By Nick Griffiths-Haynes.
As Druids, one of the most important things we do is honouring the spirits of Place. Offering them our respect and thanks for allowing us to be there and for holding us. We often expand on this by describing some of the spirits around us that inspire us, the glinting dew drops on succulent grass, the high arching branches of trees, the rich dark earth and so on. In a city how applicable is it to call on these natural “living” spirits? If we accept a fully animistic approach to the world, everything has spirit, whatever form that may take.
According to the National Office of Statistics, there are over 56.9 million people living in the UK and around 90% of us live in what are described as urban and suburban environments. Our surroundings are made of concrete, glass, plastic and stone. The earth beneath us is filled with cables and pipes carrying water, gas, sewage, electricity and pulses of light. The air above hums with radio waves and microwaves bringing us ever faster communication. Cars rumble past on tarmac creating a background resonance that is now almost as much a part of the landscape as green fields and dry stone walls.
Do the trappings of modern life have spirit? What of cars, computers, phones… How many people name inanimate objects? Is this childish personification or is it because on some level we are feeling their spirit? Do we dishonour the places we live in by not honouring the objects around us and the materials they are made from? No matter how twisted and deformed their manipulation from their natural state has left them? They are still a part of the web. Perhaps we should simply acknowledge the processes that made them, respect the journey they have made from their natural state to the tools we use every day.
Towns and Cities have spirit. Our ancestors built these settlements as places to live and work. Each one has its own unique story its own history. Made up of the stories of everyone who has ever lived there, every house that was ever built there. Layers of occupation stretch down through foundations and mud back through time. Archaeologists reveal pockets of the physical history, tiny windows into these ancestral places. Trying to gather as much information as possible before a new car park or office block rises out of the rubble to take its place in the skyline, to add another strand to the story. Patterns in architecture and road layouts all leave a resonance of themselves that adds into the place. Surely the land beneath accepted or even attracted people to settle and create hubs of communication.
The stories of these places are tales of the beautiful old building with 200 years of history pulled down and turned into hardcore because no one remembers what it was for. The story of a concrete tower block thrown up on the same plot in a staggeringly short time as cheap social housing to solve all the problems of impoverished “slums.” It is lives played out against a brick wall backdrop, tagged with the signatures of an alienated youth. It is factories turned into luxury apartments or left to rot, becoming havens for urban wildlife, both human and non-human. It is pristine shopping malls created for the perfectly sanitised retail experience.
Urban Myths, the rumours of dubious origin that pass from person to person in pubs and offices are a modern secular oral tradition. Each town has its own legends, every place has its own variations on themes that spread across continents. These are the penny dreadful stories of crocodiles in sewers, vampires, serial killers, ghouls and criminals. The one about “This guy I know, well, his cousin’s brother did something stupid but hilarious…” These tales mix in with popular culture. Tabloid headlines and celebrity gossip, local quirks of fashion and phrases of speech, regional twisting of pop songs to celebrate or humiliate the local team, all adding into a spirit of place.
Ghosts of forgotten lives weave in and out and through crowds in the town centres. Echoes of people walk along side streams that now pass beneath hurrying feet in plastic pipes. So many lives… to be open to them all is to be drowned in humanity. A farmer bringing wool to market. Traders in fashionable 18-century coffee houses speculating on sugar and lives. A Victorian street urchin stealing pocket watches in the fog. Factory workers clocking in and out, neatly slicing up the time they are owned by the company. Sailors back in port for one night looking for sex and others selling it. An alcoholic collapsed in a doorway and the respectable man who walks past ignoring him. Students partying with new found freedoms. A mum pushing a pram stopping to look in shop windows. Business suits crowding onto trains commuting from silent suburbs with neat gardens. A professional ordering drugs from a phone box so the number isn’t traced. Politicians, Pimps, News vendors, shop workers, office staff, market traders, school kids… Life. Lives. All twisting round each other weaving in and out of bricks and mortar, steel and glass, to make one song, one story, one spirit of place pulsing with energy.
Next time you reach down through paving slabs and tarmac, down to the essence, the spirit of place ask, Has London ever not been a city? Or Paris? Or Edinburgh? Or Rome? Or Wherever? We are a part of the world around us. Whether we like it or not, so are pollution, car fumes and landfills. All the effluent of occupation. By all means be inspired by the trees in the park, the grass growing through the pavement and the pigeons perched on the high-rise. But don’t overlook the pavement, the high-rise or the roads. They are just as much a part of the place as anything else. How ever they got there. Honour our ancestors who built the towns and cities because they wanted them. Honour the towns and cities for what they are, where they are, warts and all. It is the place we are honouring, not just the bits we find easy to deal with.
