The UPWL

Leaning on my handlebars in a particularly pensive mood, I have the idea of creating a Union for the Preservation of Waste Land. The UPWL. This poem (if that is what it is) will serve as its manifesto, or rather as a preamble for the project since I myself will be taking no part in it, incapable as I am of being in the streets and in the offices of such an organisation at one and the same time. So let it remain a kind of guild, a kind of vague waste land itself, without statues and subscriptions, so that neither the press nor the politicians can lead it astray…

Jacques Réda, The Ruins of Paris, translated by Mark Treharne (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), p. 38.

Garden Street, Sheffield, March 2011.

Florent Tillon, Detroit Wildlife

Walk with Terry in Upperthorpe and Shalesmoor

A frightful piece of waste ground…

One particular picture of Sheffield stays by me.  A frightful piece of waste ground (somehow, up here a piece of waste ground attains a squalor that would be impossible even in London), trampled quite bare of grass and littered with newspaper, old saucepans etc.  To the right an isolated row of gaunt four room houses, dark red, blackened by smoke.  To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney behind chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze.  Behind me a railway embankment made from the slag of furnaces.  In front, across the piece of waste ground, a cubical building of dingy red and yellow brick, with the sign, ‘John Grocock, Haulage Contractor’.

George Orwell describes his visit to Sheffield in March 1936.