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sawylA September Bristolcon this year to avoid clashing with FantasyCon, so this morning saw me scrabbling to get my stuff together in time catch the train to Temple Meads — complete with a heavy police presence courtesy of the rugby world cup crowd — arriving with time to spare for the first session on lost cities and abandoned places.
The enjoyable dark panel was composed of:
Stark Holborn (moderating)
Jaine Fenn
Anne Lyle
Pete Sutton
Huw Powell
And while I've tried to attirbute things correctly, but it's mostly from memory so I may well be wrong about some of the comments...
If buildings are stories and we assign them personalities, what does that say about destruction and ruins?
(Lyle) Ruins have been there since we started building & because there was no written histories, stories would grow up round them. Anglo Saxons when they came to England found the Roman ruins and didn’t know what to make of them because they couldn’t build in stone in the same way.
(Fenn) We projected onto something and because there’s something there, it's whatever depending on what decade it is. You can see this with Stonehenge.
(Powell) As beautiful as a new building might be it doesn't yet have a story. Ruins have a Mary Celeste appeal. There’s also the feeling that you've outlived something huge — "I’m still here while this vast thing is in ruins".
(Fenn) Sounion is covered in graffiti — there’s a famous Byron tag — but it's ruined so it's cool!
What about future history?
(Powell) The idea of the future being old as you would in a pirate novel. Perfectly possible to have ancient ruins in the future. What would the archaeologists be doing?
(Sutton) I recently met someone doing a PhD on ruins in sf films...
(Fenn) Firefly is an interesting example. It’s set in space, Earth is legendary, and truth has been lost in the colonisation. Myths have grown up & it has become storified. Planet of the apes.
(Holborn) Ruined spaceships are a big thing — like the ship in Alien.
(Sutton?) Let’s agree that Prometheus never happened!
(Fenn) Things being isolated, e.g. Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers. Is there something that makes it separate and makes a blank canvas. Travel is important. Travel increases impact if it is difficult to get somewhere. Always lots of far away places. Old maps and here be dragons and people with heads in their chests and things like that.
(Sutton)There’s a bit of othering going on with ruins. And a lost city can do that. City of saints and madmen is a good example of a ruin that it’s isolate: people are still living in the city but at the same time it’s half full of alien ruins. Its inhabitants don't have to travel b cause the city isn't quite abandoned.
Moving on to Harry Potter, the Chamber of Secrets is interesting because it’s lost — no one knows how to get to it — but its right under their noses at the same time. It’s quite a common thing.
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep shows a world becoming abandoned. The process is shown as interesting — quite a common trait.
(Fenn) The middle volume of Joe Abercrombie First Blade is a deconstruction of Tolkien. The protagonists journey to a Lost City but because it’s Abercrombie, nothing feels like it's really achieved. They bring a sense of a depth of time and vastness of the area being travelled through.
Does anything positive ever come of of a lost city?
No, you think we'd learn from Indiana Jones! They’re merely creepy.
(Fenn) The Krell City in Forbidden Planet is a good example. They travel a long way to get there and literally project their own ideas on to it, but it is always utterly alien and you can’t imagine anything human living there.
Ruined cities often reflect the characters and can be part of a metaphorical search for identity. Library Planet in Dr Who is a goo example; the Doctor has to work out why it has been lost and what needs to be done to fix it because he’s the Doctor; whereas River Song is just there to do archaeology. The Library is a character in the story.
(Holborn) Gormenghast.
(Sutton) The setting is the story, especially in the first book. Architecture is a character & the way they interact becomes the story.
(Fenn) Ruins can become an exploration of mortality, like Shelly and Ozymandias. Both Shelley and Horace Smith wrote poems on the same subject — but Smith’s explicitly mentions a ruined London. It’s interesting how the name Ozymandias crops up again — especially in Watchmen.
(Fenn) We like to think that when an empire falls it's dramatic; but not the case in history. It’s often hard to tell when a fall occurs if it takes hundreds of years — there’s a reason why Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is as long as it is! It’s hard to make this sort of story personal. (Powell) Unless you do the long lived protagonist thing. It’s also about lessons learnt: how to do we avoid it; how do we become immortal? But nothing lasts for every and the ruins are proof of that. Ancient Egypt is a probably as near as anyone has come to an immortal monument — the ultimate memento mori that everything turns to dust.
(Lyle) Think of the Victorians and their enthusiasm for creating follies. They were obsessed with death and making ready-made ruins is a big part of them.
Let’s talk about urban exploration — UrbEx. It seems like a morbid fascination, especially with abandoned hospitals.
(Fenn) I think it’s because hospitals are always terrifying and abandon ones are even worse. (Sutton) Look at Danvers State Hospital — which is now apartments, as so many of them are!
(Lyle) Old underground stations and secret bunkers are also a big thing. It feeds into a desire to believe conspiracy theories. There are now signs that point to the underground bunkers of the 50s! The Book Secret Underground Bristol. UrbEx is part of the explore everything mentality: it’s about place hacking; exploring and taking photos and geocaching. (Sutton) The Met carried out a very expensive sting, only to arrest a group of people who were entering abandoned buildings and merely taking photos.
(Powell) I used to go to a theme park in Westen and now it’s become Dismaland!
(Fenn) What is it about the danger of exploring abandoned places? New York has no clearance subway lines — they call them the blood and bones lines because that’s all that will be left if a train passes. People still go down there. Its it thrill seeking? (Fenn) It’s Darwinism in action! But there’s obviously something about the isolation and being to only person to see something. (Fenn) Cities are palimpsests, new over old.
(Fenn) There are two sorts of place: a remote place that’s hard to visit; or a place in a city that everyone walks past. In books its generally easier to project an idea onto a single place. Cities built on top of themselves so their ruins are hidden; whereas other ruins are more obviously in plain sight.
All cities eat themselves and their ruins are often a romanticised memory of what has gone before. Edinburgh is a good example of a hidden city that has been built over and there are lots of myths and ghost stories. London has myths of the London under London.
(Powell) I’ve just thought of a good ruin: the recent story about a buried train full of nazi gold!
(Holborn) The nazis and stolen gold — it’s a bit of a dark session when that’s considered good news!
Pripyat!
It’s an interesting place because it was only created a decade before and then suddenly it was abandoned. There are places that have witnessed violence and what we know colours the horror of it. It’s also about sudden loss. What happens and how it happens determines the myth and what stories we tell about them. (Fenn) Actually we don’t project horror onto most of them...
(Sutton) Stalker computer game is full of weird mutants, while the film Stalker is about the horror we project.
(Lyle) Ruins are also very much a reflection of periods and attitudes. It tells us a lot about what they thought in the past. Cambridge no longer has a castle; the stone that used to make it up was cannibalised to build the colleges.
(Sutton) Other places have been built and rebuilt and they’re still portrayed as old. There’s a Korean temple that is said to be thousands of years old, even though it burnt down and was rebuilt in the 1960s — they’re different about things like that in East Asia. (Lyle) Much of London was rebuilt by the Victorians. The Tower of London was recreated — bless them — because the old one was so run down and decaying because it had become useless.
(Fenn) One of my favourite places is Portmeirion. It’s an Italianate village on the Welsh coast. It’s where the Prisoner was filmed. It’s very much a found place. But just outside the town itself, there’s a Norman motte and bailey. But there’s a plaque — it’s in the bell tower, so you can only see it if you stay overnight — that says that the Norman ruins were pulled down in the 18th century by an ancestor who wanted to prevent people from visiting and it’s an irony that Clough Williams-Ellis restored it!
Questions
Any favourite abandoned places in computer games? [But it turns out that no one on the panel really has time to game, so no abandoned game places, but after a bit of thought they come up with some ideas!]
(Sutton) The Last of Us.
(Powell) The last one I played was Tomb Raider.
(Lyle) Assassins Creed has some good ones. (Holborn) Dear Esther.
(Adrian Tchaikovsky from the floor) The second Portal game has a wonderful sequence of abandoned ruins that run through from the 1950s and capture the spirit of each age.
Urban explorers. Some places still have stuff in them. Still clothes and drapes but decaying at different rate. Not a blank canvas but something's gone. An interesting setting.
(Powell) The Mary Celeste is a famous example and mystery, but we’re never going to know what really happened because the people are gone. Ghost towns are like that.
(Holborn) There’s that flat in Paris that hadn't been opened for over 50 years….
What about places in the process of declining. Detroit.
(Fenn) they lack the sudden mystery. It Follows is a great horror film set in Detroit. Lauren Beukes has this sensibility.
(Holborn) Ubik!
You haven’t mentioned the post-apocalyptic very much and there’s a strong correlation with post apocalyptic settings.
(Sutton) A lot of the appeal is in place no longer functioning as intended. I am Legend etc — the whole place is lost and you're the visitor. (Powell) It’s like going to your own house and finding it withered — very eerie. It’s a reminder of mortality and it gives rise to the suspicion that we are living in a bubble the might burst at any moment.
We're still finding lost spaces and this is part of the appeal. That and the fact that we might need to revise of our history to reflect the new discovers. Not that we actually do! There are also problems of ownership and access. There are also times when we feel lost places should stay lost. Should the Titanic be left alone as a monument to the people who died?
(Fenn) I went to Machu Pichu. You can hike but I did the tourist thing and took a bus. You can’t see the temples from space; but you can see the big road they built to get the tourists in and out. And there’s a city at the bottom full of a people to service the guests. They’ve turned it into a theme park!
Which is your personal favourite ruin and why?
(Fenn) golden witchbury (?). Silchester.
(Lyle) Akrotiri on Santorini.
(Sutton) Skara Brae on Orkney. Recognisable dwellings complete with cupboards.
(Powell) Has to be the Pyramids in real life and the Mysterious Cities of Gold in fiction!
Towards the end of the discussion about ruin and darkness and everything falling into dust, there was, quite literally, a lighter moment when the spotlights around the front of the stage started strobing various different colours. As someone said as the tech guy came down to the front to deal with them: they were probably the least subtle five minute warning ever...
The enjoyable dark panel was composed of:
Stark Holborn (moderating)
Jaine Fenn
Anne Lyle
Pete Sutton
Huw Powell
And while I've tried to attirbute things correctly, but it's mostly from memory so I may well be wrong about some of the comments...
If buildings are stories and we assign them personalities, what does that say about destruction and ruins?
(Lyle) Ruins have been there since we started building & because there was no written histories, stories would grow up round them. Anglo Saxons when they came to England found the Roman ruins and didn’t know what to make of them because they couldn’t build in stone in the same way.
(Fenn) We projected onto something and because there’s something there, it's whatever depending on what decade it is. You can see this with Stonehenge.
(Powell) As beautiful as a new building might be it doesn't yet have a story. Ruins have a Mary Celeste appeal. There’s also the feeling that you've outlived something huge — "I’m still here while this vast thing is in ruins".
(Fenn) Sounion is covered in graffiti — there’s a famous Byron tag — but it's ruined so it's cool!
What about future history?
(Powell) The idea of the future being old as you would in a pirate novel. Perfectly possible to have ancient ruins in the future. What would the archaeologists be doing?
(Sutton) I recently met someone doing a PhD on ruins in sf films...
(Fenn) Firefly is an interesting example. It’s set in space, Earth is legendary, and truth has been lost in the colonisation. Myths have grown up & it has become storified. Planet of the apes.
(Holborn) Ruined spaceships are a big thing — like the ship in Alien.
(Sutton?) Let’s agree that Prometheus never happened!
(Fenn) Things being isolated, e.g. Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers. Is there something that makes it separate and makes a blank canvas. Travel is important. Travel increases impact if it is difficult to get somewhere. Always lots of far away places. Old maps and here be dragons and people with heads in their chests and things like that.
(Sutton)There’s a bit of othering going on with ruins. And a lost city can do that. City of saints and madmen is a good example of a ruin that it’s isolate: people are still living in the city but at the same time it’s half full of alien ruins. Its inhabitants don't have to travel b cause the city isn't quite abandoned.
Moving on to Harry Potter, the Chamber of Secrets is interesting because it’s lost — no one knows how to get to it — but its right under their noses at the same time. It’s quite a common thing.
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep shows a world becoming abandoned. The process is shown as interesting — quite a common trait.
(Fenn) The middle volume of Joe Abercrombie First Blade is a deconstruction of Tolkien. The protagonists journey to a Lost City but because it’s Abercrombie, nothing feels like it's really achieved. They bring a sense of a depth of time and vastness of the area being travelled through.
Does anything positive ever come of of a lost city?
No, you think we'd learn from Indiana Jones! They’re merely creepy.
(Fenn) The Krell City in Forbidden Planet is a good example. They travel a long way to get there and literally project their own ideas on to it, but it is always utterly alien and you can’t imagine anything human living there.
Ruined cities often reflect the characters and can be part of a metaphorical search for identity. Library Planet in Dr Who is a goo example; the Doctor has to work out why it has been lost and what needs to be done to fix it because he’s the Doctor; whereas River Song is just there to do archaeology. The Library is a character in the story.
(Holborn) Gormenghast.
(Sutton) The setting is the story, especially in the first book. Architecture is a character & the way they interact becomes the story.
(Fenn) Ruins can become an exploration of mortality, like Shelly and Ozymandias. Both Shelley and Horace Smith wrote poems on the same subject — but Smith’s explicitly mentions a ruined London. It’s interesting how the name Ozymandias crops up again — especially in Watchmen.
(Fenn) We like to think that when an empire falls it's dramatic; but not the case in history. It’s often hard to tell when a fall occurs if it takes hundreds of years — there’s a reason why Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is as long as it is! It’s hard to make this sort of story personal. (Powell) Unless you do the long lived protagonist thing. It’s also about lessons learnt: how to do we avoid it; how do we become immortal? But nothing lasts for every and the ruins are proof of that. Ancient Egypt is a probably as near as anyone has come to an immortal monument — the ultimate memento mori that everything turns to dust.
(Lyle) Think of the Victorians and their enthusiasm for creating follies. They were obsessed with death and making ready-made ruins is a big part of them.
Let’s talk about urban exploration — UrbEx. It seems like a morbid fascination, especially with abandoned hospitals.
(Fenn) I think it’s because hospitals are always terrifying and abandon ones are even worse. (Sutton) Look at Danvers State Hospital — which is now apartments, as so many of them are!
(Lyle) Old underground stations and secret bunkers are also a big thing. It feeds into a desire to believe conspiracy theories. There are now signs that point to the underground bunkers of the 50s! The Book Secret Underground Bristol. UrbEx is part of the explore everything mentality: it’s about place hacking; exploring and taking photos and geocaching. (Sutton) The Met carried out a very expensive sting, only to arrest a group of people who were entering abandoned buildings and merely taking photos.
(Powell) I used to go to a theme park in Westen and now it’s become Dismaland!
(Fenn) What is it about the danger of exploring abandoned places? New York has no clearance subway lines — they call them the blood and bones lines because that’s all that will be left if a train passes. People still go down there. Its it thrill seeking? (Fenn) It’s Darwinism in action! But there’s obviously something about the isolation and being to only person to see something. (Fenn) Cities are palimpsests, new over old.
(Fenn) There are two sorts of place: a remote place that’s hard to visit; or a place in a city that everyone walks past. In books its generally easier to project an idea onto a single place. Cities built on top of themselves so their ruins are hidden; whereas other ruins are more obviously in plain sight.
All cities eat themselves and their ruins are often a romanticised memory of what has gone before. Edinburgh is a good example of a hidden city that has been built over and there are lots of myths and ghost stories. London has myths of the London under London.
(Powell) I’ve just thought of a good ruin: the recent story about a buried train full of nazi gold!
(Holborn) The nazis and stolen gold — it’s a bit of a dark session when that’s considered good news!
Pripyat!
It’s an interesting place because it was only created a decade before and then suddenly it was abandoned. There are places that have witnessed violence and what we know colours the horror of it. It’s also about sudden loss. What happens and how it happens determines the myth and what stories we tell about them. (Fenn) Actually we don’t project horror onto most of them...
(Sutton) Stalker computer game is full of weird mutants, while the film Stalker is about the horror we project.
(Lyle) Ruins are also very much a reflection of periods and attitudes. It tells us a lot about what they thought in the past. Cambridge no longer has a castle; the stone that used to make it up was cannibalised to build the colleges.
(Sutton) Other places have been built and rebuilt and they’re still portrayed as old. There’s a Korean temple that is said to be thousands of years old, even though it burnt down and was rebuilt in the 1960s — they’re different about things like that in East Asia. (Lyle) Much of London was rebuilt by the Victorians. The Tower of London was recreated — bless them — because the old one was so run down and decaying because it had become useless.
(Fenn) One of my favourite places is Portmeirion. It’s an Italianate village on the Welsh coast. It’s where the Prisoner was filmed. It’s very much a found place. But just outside the town itself, there’s a Norman motte and bailey. But there’s a plaque — it’s in the bell tower, so you can only see it if you stay overnight — that says that the Norman ruins were pulled down in the 18th century by an ancestor who wanted to prevent people from visiting and it’s an irony that Clough Williams-Ellis restored it!
Questions
Any favourite abandoned places in computer games? [But it turns out that no one on the panel really has time to game, so no abandoned game places, but after a bit of thought they come up with some ideas!]
(Sutton) The Last of Us.
(Powell) The last one I played was Tomb Raider.
(Lyle) Assassins Creed has some good ones. (Holborn) Dear Esther.
(Adrian Tchaikovsky from the floor) The second Portal game has a wonderful sequence of abandoned ruins that run through from the 1950s and capture the spirit of each age.
Urban explorers. Some places still have stuff in them. Still clothes and drapes but decaying at different rate. Not a blank canvas but something's gone. An interesting setting.
(Powell) The Mary Celeste is a famous example and mystery, but we’re never going to know what really happened because the people are gone. Ghost towns are like that.
(Holborn) There’s that flat in Paris that hadn't been opened for over 50 years….
What about places in the process of declining. Detroit.
(Fenn) they lack the sudden mystery. It Follows is a great horror film set in Detroit. Lauren Beukes has this sensibility.
(Holborn) Ubik!
You haven’t mentioned the post-apocalyptic very much and there’s a strong correlation with post apocalyptic settings.
(Sutton) A lot of the appeal is in place no longer functioning as intended. I am Legend etc — the whole place is lost and you're the visitor. (Powell) It’s like going to your own house and finding it withered — very eerie. It’s a reminder of mortality and it gives rise to the suspicion that we are living in a bubble the might burst at any moment.
We're still finding lost spaces and this is part of the appeal. That and the fact that we might need to revise of our history to reflect the new discovers. Not that we actually do! There are also problems of ownership and access. There are also times when we feel lost places should stay lost. Should the Titanic be left alone as a monument to the people who died?
(Fenn) I went to Machu Pichu. You can hike but I did the tourist thing and took a bus. You can’t see the temples from space; but you can see the big road they built to get the tourists in and out. And there’s a city at the bottom full of a people to service the guests. They’ve turned it into a theme park!
Which is your personal favourite ruin and why?
(Fenn) golden witchbury (?). Silchester.
(Lyle) Akrotiri on Santorini.
(Sutton) Skara Brae on Orkney. Recognisable dwellings complete with cupboards.
(Powell) Has to be the Pyramids in real life and the Mysterious Cities of Gold in fiction!
Towards the end of the discussion about ruin and darkness and everything falling into dust, there was, quite literally, a lighter moment when the spotlights around the front of the stage started strobing various different colours. As someone said as the tech guy came down to the front to deal with them: they were probably the least subtle five minute warning ever...
