To the CCA and the new Simon Yuill exhibition 'Fields, Factories & Workshops' and particularly the bit dealing with the building and existence of suburban estates over commons outside Bournemouth. The picture I have found here, of West Howe, shows a bit of the earlier estates under construction, with a newly levelled area of the scrubby common ground ready for new houses.
These commons, incidentally, are said to form part of Thomas Hardy's imagined Egdon Heath in 'Return Of The Native'.
Some slides show the commons - stretching brambles, yellow, damp grass, and tracks, skeletons of cow parsley - pressing up on and attempting to broach the outer garden fences of the estates on a rainy morning. They are at once themselves and the representatives of the other, the outlandish tale, song and superstition out there.
Here is a picture of pigeons being released on the common that backed on to my own childhood suburb - a place of grass snakes, criss crossing tracks through the bracken, dens, a sinister disused railway station, the smells of grass and a felt, to these children, other. That was sensed over our roads in the big, black shiny clouds above the school or in the burning light. There was a magickal 16th century manor house to one side and an old chocolate factory down away beyond another. And a factory rolling out Brain's Faggots.
A fair rolled up in the summer, and still does.
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