Childhood ruin of industrial England was a formative reservoir for later London imagery
Evidence
JF: When I first came to London it seemed a great deal like Lancashire, where I’d come from. But Lancashire had fallen into ruin. The factories had closed, the economy had faltered. We felt like the Incas after the Spaniards had passed. Helpless, nostalgic savages adrift in the ruins. I grew up playing in empty factories, huge places which were overgrown. I remember trees growing out of the buildings. I remember a certain moments of looking at it all and thinking what it would have been like when it was all working. What life might be like, if it were all working still. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 393
Categorization
- XREF: Foxx’s ‘Incas after the Spaniards’ collapse of Lancashire industry connects to the book’s recurring lost-futures theme and to later aesthetic nostalgia for welfare-state modernism (chapter 18/19 claims about destroyed public concept and 1970s paternalism). — connects to: Pervasive cultural nostalgia signals an inability to make new memories — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 249; Childhood emotional tones get reapplied to adult situations — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 436; The uncanny surfaces when foreign scenes trigger repressed childhood imagery.