It often helps not to know too much about where you’re going. It means that you pay attention to what you find, rather than what you hoped to find. Ferry Meadows is a country park just outside of Peterborough, and subconsciously I expected this to be a walk out of the city and into the country. I imagined pausing in woods and by lakes to watch the light play. I imagined a gentle two-mile stroll once I’d found my way to the park. I imagined sitting down and writing.
I found other things entirely. And I didn’t stop to write at all.
Reflecting the next morning I realised that the reason I had scarcely paused to look at the light on the water, the calligraphy of the reeds, the beauty of the woods was because my inspiration had been hijacked – in whatever positive sense that word might be deployed – by unanticipated artwork. If I’d grasped that at the time, I might have found a quiet spot outside to sit and write about that. I didn’t. I just kept walking.
Of course, there’s more to it than that.
There’s the fact that I’m getting older.
There’s the fact that I’m out of the habit of route-finding, route-planning even. I’ve fallen into the trap of using downloaded instructions rather than proper maps. The strange thing is those e-generated route-finders make it look and sound way more complicated than it actually is. If I’d gone old-school and started with a street map, I’d not have become confused just after leaving the station. I’d not have become fractious about not knowing whether I was even heading in the right direction. I wasn’t. And then I was. My instincts are better than I give them credit for, and maybe my affinity for actual paper maps is because I am more visual than I give myself credit for. My course-correction, I’m sure, used a subliminal image of where the park lay in relation to the city and where the railway station lay in relation to both. It certainly had nothing to do with any of the directions I had in my hand.
If I’d used that visual to mentally calculate distance as I went along, I’d have relaxed into my corrected course earlier than I did. Instead, I fretted for a little while longer than necessary.
I didn’t get very lost and once I allowed my instincts to take over, I was soon back on track, leaving behind the street of charity shops and mattresses in gardens and only the occasional terraced house trying to maintain its dignity among neighbours whose nets have never been washed, or
whose windows are shielded by bedspread curtains that are probably never opened.
I turned a single corner and suddenly I’m in the leafy suburbs, where the big houses hide behind high gates and signs that warn of alarms or dogs or both. Seriously big houses. Seriously rich people, with big cars and gardeners.
I love the aesthetics of these houses and gardens. One or two in particular I’m drawn to the idea of living within, but at the same time…I don’t want to do or be what it takes to have that kind of ostentation. I know it is not worth the cost. There is part of me that knows that these are not “homes” – they are works of art – and I admire them as such. They are beautiful but there is an artificiality, an unreality, that sustains them. I imagine their interiors match their exteriors…clean and designed and ‘perfect’. I don’t imagine post-it notes on kitchen counters, computer cables on the dining table, shoes abandoned here there and everywhere, half-made beds, dripping taps, last night’s washing up, the detritus of real lives lived beyond the expectation of what anyone else might think.
I love to look at these houses and their gardens. I do not aspire to live there.
I walk on and into the meadows. Thorpe Meadows. Orton Meadows. Ferry Meadows.
As meadows go, they are as false as the facades of all those wealth-dripping properties. They are trying to be something that they are not, and yet we cannot condemn them for trying. There is beauty in them regardless. There is plant-life and wildlife value in them regardless. There is succour for the soul, regardless.
Thorpe Meadows is centred on the rowing lake. A kilometre-long rectangle of water intended for the rowing club to practice, train and race upon. It is artificial. But the trees and plants that grow alongside it may not know that. The birds that settle on it when the rowers are not out in force do not care about that. The light dances on it just the same.
There are sculptures dotted about the place. Make of them what you will. Not all of them caught me.
John Foster’s “Outside In” is intended to be “a powerful shape that could represent a fist, an engine, or a heart.” Or not. It looked like a heap of scrap to my untrained eye.
Tolleck Winner’s “People” is more sinuous and more at home in this watery landscape. The instruction to move around the piece and watch how the two proto-figures come together and move apart did add another dimension to my understanding. If I lived nearby I think this is the one I’d be
drawn back to.
I suspect I’d love Elizabeth Cooke’s “Cormorant” if it had clear sky or clear water behind it. The trees interrupt – and I won’t deny them that right – but I don’t think I saw the bird at its best. It made me think about the installation at the Cley visitor centre, placed where you have to look up at it, and there is only sky behind. So I start thinking about the context of art. How much does the “where-ness” of it impact on our response to it?
Three pieces come rapidly one upon the other if you continue to walk along this side of the ‘lake’ as I did. “The festival boat” (Sokari Douglas Camp) drew me across the meadow because I wasn’t sure whether it was meant to be boat or whale. It felt like one emerging from the other. It’s the one I felt most called to follow up on when I got home. That’s when you know art has touched you, when it doesn’t leave you alone, when you want to know what the artist was trying to do and maybe also when you are taking from it things that the artist never consciously put into it.
In a wider sense, I’m thinking a lot about the nature of writing at the moment, on the back of conversations I’m having with fellow writers, but what we’re saying applies to creativity in
general. It revolves around “what counts as [writing / art / creativity]”? Where do we draw the boundaries? Why do we do it? What do we want the people who encounter it to do with it?
There will never be definitive answers to these questions. That’s why they’re worth asking.
“Festival boat” intrigued me. I think it is the one that will, visually, stay with me the longest even though, to be honest, I don’t actually like it. I find it crude and simplistic and – if I’m allowed a personal opinion – a bit ugly. But its “boat-ness” and its “whale-ness” touched something in me, so whether Ilike it or not, I suspect it’s doing its job.
I’ve always said that the thing about music is that it directly touches the heart by-passing the brain and I’m beginning to wonder if that is true of all art forms. They can touch us without our fully understanding why. Maybe we should just let them do that. I talk a lot about ‘getting out of our own way’ when writing. Maybe I should apply that to my appreciation of art as well as to my creation of it.
The last of the sculptures I looked at with any intensity was Jane Ackroyd’s “Little Prince” – inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s book – space journeys, exploding asteroids, discovery beyond expectation – all the stuff that tiny little book includes. For me, it also takes me back to Nepal 2000, where a fellow walker gifted me a copy and wrote a beautiful inscription in it. Connections. Memories.
In between these two is Nicholas Pope’s “Odd Oaks”. Removed here from the Werrington Shopping Centre because they had become ‘unsafe’, these three rounded pieces of oak, vaguely acorn in shape, have now been lain on their sides and are being allowed to rot down, to feed whatever burrowing things are working their way into their centre. The most-decayed of the three has a boat-like shape of its own, suggestive of deeper journeys in life and beyond. In all of them, I was drawn to the detail of their skin, the whorls and peaks in the bark that look like so
many eyes watching us, or so many planetary storms seen from far away.
Next, I reach the crossing under the by-pass into Ferry Meadows itself. Dull grey columns holding up the road have been transformed into a street-art gallery. I don’t know the background, and deliberately choose not to enquire. I choose to love this unexpected beauty for its own sake and for its unexpectedness. Mural and street art are having “a moment” and long may it continue. We have so many drab spaces that can be made wonderful. Most of the artists involved will never get their fifteen minutes of fame, but I for one salute them all. They add joy to my life, and I respect their talent.
I photograph the ones that arrest me – the Kingfisher in particular – but others too. I will come back to these pictures again and again. They will inspire poems and thoughts. Hopefully, I will bring a few of them to the wider world, released into the wild with my own words wrapped around them. In the moment though I am stunned.
I look up at these huge portraits: of cyborgs, of proud black women, of people masked and silenced
while their head is full of love and stars and a happier earth, of a sunrise that might overcome the nightmare of tech, of nurses, or split people or meeting people, of unexplained things, of a kingfisher.
In the sculpture park the pieces are explained. The artists and curators tell us what they mean. Here, under the road, with traffic roaring overhead, no-one explains this raw art to me. I can make it mean whatever I want it to mean. I am not only surprised by it – I am entranced – and surely that is a function of art? To enchant. To mesmerise. To arrest. To make us think for ourselves.
By the time I get to the nominal start point of a very short walk, I am already “full”. I sit for a while to regroup. I watch the water beyond the shrubs. I appreciate just sitting. I don’t reach for my notebook, everything I have absorbed needs to ferment and I am also conscious of needing to be open to the next bit, which was, after all the original point of the journey. Allegedly.
That short walk, in keeping with the nature of the day, also got stretched. The plan was: the bottom edge of Overton Lake, divert to cross the River Nene, follow the boardwalk along the wooded edge of the river to Ferry Bridge, and thence back towards Overton, over to the Pontoon bridge…and that’s where the plan had to be adapted. The pontoon bridge was closed.
Had I been thinking clearly – and clearly this was a day on which I wasn’t – I might have simply followed the path along that north eastern shore of the lake, picked up the beginning of the
route, retraced that, and then done an out & back on the bit I was missing. The more I look at the map, now, the less sure I am that such a tactic would have saved me any footsteps, the more sure I am that my actual choice was the right one.
I opted for the longer walk around Gunwade Lake. There’s little to be seen out on the water, but it’s pleasant enough walking under the trees and my head is still full of human artistry.
Allowing for my wayward start and my mooching about in the sculpture park and the diversion because of the closed bridge, I reckon this particular two-mile walk edged out at about
seven-and-a-half to eight miles.
My feet hurt.
A little history lesson:
Ferry Meadows is not just the reclamation of an industrial site. It is a repurposing that was envisaged from the outset. The park was designed around the gravel reserves before their extraction. The digging out of the reserves was tied into the provision of lakes for recreational use. Liaison between the gravel company and the relevant local authorities allowed for the original plan to be revised in light of the what was found on (or in) the ground.
The shape of the eastern lake (now Overton Lake) was adapted to preserve the foundations of a Roman settlement discovered during the soil-strip. Another area, now Lynch Lake, was found to be unproductive and so dug only to a shallow depth and made a children’s boating pool.
The adjacent area known as Orton Mere had already become a recreational area prior to the park’s opening in 1978. This had originally been one of the settling ponds belonging to British Sugar, acquired by the development corporation as part of the land needed for the Nene Parkway.
Parkway is a term that puzzles me. It seems to mean different things in different places, but I think it’s just one of those developer words used to make a ring-road or a fly-over or a by-pass sound (and ok, maybe, look) a little nicer than it really is.
Be that as it may Peterborough Development Corporation seem to have been sensitive in what they did with the land bought to enable the road to be built.
On the north side of the river, the final part of the parkway system was built on an embankment within the floodplain. The river authority (at the time Anglian Water) required that a balancing lake be provided in the valley to compensate for the loss of flood storage capacity. This could have been a lake of any shape, but the decision was taken to create a designated rowing course. Seventy metres wide, a thousand metres long with overage of 20 metres at the start and 80 metres at the end to allow for circulation it was designed to competition standards – and serves that purpose
today.
I’m including this not just because it’s interesting, at least I think so, rather because it’s important. This isn’t a lesson in history. It’s a lesson from history. It’s an instruction on how it should be done. I worked in social housing for a long time. My view of town planners is not a happy one. It’s heartening to find an example of where it was actually thought through from the very beginning and adapted as needs be and ultimately worked. Brilliantly. Planners, Developers and anyone else involved in reshaping our landscape: please take note!
