ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I consider the effects of walking through industrial ruins. Having undertaken many journeys on foot throughout the United Kingdom over the past three years, I have walked through structures of varying age and states of decay, buildings and sites ranging from old mills to warehouses and foundries to vehicle workshops, and a host of derelict sites whose prior use could not be determined. While in Britain the de-industrializing Thatcher years were the era most productive of landscapes of ruination, there remain many urban areas that are littered with industrial ruins, typically in cities which have failed to prosper in the intense competition for new investment. Along railways and canals, in old industrial estates and interstitial, neglected urban areas, ruins continue to crumble and decay. While such sites are frequently vilified as despondent realms, spaces of waste and blights on the landscape, they support a range of human activities and a plethora of nonhuman life forms, as well as offering aesthetic, somatic and historical experiences at variance to the often over-coded, themed spaces of urban renewal. They are thus able to talk back to these apparently seamless processes of regeneration and provide spaces within which counter-aesthetics and alternative memories might emerge. Different encounters with objects and materiality, peculiar sensations and ineffable impressions may be experienced. Accordingly, I will highlight how travelling by foot through an industrial ruin or derelict site opens up walking to critical speculation and offers a diversity of distinct experiences which defamiliarize the encounter between feet and world.
