John Scanlan

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

Unpublished Tour built on artist Irene Rogan’s earlier Arts Council England-funded projects, The Making of a Cultural Landscape (GFTA 2018) and Between Silence and Light (GFTA 2019) as well as the strong community links she has developed in south Copeland, and in particular in the town of Millom and its surroundings …

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) …

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’ …

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 …

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.

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.

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.