An Alternative Writing Retreat
When the bridge was built it was brilliant white, but now the cars have spat their soot and the rain has found the cracks in the paint to make it rusty and orange. They painted it 10 years after it was built, 20 years after, 30 and on and on until one year they painted it and the next day it looked grey and orange again and the council said they weren’t coming back for it…
One summer, my father took us, Rob and I, to the Orkney Islands, to see the Viking burial sites, Pictish and Neolithic ruins, and to do some fishing. I was still in primary school – year five, I think. The first evening we arrived, we watched three locals unload their catch from a small motorboat onto the boggy shore of the lake we were staying on…
Slushy. Books with poems. Parapets. There is a shadow cast from the trees. Wind. Summer. Talk in the distance both prosaic and profound. Denim. Denim for certain. Cars. It rained before. It’s all cleared up now, someone said. The barber shop sign is winding. White red blue, right? Someone is always chartering a boat, a vessel…
Turn off Seafield Road onto Marine Esplanade, past the sewage plant’s entrance, and you quickly come to the edge of the Firth of Forth. A wide expanse of water with the glittering lights of Kirkcaldy on the other side. There’s a grass walkway here, sandwiched between the treatment works’ chain fence and the sea wall, that leads down to the edge of what then becomes Portobello beach…
During its almost 30 years of operation the Camelot theme park in Lancashire had the slogan “The land of great knights, and amazing days.” Visitors could ride a selection of flat rides and rollercoasters, play games and buy snacks at battlemented stalls, and watch knights both great and not-so-great battle it out in the jousting arena…
Walsall railway station doesn’t really exist. I was once mesmerised by the dark polished floor in the vast booking hall, and in awe of its wrought-iron canopy. Now whatever’s left has been swallowed inside a shopping centre named Saddlers as commemoration of a vanished industry. The usual shops – Poundland, Claire’s Accessories, a Costa Coffee…
Sometimes as he walked, taking long and meandering digressions down side streets and across squares, through underpasses and over raised walkways that spanned like triumphal arches the segments of silent motorway, the architect liked to think that the very formlessness of his wanderings was a kind of pattern in itself…
In 2019 we launched Alton Towers, a Residency Book which records the results of a weekend residency at one of the UK’s oldest and weirdest theme parks. For anyone who couldn’t make the launch in Stoke-on-Trent, we’ve put together some video clips of the readings…
“I’ve kept on being aware of sky since I lived in Norfolk. Up at Ivinghoe Beacon sky is paramount. Everything around you bleeds into it…”
Julia Deakin participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about landscapes, writing poetry, and her connections to Alton Towers…