*
All that really remains as a reminder of the ‘British Mediterranean’ today are the echoes of places that once bounded it, heard in the sounds and voices that radio transmitters bring back to a place – West Cumbria – that was once at the centre of things and now exists on the periphery. ‘Peripherality’, in this sense, is an interesting idea, because it is not simply a geographical phenomenon given by the fact of being located on the edge or boundary of some physical area, but rather it tends to refer to the idea that places can come to hold little interest or be of no importance to most people. But as such a place shifts from the centre to the edge it is possible to see it as also occupying an ‘inbetween’ space.
In West Cumbria, the realisation of this ‘inbetweenness’ hit me as I scanned the AM and FM radio frequencies while travelling by car around the coast. Once I had established a loose sense of my co-ordinates, but still in need of more information and other impressions of the place, I asked a colleague what he would do in my position. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘listen to the local radio, and you’ll soon figure out where you are.’
So, I spent much of my time on the road, looking at what was out there in front of my own eyes – on the ground, looming up in the distance – while simultaneously searching for more clues via my car’s radio. This did not necessarily lead to a sense of enlightenment in terms of gleaning information about the actual place I was in, but my sense of place changed soon enough anyway. The babble of voices (and accents) began to transform my sense of the peripherality of this place – the sense of being in an ‘unimportant’ place without a unique or well-articulated sense of itself – into understanding it more accurately as one of those kind of transitional, ‘inbetween’ places. For as it turned out, West Cumbrian ‘radio space’ – if I can call it that – reflected its history and the limits of a cultural geography that had, in many respects, faded into the past. I found myself listening to voices that seemed to be out of place.
The voices of two Irishmen, who were located in Dublin, addressed me through RT… Radio Dublin, dispensing seasonal advice – turning me into one of their hypothetical ‘local’ listeners who were curious to know how they should utilise their gardens at this ‘time of year’ – and recommended that I should now be planting my ‘Christmas potatoes’. ‘Where?’ I wondered. Was this a tip that applied anywhere within range of their broadcasts or only in Ireland? Do cultural habits, like cultural influences in the maritime age, translate to territories now divided, rather than joined together in some way, by the sea?
I suddenly had an image of some alien visitor in a similar situation being quite confused by the conflicting geographical–locational information that such radio encounters might bring to light, because the ‘local’ radio (that is to say, what I was able to pick up here in West Cumbria) seemed to be coming from all directions.
I soon found that I could choose between a range of voices that in all likelihood – and without need of the internet, which destroys the peculiarity of location – could only be encountered here: BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Cumbria, BBC National Radio (London), BBC Radio Ulster, Manx Radio, RT… Radio Dublin and Radio Clyde broadcasting from Glasgow. All this knowledge seemed to locate me anew – at the centre of a place that was somewhere between Scotland, England, Ireland and the Isle of Man, which is to say, somewhere near the geographical centre of the British Isles; not on the margin, as such, but in the middle.
If nothing else, the voices that might have temporarily given rise to a sense of personal dislocation or confusion seemed to be in tune with what I would learn about this place from historical sources, namely that in economic and cultural terms, West Cumbria was in fact once at the centre of its own small world; one that extended across the seemingly arbitrary boundaries drawn on maps and was not confined by the formations of land and water that produce in us an image of where one place ends and another begins.
*
A tip I picked up from William Least Heat-Moon’s book, PrairyErth, was to try and be imaginative when plotting your location on these abstractions we call maps. Following his example, I tried to centre myself. I discovered that where I am is 259 miles from London (a 10–12-hour round trip by train or car), 128 miles from Glasgow (just over two hours’ drive), 90 miles from Newcastle and 142 miles – as the crow flies – from Dublin, the place from where my seasonal advisors were broadcasting their gardening tips. If you look at a map of the British Isles, from its northernmost coastal edge to its most southerly tip in Cornwall, I am located very close to the mid-point of the two extremes. Similarly, tracing a straight horizontal line from where I am would establish that I am at a mid-point between Middlesbrough on the east coast of the country – where the A66 road that terminates at Workington, begins – and Belfast in Northern Ireland to the west.
I am, in other words, very close to the geographical centre of something – the political entity we know as the United Kingdom – yet, I am undeniably on the margins of things in a more profound sense; one that indicates something crucial about the character and spirit of the place as it has emerged into its present-day form.