Route Haunting End – A Pub: PostScript

The work on the sub/urban commons and in Route Haunting asks those who encounter it to boldly go – not on the path of the heroic walker, deep into the mysterious and enchanted moors and heathlands defining ancient Britain, nor into deer parks and enclosures that present the visually attractive side of a desired high-quality way of life with its origins in devotion to king and country. Instead, I ask us to boldly go where we already habituate, domesticate, and settle – the subdivisions of sub/urban commons that offer the appearance of an accessible ‘way of being’ – even if just for an early morning stroll with the dog or to arrive to work and school. Sub/urban commons present a unique paradox: the green and pleasant land of bucolic England, the English ‘pastoral’ is an entity of custodianship and protection where nature and national agendas of king, country, and affection for farming meet. With its history of market gardens and allotments, open space that was once for sheep and cattle grazing now made available for a morning stroll, sub/urban commons take on a whole other symbolic meaning. Barnes, in particular, presents the foundations of protection of the ‘natural and historical’ challenged by cultures and conflicts in the generations between Lark Rise to Candleford to Wombel¹Lark Rise to Candleford was a BBC period drama set in Oxfordshire involving the daily lives of families and friends navigating between traditional farming lives and the growing market towns of 19^th century England. The Wombles was a 1970s children’s TV series involving puppet moles who lived off the refuse discarded by visitors to Wimbledon Commons – a neighbour common to Barnes connected by rights of way through Putney Green and Richmond Park. Wimbledon Common is both larger and hosts a more economically and ethnically diverse set of visitors.. This is the tension between a kind of prototypical citizenry who inherited English land and those who have settled it through class mobility. Barnes begs a question about who is on and off the commons. With Putney and Wimbledon in close proximity, with the enclosure of Mill Hill, the manicured grounds, canines and local residents present, the signs of protection and rewilding abound – the ongoing link between ‘the commons’ and the English class system remain firmly intact. Here in the upwardly mobile community of Barnes in Richmond-Upon-Thames, both grown in infamy via popular culture, celebrities, historical figures and pilgrimage destinations ranging from Marc Bolan’s shrine and Olympic Studios to Ted Lasso, Virginia Woolf, and of course, the royalty who built the road ‘Queens Ride’ to avoid the peasants on Putney Common as they made way to Richmond Palace.

When this topic of propriety is raised on common land, interactors are stimulated to consider, to speculate, about how this came to be – how the commons have been shaped by a series of cleanings, enclosures, hedgerows, and a network of rights-of-way that interlink these common spaces to one another. This is the balance between responsibility and access gesture to domestication, rights-of-passage, and what is appropriate land use. Put this on a sub/urban common, confronted, as we are with Mill Hill, Barnes Green, and Thorne Passage, with an evolving ‘appropriate use’ that shelters space for human habitation in sustainable and appropriate ways. In this moment, the underlying structures of self-actualisation present themselves here: what lives are behind the gates and hedgerows, when did these settlements arrive, and who has access to them? Route Haunting nurtures engagements with that which fails to be grasped on sub/urban commons – what is heard, felt, visible, sensed – but still out-of-reach. It is done by applying a companion’s framework that gathers, with in/tension, FLINTA muddlers at the intersection of felt, knowable and imaginable as a demonstration of what is out-of-reach and overlooked. We face each/other, those that are present in body or record, to not exclusively recognise or describe the out-of-place or uncomfortable, but to recognise the feeling of un/knowability. Palimpsests of intertextuality, of companionship, and a sense of genealogy Virginia Woolf, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Adrienne Rich, myself and the growing set of interactors present on Route Haunting²who, if they themselves do not take on a role of guiding another group, leave their mark in postcards are the somebodies we are facing, gathering and orienting on separate journies, yet with (critical) skills to navigate through these muddles, these malarkies,
of conflicting yet converging paths.