This keynote originally for the University of Basel, as stated in title, reads as a making-of and commentation of Symmons Roberts co-authored work (2011) Edgelands. Symmons Roberts discusses the rationale, influences and the work itself while providing insight and perspective on the Edgeland space. As the work is more recent than his earlier work (2011) Edgelands and Shoard’s (2000) Edgelands of Promise, this paper reinforces the Edgelands as a contemporary concept. Additionally, Roberts writes about the wilderness aspect of the neglected interfacial space and the subversive edge characteristic. While the language is clear-cut it does not deviate from northern post-industrial sensibility established by the 2011 work, therefore can be seen as an epilogue to the later.
In England, they [edgelands] are those interfacial territories that do not fit the titles ‘urban’ or ‘rural’. Largely unplanned, often unwatched, derelict in parts, rapidly shifting with the economic tide, these are places commonly assumed to grow in rings around the edges of towns and cities, defined by what they contain. (Roberts, 2016, p. 18)
England’s edgelands refuse to be held in a tight circle around our urban borders. … In many English cities, the edgelands have refused to remain in the border zone between the outlying housing estates and the first steps of farmland. In some cities, like Manchester and Liverpool, we found them in pockets. (Roberts, 2016, p. 18)
If the edgelands are not necessarily (or at least, not solely) at the edges of towns and cities, then how are they to be identified? (Roberts, 2016, p. 19)
Marion Shoard’s coining of ‘edgelands’ seemed to conjure exactly our experience of these places. They were, and are, edgy. In British tv drama and low budget films, the edgelands are always the place of the dénouement, the place where the drug gang is busted, the car chase ends, or the kidnap victim is rescued. These are places where anything could happen. And when it did, it was usually illegal or contravened every rule of health and safety. This sense of the edgelands as a dystopian landscape is a familiar trope of British popular culture in particular. (Roberts, 2016, pp. 19–20)
... the edgelands were not simply dystopias. They were the places where, as children, we felt free and inspired. (Roberts, 2016, p. 20)
Why then use the word ‘wilderness’ at all in relation to the edgelands? Well, it is partly their lack of honouring, of lifting up, even of documentation. If a stretch of edgelands – say, the stretch around Barton Bridge on the M60 outside Manchester – is less walked through, less watched, less written about and less managed than a Highlands glen, then is it not more worthy of the term ‘wilderness’? Add to that the un-named qualities of England’s edgelands, and the case is very strong. A place with pools, woodlands, ruins and meadows all without names sounds pretty much like a wilderness to me. (Roberts, 2016, p. 21)