"Unofficial Britain: Journeys through Unexpected Places" by Gareth E. Rees

Unofficial Britain: Journeys through Unexpected Places

by Gareth E. Rees

A review 

These are the first shoots of future folklore emerging from an urban Britain that might look soulless and secular but under the surface remains very strange indeed, rippled with weird undercurrents. The backdrop to these stories might have changed since the days of Merrie Olde England but that impulse to make sense of the world through our imaginations remains as powerful as ever. Welcome to Unofficial Britain…

Every year around July, my family and I leave our Mediterranean home to go on holiday in cooler climes.  Britain is one of our favourite destinations. As a result, we have had repeated occasions to go off the tourist track, visiting obscure villages, towns and suburbs which do not earn a mention on mainstream guides.  Covid laid this year’s travel plans to rest.  As temperatures sweltered around me, my wanderlust was partly assuaged by Gareth E. Rees’ Unofficial Britain.  Inspired by and partly based on the eponymous website of which Rees is the founder and curator, this book  is a travelogue of sorts, except that it celebrates those aspects of the British landscape that are often overlooked on the assumption that they are ugly, uninteresting and nondescript – electricity pylons, motorways and flyovers, hospitals, industrial estates and retail car parks (already the subject of an earlier book by Rees – Car Park Life). 

The philosophy behind this approach is easy to explain.  Landscape does not have any objective meaning. It acquires its connotations only insofar as it acts as a backdrop to the communities living in it.  It is a blank slate onto which we project our memories and experiences, our individual and collective joy, love, loss, grief.  Once we grasp this, we should no longer be surprised that people can be as emotionally attached to a flyover as to a breath-taking mountain.  Or that ghosts and legends should inhabit twentieth century housing estates as much as they plagued medieval castles and Victorian mansions in earlier times.  Accordingly, the book takes us on a strange journey along miles of tarmac, with stops at abandoned factories, ghostly carparks and industrial wastelands haunted by mythical men-beasts.

"Ghostbox" an oil-painting of the Dungeness power station by Mark Hollis.  The painting was bought by the author Gareth E. Rees and is featured on the Unofficial Britain website.

Rees writes in an engaging style, effortlessly combining urban folklore and personal memoir, history and psychogeography, road-trip narrative and gonzo journalism.  In this regard, I spotted parallels with two other books I read and enjoyed recently, both of which provide an idiosyncratic view of the landscape of the British Isles: Richard King’s The Lark Ascending, an exploration of 20^th Century British (mainly English) music and its connection to landscape, and Edward Parnell’s Ghostland, a memoir presented through the prism of the biographies of British ghost story writers and the places that influenced them.  

Unofficial Britain is, in my view, the strangest of the three books and, at times, the scariest.  Rees is a writer of weird fiction and folk horror who has contributed to anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ brilliant This Dreaming Isle. Although this book is a work of non-fiction, it shares the same themes and concerns as the author’s fiction: a predilection for the weird and the strange, the magic – sometimes dark, sometimes benign – which haunts the everyday, the realm of the Natural snaking its way into the urban landscape.   Rees also shares with other writers of the same ilk (such as Gary Budden) a sense of Deep Time:

What I learned on this journey is that everything changes and yet little does. Landscapes overlay landscapes, in ever-turning cycles. The flyover where a viaduct once stood. The Victorian workhouse that became a hospital. The steelworks on the site of a monastery. The burial cairn surrounded by a busy interchange. Motorway earthworks that rise alongside their Stone Age predecessors. The pretty bend on the river that became a dirty dockland then a ramshackle trading estate then an artist’s hub then an estate of luxury waterside high-rises… The past is never absolutely destroyed by recycled into mutant strains. It seeps through the layers of a place and takes on new guises to give us goose-bumps and chills.  

The passage above is typical of the best bits of the book where the author turns poet – literally so at the end of the chapters, each of which concludes with a sort of modern-day ballad.   Rees is a bard singing the praises of a weird, urban Albion.

ebook, 288 pages

Expected publication: September 17th 2020 by Elliot & Thompson