Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett Page B

large bump in a nearby park was labeled a ski slope on city maps. It was never used for this purpose, however, since Newcastle, then as now, gets little snow.
    Arial photos from the 1960s show that the area that now includes the triangle was once occupied by a school field and long rows of Georgian houses. Both field and houses are still there but bitten off, ending abruptly before the twin-level highway. The violence and suddenness of the transition created a deep sense of loss. The schism between the past and the new world that was built over it has never healed. Almost as soon as the highway was completed, community projects, and now websites, began to be created that gather together pictures, maps, and recollections of the place that was knocked aside.
    The unnameability and arbitrary nature of modern remnants like the triangle seem to mock the old streets, but the meaning of these offcuts is inherently amorphous, forever open to reinterpretation. Today in some cities there is a vogue for the most accessible versions of such places to be named, even micro-farmed and semi-inhabited, although not yet in Newcastle, a city immune to such bohemian habits. The postindustrial creative imagination circles these scraps; they suit the academic fascination for transgressive in-betweenness. It is a fashion that has spawned a slew of neologisms among postmodern geographers: “dead zone,” “nameless space,” “blank space,” “liminal space,” “urban void,” “terrain vague,” “gapscape,” “drosscape.”
    But such places are too legion to be co-opted by academic jargon. The only writing that really stays with me when thinking about my traffic triangle is a novel. J. G. Ballard’s
Concrete Island
is about a man called Robert Maitland who, after a car crash, finds himself marooned on just such a place: “Maitland saw that he had crashed into a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes.”
    Concrete Island
is Ballard’s journey into the psychological damage and opportunities of the contemporary landscape. It hardly matters that Maitland’s would-be rescuer, Jane Sheppard, has no trouble clambering away. Maitland is stuck because the island induces in him an ever more desperate desire to create meaning out of placelessness. He has to stay in order to create rituals, naming and declaiming over the separate regions of his new domain like “a priest officiating at the eucharist.” “I am the island,” he declares.
    Elsewhere Ballard writes, “Rather than fearing alienation . . . people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting.” Yet I do fear alienation, and with good reasons. One is my daily journey past this traffic island in Newcastle. It offers a trauma deeper even than the utterly personal one that is charted in Ballard’s
Concrete Island
because it is a place emptied of so
many
histories. The sliced-off terraces and fields look as if they have been freshly cut. It’s a mutilated landscape, somewhere to look away from, far easier to ignore than acknowledge.
    Could I claim this island, become a thirty-minute Crusoe amid the din? Perhaps it’s the only way I can get this place out of my mind and stop this possibly unhealthy obsession. And there might be something there, a hidden structure, or hatch, something left from the past. It has become a necessary trip, and I’ve chosen a relatively quiet late morning to make my pilgrimage, the only daylight period when it is possible to get across the traffic. The on-ramp isn’t too bad, and the safety barrier before the island is a bit buckled in one spot, allowing knee-height access. But as soon as I’m over it and onto the island I feel acutely self-conscious. There are a variety of young maples and alders and other self-seeded shrubbery. As the traffic swarms about me I attempt to look purposeful, like a council official