Haunting My Own Life

I spent a couple of days in my home town of Lincoln over the recent Christmas period.  As usual, by Boxing Day I needed fresh air and the chance to walk off the previous day's food intake, (and to escape from festive T.V. for a while).  For a few hours I took a stroll around the more picturesque parts of town and revisited a few old haunts.

Lincoln Cathedral from the Castle Walls

It's something I've done increasingly of late after living away for over thirty years and paying relatively little attention to the place for much of that time.  It's probably inevitable that we start to re-evaluate the past more as we move into middle age.  As a young adult, there’s an impetus to move forward in search of experience and the chance to construct a life on our own terms.  Geographical relocation is obviously integral to this process for many people, myself included.  At a certain point though, there’s a growing temptation to reach back toward some of our formative experiences, and a realisation that they stay with us, despite the person we may have become.  I think we should all guard against the seductions and delusions of self-indulgent nostalgia lest it rob us of our remaining impetus to embrace future experience.  For anyone engaged in creative work, this is doubly important.  Nevertheless, I believe to open-mindedly revisit those locations haunted by revenants of our earlier lives can be a healthy and instructive process.

It always strikes me on these trips how much we can take for granted when growing up in a place, and how much is left behind without a second thought as we reach escape velocity.  It may not feature on anyone's list of top global locations but parts of Lincoln are undeniably charming, evocative, and, in certain cases, genuinely spectacular.  Most obviously, what the place has is history - centuries worth of it, right in your face and with people still living and working amongst it.  I was talking to a work colleague recently about my abiding interest in History and realised that one reason may be that I grew up in a location where it is so palpable.

Newport Arch

The Castle from Castle Square

The relative compactness of the city’s oldest quarter and my home’s geographical proximity to it brought me into routine contact with the past.  My daily journeys to infant and junior schools took me past medieval buildings, under an ancient stone arch and along a street that still follows the Roman street plan.  It was possible to see cobbled circles set into the road to mark the position of pillars in the original colonnade.  To this day, you can still drive a car through Newport Arch - originally an aperture in the Roman wall.  Every 15 minutes, the Cathedral bells tolled the hour - reminding us of its centuries-old presence looming over the rooftops.  I have clear memories of staring out of classroom windows at the massive walls of the Norman Castle immediately across the road.  At the foot of the embankment stood the Strugglers Inn.  Supposedly, those prisoners condemned to death at the Crown Court within were often dragged for a last drink there, and then back to the castle  gallows above.  Coincidentally, one of the hangmen associated with the Castle was one William Marwood.  William was the inventor of the 'Long Drop' method and a possible distant ancestor of my family. 


The West Front of the Cathedral

Of course, our school teachers were keen to use much of this heritage as an educational resource but in time, inevitably, much of it became a mere backdrop for the dramas of our teenage lives and the struggle to grow up and discover exactly who we were going to be.  After spending an immensely enjoyable Foundation year at the local Art College, my greatest priority was to leave what often felt like a quaint backwater and find out what life, (and Art), was really all about in a bigger city.  However, in retrospect, it seems significant that the place I chose to continue my studies wasn’t London or one of the large Northern, industrial conurbations.  Instead I chose Bristol - a larger, edgier city than Lincoln with a dynamic cultural life, for sure but also one with plenty of historical architecture, obvious heritage, and picturesque locations.  Perhaps growing up in Lincoln had conditioned my responses to those things more than I realised.

In the intervening years, my own story unfolded away from both Lincoln, and indeed Bristol, and much of my stored experience is associated with other locations.  Nevertheless, on recent return visits I’ve been increasingly thrilled by the way that my own personal history is now ingrained into the very fabric of streets and walls that had witnessed the passing of so many generations and events before. On this last occasion I took my camera on the walk in an attempt to document a particular set of related memories attached to very specific locations.

During the year I studied at Lincoln School of Art & Design, (since incorporated into the more recently established University), My morning walk in took me right past the foot of the Cathedral’s Eastern end.  Of all the city’s notable features the most impressive are the Cathedral itself and the steep escarpment on which it is built.  The latter is a surprisingly steep natural rampart rising dramatically above the, (more recently built), Southern and Western portions of the city.  It provided the perfect elevated site for the Normans to build both their ecclesiastical status symbol and the adjacent fortified citadel.  Consequently, from various directions both edifices dominate the town visually and psychologically.  Indeed, the Cathedral’s visual presence actually extends over many miles of surrounding landscape.  The building is impressive both in the quality of its Gothic architecture and in sheer physical scale.  Travelers approaching the City Centre from the South along Broadgate gain an uninterrupted view of the building’s entire side elevation rising above them.  It is so much larger in all dimensions than any other visible structure that I can never quite believe it is a single building.  This scalar disjuncture is sufficient to make one question the known rules of perspective.

Architecturally, most attention gets paid to the Cathedral’s vertiginous West Front.  It clearly reveals the development in building styles from Romanesque through to Perpendicular Gothic modes as it extends outwards and upwards and is surmounted by three towers of startling height and verticality.  Often, such Medieval architectural statements are described as ascending towards heaven but my overriding impression, conversely, is often of an incredible stone waterfall cascading to the ground. 

A walk along the building’s length from West to East is to travel further through time and changing architectural styles.  The East End was completed in a more decorated high Gothic mode, complete with florid spires and outstretched gargoyles.  The multitude of empty plinths and niches suggest it was once further complicated with hosts of watching statuary before Cromwell’s iconoclasts got to work.  This portion of the Cathedral has always felt darker and more atmospheric to me.  In practical terms this is because less concerted attempts have been made to clean the stonework here of centuries of accumulated pollution.  But, expressively too, there is more forbidding quality to these stones. There is a dark intensity about the immense East window and the complexity of decorative motifs and competing spires evoke the more twisted corners of the medieval imagination.  The sense of entanglement in stone is exacerbated by the adjacent Chapter House with its radiating flying buttresses.  To me, walking beneath and amongst them feels rather like entering the mechanism of an immense stone machine - perhaps a generator of superstition or a mill for grinding the souls of the impressionable.  In retrospect, I suspect such flights of fancy must have been a valuable imaginative workout prior to a day’s artistic study.  I've given the photos I took there a bit of moody Photoshopping - just for the pleasure of it.

There are delightful, modest, spiraling iron handrails nearby to either side of the steps exiting the Cathedral site.  They punctuate that section of the journey perfectly and I remember drawing them while still at school.  The rest of my journey to college involved descending the hill below the Cathedral and entering through a side entrance.  Viewing the Art College’s Greestone Centre from the front however reminds me of the first times I ever entered the building through the main door.  It all seemed both atmospheric and momentous and a world away from the shabby modernism of our secondary Comp.  It was definitely a world I wanted to inhabit.  The building itself, built in red brick and terracotta, is a rather ostentatious Victorian Pile - originally an up-market girl’s school I believe.  It features high windows, a grand assembly hall, (complete with stage and balcony on three sides), and endless nooks, alcoves, passages and twisting staircases.  It felt like exactly the kind of building I could let my imagination run riot in and whilst full of practical, endeavour and academic routine, it took little effort to daydream myself into my own version of Gormenghast.  It was an ideal location in which to play out my overly romantic notions of what it meant to be an Art student.

Lincoln College of Art & Design, Greestone Centre

Usher Art Gallery

Usher Gallery Grounds & Bishop's Palace 

Next door to the college was, conveniently enough, the Usher Art Gallery - with its own sense of architectural grandeur and set in steeply landscaped grounds.  Though lacking much in the way of a contemporary collection, the Usher was where I first experienced real artworks and was the venue for occasionally stimulating visiting exhibitions.  I remember looking in amazement one day at the tortured paint, inches deep, on a large borrowed Auerbach.  I probably spent as much time wondering round the picturesque grounds as I did inside the gallery.  I particularly loved the view up the hill to the Medieval Bishop’s Palace with the Cathedral above.  It was inaccessible to the public in those days and thus became a partially ruined forbidden zone of the imagination.  Another favourite spot was one of the small arched side entrances.  It impressed me enough to form the subject for my A level exam painting - a fact which gains extra resonance on seeing the view through into the Usher grounds.  The eye is led along a path towards the red bulk of the Art College beyond.  One thing leads to another.

Entrance to Usher Gallery Grounds

Usher Grounds & Art College

I now appreciate just how many of these locations acted as triggers for my young imagination to project itself forward, either into pure fantasy or, (often, equally romanticised), aspirations for the future.  I must have spent a lot of time mooning around these picturesque corners.  Maybe I was responding in part to the imaginative historical vibrations of what is now labeled Psychogeography.  Certainly, much of the time I was wondering “what is it like in there?”.  In the same way, I felt the future held an, as yet inaccessible, realm of possibility.  Significantly, these very same locations now serve as triggers for memory and project the imagination back into my autobiographical history.  More intriguingly they serve to way-mark my own ‘future past/passed’.  They are like portals of a personal form of hauntology.

My Boxing Day Walk took in one final such example a little further back up the hill.  Towering above charming old Danesgate, sit two imposing Victorian villas.  They are accessed by steps behind high-walled street entrances and so feel remote and, again, resistant to casual visitors.  They enjoy an incredible elevated perch that must result in a fantastic view over the rooftops.  Part of me always yearned to live in such a place one day, (and even now I wouldn’t say “no”).  Twice, in more recent years, I’ve had vivid dreams featuring these houses.  Interestingly, both dreams involved me climbing up to one of the buildings and discovering a fantastic zone of further impressive houses and interconnected walled gardens beyond.  Google Maps reveals this to be a purely imagined, impossible location, yet it seems no less real in my mind for all that.  With the emotional intensity of dreams, on both occasions I have felt a strong sense that “this is where I want to stay”.

Lottery wins aside, it seems impossible I will ever fulfill those dreams in either of the actual buildings.  Furthermore, I have no hard evidence to suggest the prophetic power of dreams.  However, I do wonder if the resonances I respond to in these locations might still point forward as well as back.  For decades I wouldn’t have even considered it -these days I wonder if, maybe, one day I might end up living in the old place again…