Whilst I’m trying to figure out a longer piece about what a growing interest in craft culture and ruralism amidst younger people in our post-industrial, information economy-based society could mean, I thought that I would take a short time to explain what’s in my profile photo on this newfangled website/app thingy and why I chose it. (Spoiler: it’s not just because it’s the first photo in my camera roll that both anonymises me and lends me a certain on-brand air of mystery…)
Pictured here are what remains of a Victoria-era folly in Sydenham Hill Wood, South East London. Follies were a popular choice for the wealthy, land-owning Victorian man to decorate his property and imbue it with some old-timey charm. Ranging from towers with no doors, the facade of a castle, stone archways that lead nowhere, or the kind of sham ruins that live here in leafy south London, it is generally accepted that follies are structures built almost solely for an aesthetic purpose, not a practical one. They differ from sculptures or more artistic, statuesque methods of mystifying one’s back garden in how they are strictly architectural in form.
These ruins have always been ruins, built to look old. Ever since Alderman David Henry, owner of the Fairwood villa that once lay on this site, contracted James Pulham & Sons to erect these medieval monastic ruins in the 1860s, they’ve always been completely incomplete, deliberately deconstructed, made to look as though hundreds of years of the ceaseless passage of time has washed them away into a heap of stone and moss. But once someone points out that the red brick poking out of ancient stone is anachronistic with the choice of building materials of medieval monks, and that that the ancient stone is in fact the trademarked Pulhamite rock, of the aforementioned, innovative and savvy Pulham family, you feel slightly caught-out by Henry’s trick and some of its mystique disappears.
Of course technically, what we are looking at when we look at the folly in Sydenham Hill Wood today is a man-made structure that’s sat outside exposed to the elements for 160-odd years. The archway is said to have once been intact, and some say that there may have been stained glass remains in some of the windows as early as the 1950s and 60s. So in a way, Henry and the Pulham fellas got more than what they set out for, a few years later than they set out to do it - they’ve made a genuine ruin! Well, it is the remains of a ruin that was always a ruin. It is what remains of remains that we never actually remains at all.
It’s this kind of confusing, always-changing, liminality that hangs around the ruin and all throughout the wood as a result, which made me think of that photograph when creating an account on this thing a week or so ago. There is something in it which works well as a representation of the writing that is intended to take place here is going to deal with. The folly, its location, its history, its unpredictable future-made-present that continues to unfold unpredictably. Like all things, it exists at an intersection of a lot of things, some of which I’m particularly interested in; the ‘natural’ versus the ‘artificial’, capital, history, place, memory, time, art, affect. But there is something in the unique nature of the old folly; degraded remnants, built out of fake stone to look old in a green forest that’s older than written history itself, that serves to pictorialise the complex interconnected, mutli-levelled, nature of existence in a powerful way, for me at least.
Let’s just consider Sydenham Hill Wood again for a second, the place the folly now finds itself within. The area now stands as a defined 10-hectare area of Sydenham Hill Wood, protected by the London Wildlife Trust as a nature reserve since the 1970s, once had seven different mansions built upon it after the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition was moved to south London to an area then known as Penge Place, resulting in an uptake of cultural and economic investment into the area. A railroad once ran between these gardens, through the middle of what we call ‘the wood’ today. Practically no traces of it remain. Before that, this 10-hectare area of south London was a very small part of a vast natural oak wood that has been inhabited by gypsies, hunted in by royals, made home by hermits, harvested by workers, and memorialised by writers - which is how we’re told we can add fortune tellers to our list our forest users, thanks Samuel Pepys. It has been said by people more knowledgeable than me that the lumber from this ancient woodland is ‘the wood that built London’. And if we try to go back further than our written history of property deeds, borders, game and plant surveys, lumber and charcoal output, allows us to, it is easy to imagine the myriad of beings that have both affected and been affected by this wood through their occupying of the same space. And today, here I am, writing about the wood after having been moved to do so, in such a way that - maybe, though it may seem too grand of a statement - reshapes how other people engage with this small piece of landscape after reading this.
The folly within Sydenham Hill Wood has an affective presence that, for me, exemplifies how within the everyday there are certain things we take for facts - for the always-has-been and the always-will-be - but that there also exists ways of breaking out of this existential contraction by not taking things at their face value and by trying to understand both your and their existence as part of a wider assemblage of things. As Felix Guattari said in the conclusion to his book, The Three Ecologies, which in part deals with how thinking in this kind of way is a refusal to abide by the penetrating, homogenising effects of contemporary decentralised capitalism that injects apathy and fatalism into our frontal lobes, instead we can place ourselves
“simultaneously in the realms of the environment, in the major social and institutional, and symmetrically in the landscapes and fantasies of the most intimate spheres of the individual. The reconquest of a degree of creative autonomy in one particular domain encourages conquests in other domains - the catalyst for a gradual reforging and renewal of humanity’s confidence in itself starting at the most minuscule level. Hence this essay, which sets out, in its own way, to counter the pervasive atmosphere of dullness and passivity.” (Guattari, 2008, p.45).
Generally, overcoming my personal l atmosphere of dullness and passivity is the project here. It would be great if some people find some of it interesting along the way.
