ABSTRACT
Memories and sensations are galvanised through a post-industrial landscape of tunnels, railway backs, tower blocks, subways, ports, and warehouses, the places where we played out our dreams of the twentieth century and moulded the world urban. Edgelands are the sites of car-crushers, sewage works, waterworks and power stations. Without knowledge of the places one cannot connect the urban with the natural, as to do so is to venture into the edgelands where a new topography awaits the city dweller unaccustomed to the raw workings of man-made culture. The metaphor of the gasholders as 'housing the spite and gloom of post-industrial towns' is not a dismal portrayal of a stereotypical northern grittiness; the 'colourless, odourless leak' that seeps out in the poem is a grounding force of humility. Living inside the metaphor is perhaps the only way to actively reconnect us to the power points of our own lives.
