
I recently went on a day trip to Dungeness – an isolated settlement on the South coast of Kent, widely known as a peculiar sort of place. In fact, it attracts a constant stream of visitors, specifically because it is such an unusual place. On the way home, I was wondering how we might account for it as a place.
These days, we tend by default to theorise of a ‘sense of place’ as shaped by connections to elsewhere. A place can somehow ‘hang together’ even if it has multiple resulting identities, and these shift over time, as its relations to the rest of the world change. Alternatively, it has become common to think of places as ‘assemblages’ (of materials, resources, bodies, ideas, perceptions, historical traces, etc). I can’t help feeling that there is something centripetal in all this: an underlying emphasis on places as acted upon, shaped by the ‘outside’; place as an outcome or result.
But what if we also consider the possibility that some places are more obviously centrifugal. This is one perspective taken by AbdouMaliq Simone, in his (2018) book Improvised Lives, on a series of deprived parts of cities (mostly) in the global South. Such areas are populated by people, activities and things, but their constituent parts aren’t necessarily in tension, conflict or harmony – they more obviously don’t really speak to each other. People end up there without actively wanting to be there; they function most evidently as ‘platforms’ from which people depart to go about their daily life elsewhere in the city. Things and activities share the space, but largely because there’s nowhere else for them to be. This isn’t place as a coming together, so much as an arbitrary and unenthusiastic coexistence. (I’d do Simone’s ideas more justice if I could have another look at his book – but that’s in my office at work, and not so accessible due to lockdown.) One analogy that came to my mind was of magnets being forced together so that the same poles are touching. The two magnets are copresent because they have to be, even though each is oriented towards being elsewhere.
So I was playing with the idea of Dungeness as being a somehow centrifugal place. One of its key features is an old lighthouse. Lighthouses send out signals to warn people away; they signify a place where you don’t want to be. Sitting in juxtaposition is a nuclear power station. Nuclear power stations tend to be built in places where very few people want to live; they send energy to elsewhere. The landscape itself is hardly hospitable: no trees, salt, rocks, sea cabbages. In fact, the place is full of bad omens: rusting machinery and rotting boats; a sign warns of artillery fire on the beach at certain times; all the roads nearby are bordered with barbed wire; a sign warns that the water there is “deep and cold”. It all shouts at you: This is no place for you to be.
But all these things are there, together. It’s a very distinctive place, but has no coherence; it is repulsive in a literal sense. Do we find it so alluring specifically for this reason? Anyway, a couple of hours there was plenty for me. I wish I’d booked a tour of the nuclear reactor, though.


London, 27 August 2020