My first public event of 2016 is a presentation entitled
The Psychogeography of the Wirral Park Roundabout.
It takes place in Glastonbury on Wednesday February 3rd at
the Red Brick Building, Morland Enterprise Park, Morland Road, Glastonbury, BA6 9FT.
Entry is £5.00 with doors opening at 7:00 for a 7:30 start.
John Cowper Powys meets JG Ballard. Psychogeography is a literary
mythopoetic mode of understanding the effects of environment on human
consciousness. Powys portrayed a conflict between two different levels of
Glastonbury, the realm of the Grail and the domain of worldly concerns,
business and industry, in his great novel Glastonbury Romance. This tension is
played out in modern times with extraordinary intensity in one of the most
powerful and generally unacknowledged zones in Glastonbury, the area centred on
the Wirral Park (B&Q) Roundabout and its megalithic standing stone.
Wearyall Hill and Beckery are the gestation points of the
modern Glastonbury mythology, being the sites of the Joseph of Arimathea story
and Blue Glass Bowl event respectively. John of Glastonbury also links the two
places with a nebulous story of a convent of nuns on the hill and the strange
journey of Arthur to a Grail chapel at Beckery where he received a crystal
cross from the Virgin Mary. This brought the motif of the Chapel Perilous to a
locale which in modern times became the location of a veritable wasteland of
industrial decay.
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| View of mythic Glastonbury from decapitated Holy Thorn. |
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| View from behind Holy Thorn to Glastonbury non-places (B&Q, Tescos etc). |
JG Ballard expressed alienated post-modern sensibilities
whereby the road and the car carry isolated people from one indistinct
all-but-identical place to another and strange extremes of events and behaviour
result. The Wirral Park Roundabout has a multitude of modern non-places
clustering around it: two chain hotels, a supermarket, fast-food outlets, a
petrol station, garden centre, and so on. An A Road takes innumerable people
past it every day.
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| Glastonbury non-places. |
It is as if a strange membrane exists between mythic
Glastonbury and the relentless spread of non-places that attempt to impinge
upon it. In this unique area, conflagration and death have resulted. I will discuss the outbreak of
Legionnaire’s Disease, the McDonalds arson, the Holy Thorn decapitation and
much else.
Maybe I might see some of you there. It is possible that a short book might manifest from the material one day ---
