Peripheral Homes
The city outskirts, neglected and dumped on, is the land of temporary dwellings, ranging from regimented caravan parks to neglected mobile homes. These peripheral places share space with the scrapyards, quarries, active industrial zones and abandoned industry. These are places where abandon accumulates and homes are makeshift. It is the indistinctiveness of these places, which are neither rural nor strictly urban, that gives them a strange quality of impermanence and transition. The definition of what constitutes home or community is questioned here: are these permanent dwellings or holiday homes? Places to live in or of abandonment? These are neither dystopias nor utopias; they are places of otherness, the antithesis of the traditional, English pastoral.