into place-as-contruction, through an examination of the agency of maps and signage, and of constructed and managed environments and thier effect on behaviour.

 We kicked off with a look at the cottage and a discussion of it's relationship with the town, it's fluid purpose, and the quality of experiences its undefined status can enable. and at the value to us of its current role as storehouse for a floating, uncatalogued sample of local epehemera. 

 We looked at  our  expanded Watts map, at the  way it can be read to  acknowledge and embody the contradictions between Watts' earlier work on tourism and this piece which  actively promotes tourism,  representing the ease of access to land, rather than the facts about its topography. This map uses a language  devised by Watts and hired by the industry it serves, and it describes a moment in the development of visitor culture and its co-opting of the arts into a leisure offer.  The additions to the map use the same visual language and, using terminology  from historical documents of our own era , in attempts to  acknowledge our own place in a later stage in that development. 

The Heart Of Barrow logo was designed to highlight key local institutions and sevices, and has been a feature around the town for  years now. By imposing over a streetplan of Barrow Jamie's students used it as a means of essaying a derive, in the form of a circular walk around  a part of town.  The derive is a psychogeographical tool  devised by Guy Debord with its own wikipedia entry, which goes like this.. 

Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances..." It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there".

A way, then, of rendering the familiar unfamiliar, or of sharpening and shifting focus.  I  share Jamie's  interest  in using these methods as a means of  recognising the visual lingua franca of the privatisation of public space, and its effect. This is particularly relevant in post industrial settings and in those where a major employer is reviving, stretching and expanding.  We reconvened at Barrow's excellent Dock museum - built in a former Graving Dock- where valuable  purpose -built space has been lost  as a result of Austerity and Local Authority budget cuts, and is now again occupied by the shipyard. Other agencies have claimed areas in the town that had passed into an assumed public realm, populated by dog walkers, boy racers, rabbits and gulls. These are often supermarkets, retail parks and entertainment centres; ostensibly open spaces, without boundary walls, these contain Watts-esque contradictions of thier own in the effort to  regulate behaviour through  limiting thier offer to customers; short visits, quick service, drive-through transactions.

Jamie is aware that many of his students are surprised to find themselves exploring retail parks and former hinterland, as much of the cultural discourse over  land is centered around National Parks and rural areas, but the same imperatives apply; the drive to manage access and maximise income is as much in evidence here as it is Ambleside.