On the Edge

Silloth

Bowness-on-Solway

Approaching Allonby from Dubmill Point (54.792391,-3.435754).

Whitehaven from Mount Pleasant

Workington Beach

A view of the beach at Workington looking over the Solway Firth

St Bees

Borwick Rails, Millom

Whitehaven

Askam-in-Furness

St Bees

Whitehaven

Whitehaven Marina

27 May 2022. Captain Boomer Collective. TheSixtySix. Eden Arts.

Silloth

Workington

Whitehaven

St Bees

Silloth

Whitehaven

St Bees

Ravenglass

Whitehaven

Ravenglass

Workington

Whitehaven

Allonby

Whitehaven

Silloth

Ravenglass

Whitehaven

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Book Excerpts

Locations

West Cumbria: the North West of England, almost as far north and west as it was possible to go in England. There, on the overlooked edge of the Lake District, was a place that was both strange and unfamiliar to me. But it was here that I found myself, digging my way through the abstractions: graphics, virtual renderings, lots of maps.

Frontiers

The uncertainty that became attached to the borderlands was something that seems to have contributed to the murky and unknown early history of the place now known as Cumbria, a part of England that even as recently as the 17th century was regarded as one of the ‘dark corners of the land.’

Prospects

The coastline of Cumbria is about 100 miles long, stretching from somewhere around the location of the picturesque northern hamlet of Rockcliffe to Grange-over-Sands in the south. ‘West Cumbria’, though, has more often than not referred to a sub-region that was defined as much by its economy and industry as its geographical boundaries.

Images

Moore’s images of West Cumbria provide glimpses into a place where things, in one way or another, look as if they have always been running out – at the edge of land, time and opportunity – or seemed to have already reached some kind of terminal, post-future condition.

Westwards

Cumbria is not only of the north, it is beyond ‘The North’, which is to say, a distance further on from that supposedly grim, cold and (the further north one goes) sparsely populated territory that has, for centuries, loomed in the English imagination …

Shorelines

On the very margins of coastal places, as you move closer to the seashore, it is possible to see how precarious the human occupation of the land can be at such territorial extremes, particularly where life sprouts up in places that look as if they really belong to – or could be claimed by – the sea.

Echoes

The most well-known product of Millom, besides steel, was the poet Norman Nicholson, ‘the greatest Lakeland poet since Wordsworth’, read an obituary in The Guardian. But Nicholson was equally a poet of the grubby and dirty industrial Cumbria, and had been discovered by T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, whose own work as a poet might be described as being far from pastoral in its concerns or romantic in its leanings.

Islands

In addition to the natural and political boundaries that had set it apart as a remote or unwelcoming place, what we would refer to today as West Cumbria was – as a cultural landscape – also, like Southern California or Berlin, separated from the body of land that it formed a part of, whether this was conceived of as ‘the North’, as ‘England’ or as ‘Britain’.

Inbetweeners

All that really remains as a reminder of the ‘British Mediterranean’ today are the echoes of places that once bounded it, heard in the sounds and voices that radio transmitters bring back to a place – West Cumbria – that was once at the centre of things and now exists on the periphery.

Dreamscapes

For many years I had found myself crossing between England into Scotland on the M6, over the border and back again, and I would often find myself being distracted by the road signs to places that I now know to be on the Cumbrian coast, but which for years remained obscure to me.

About this Project

The excerpts from John Scanlan’s West Cumbria: On the Edge and other texts found on this website are part of a project which has been funded since 2017 by the Samuel Lindow Foundation and undertaken with In Certain Places, a curatorial partnership in the University of Central Lancashire, where Scanlan has worked as a researcher since 2017 (see more information here).

Research Notes

Jun 28, 2022

Raymond Moore's Uncertain Places

Jun 28, 2022

My new article about the photographer Raymond Moore, titled ‘Raymond Moore’s Uncertain Places’, has just been published in the journal Photographies, Vol. 15, No.2. To read the abstract and find out more about how to access the article in PDF or EPUB formats …

Jun 28, 2022

Jun 13, 2022

A Report on Irene Rogan's Unpublished Tour

Jun 13, 2022

This was a report commissioned for Irene Rogan’s Arts Coucil England-funded project, Unpublished Tour, as part of my in-kind contribution to the project, reflecting also my work in helping to understand and facilitate actions and relationships that can be beneficial to the creation of a self-generating, self-sustaining cultural ecology in the region.

Jun 13, 2022

Apr 12, 2022

Creative People and Places West Cumbria

Apr 12, 2022

The Creative People and Places programme is devoted to bringing investment in the arts and culture to areas of least engagement across the country. Amongst these areas are the boroughs of Allerdale and Copeland in West Cumbria.

Apr 12, 2022

Mar 8, 2022

Saxton's 1576 Map of Cumberland

Mar 8, 2022

Christopher Saxton’s map of Cumberland, dated 1576, shows the west coast of the county bounded on one side by what might have been regarded as the perilous, uncivilized, ocean – complete with sea monsters – and a landscape to the east and south west that is dotted with strange-looking mounds (by the map engraver, Augustine Ryther) …

Mar 8, 2022

Raymond Moore on the Threshold

Mar 8, 2022

For someone who had been so taken by the fugitive nature of the things that took up his interest to the extent that he thought of them as reflections of his own state of mind, it might not be that unusual that Raymond Moore, a pioneer of art photography in Britain, followed the western edge of that country until he ultimately vanished into obscurity.

Mar 8, 2022

Jun 8, 2021

A road trip, circa 1798

Jun 8, 2021

Here is an interesting find uncovered during my research to try and figure out what might have been the most used route to the west coast of Cumberland for a traveller coming from the south in the days of horse and stagecoach.

Jun 8, 2021

023-Ogilby-1675-Cumberland Roads-135w.jpg

Jan 25, 2021

A Spy Approaches

Jan 25, 2021

Modern day West Cumbria contained — according to the evidence of John Ogilby’s 1675 road atlas, Britannia, Volume the First, or an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales — only two roads worth mentioning …

Jan 25, 2021

Nov 5, 2019

Dirt Roads and Other Obstacles

Nov 5, 2019

To ride in vehicles sporting names like 'The Royal Neptune, The Eclipse, and The Perseverance must have been to imagine life beyond the earthly limitations of impassable country roads …

Nov 5, 2019

Oct 19, 2019

To the Sea

Oct 19, 2019

A new article has been published on the A66 through Cumbria at Places journal. As I write somewhere in the article, ‘to drive the A66 is to pass between worlds, from the apparently eternal mountains to the dynamic industrial coast — from the sublime to the subliminal’ …

Oct 19, 2019

Jun 23, 2019

Mystery Coach Trip and Book Launch

Jun 23, 2019

Is there a secret Bob Dylan connection that migth explain the presence of his image (from the album cover Nashville Skyline) that flaps in the wind above the entrance to The Vagabond pub in Whitehaven? Read on to find out …

Jun 23, 2019

Jun 20, 2019

Book launch at In Certain Places

Jun 20, 2019

Yesterday’s book launch at In Certain Places was kindly catered by Prof. Charles Quick, who - one might surmise from this spread - has a bit of a sweet tooth … equally noteworthy is the long table, which Charles made himself. How many university professors can say that.

Jun 20, 2019

Jan 17, 2019

Trip to Millom

Jan 17, 2019

I was fortunate to have recently met the artist Irene Rogan at an Arts Council England meeting in Workington and finally caught up with her again in Millom, where she has a studio (located in an old school building) right next to the medieval Holy Trinity Church and adjacent to Millom Castle.

Jan 17, 2019

Oct 31, 2018

Florence

Oct 31, 2018

Rain = rushed to Florence Mine to get required tomato soup puddle pictures for book.

Oct 31, 2018

Oct 17, 2018

Bassenthwaite by night

Oct 17, 2018

On several occasions as I travelled across sections of the road that had recently been given a new black tar surface, I found myself as the lone occupant of the road for several miles, catapulting along a route that seemed to open up to an experience that was vaguely hallucinogenic, making me feel as if I had indeed found myself inside some strange videogame reality.

Oct 17, 2018

Feb 18, 2018

Different routes, other places

Feb 18, 2018

Cultural landscapes, as Christian Norberg-Shulz, writes in his influential text, Genius-Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, consist not only of settlements – from houses and farms to villages and towns – but also the ‘paths’ that connect the places we live. In combination these two things transform nature into a cultural landscape.

Feb 18, 2018

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