Play Space in the Death Zone or The Unused as Muse

This paper makes a case for the importance of ambiguity and exploration-as-play in the unpackaged environment. I detail how my own psychogeographic urban walks, explorations, and research undertaken into the public grief displayed online for Fiddler’s Ferry, a series of decommissioned cooling towers in Warrington, Cheshire, together with the writings of Christopher Bollas, Tim Edensor, Owen Hatherley, and others have formed into an emotional and psychological response to the post-industrial landscape, which underpins my poetic practice. Using my own poetry as case study, this paper considers how awareness of and attention to associative memories, the attachments we have to certain buildings, and the in/stability the urban landscape provides are important factors in how people respond to space and change. Crucially, this paper details how the hybrid and fragmentary nature of poetry is the perfect medium to explore hard-to-articulate responses to the hybrid and fragmentary urban ‘between’, i.e. the not-yet-demolished but not-yet-reclaimed.