Dreamscapes

*

For many years I had found myself crossing between England into Scotland on the M6, over the border and back again, and I would often find myself being distracted by the road signs to places that I now know to be on the Cumbrian coast, but which for years remained obscure to me. The name of Workington, for instance, had a ring of familiarity to it – as if I knew what it looked like, when I had, in fact, never been there. Perhaps I assimilated it to somewhere else in the old mythical industrial North because of its name (if nothing else) or because of the icon of the lorry that always appeared next to the place name on the motorway exit signs. I would also notice another odd-sounding place name, Silloth, and occasionally wonder what delights it held in store.

These signs marked the exits on my route that were effectively the last chance to turn off the road before entering Scotland (or the first chance on entering England, if moving in the opposite direction). During those travels, a time before the internet and mobile phones made it easy to look up strange places and quickly satisfy any curious impulses, these were simply locations that had never registered any impression, to the best of my recollection, through the only available mass media means, things like television or newspapers. They were places, it seemed fairly clear, that would remain mysterious destinations to anyone who did not actually have a reason to visit them.

Once or twice I tried to convince myself that there was nothing else for it but to execute a dramatic late swerve – as in the movies – that would carry me off my route. Just to see what was actually out there. But then the moment would be lost as I approached the invisible border between the two nations and passed, in the blink of an eye, from one country into another. As I left the prospect of distant Silloth behind, I imagined that I wouldn’t really be missing anything and that it was probably just a collection of farms set amidst a rural landscape of flat land as far as the eye could see; one where all that was to be found was endless farmland. And cows and sheep and farm vehicles. I imagined the smell of the land and the nothingness of a place that had nowhere to stop, versus the safety and dependability of the wide road ahead, with its service stations, toilets and coffee. How could I have imagined that it was actually located by the coast and was a proper seaside town, its streets lined with houses painted in ice-cream colours that looked out onto carefully spaced and manicured trees that had been pruned to look somewhat exotic. Surely there should have been signs saying ‘to the seaside’ or something similar?

Now my familiarity with Silloth brings to mind not only a place that is in some sense lost to time, but also one that was perhaps always out of time and place. Somewhere that is in the wrong location, in any case, here in a part of the country where there seems to be nothing around it that accounts for why it is here. This was a perception that the many barely readable, faded and rusty road signs – relics of the mid-20th century – that rose up in front of me on my way to the town fed into. But, on the other hand, these were details that made it all the more fascinating. In some respects, it is a place that may essentially be no different to any of the other British seaside towns of the Victorian era – especially those located in the North – that never quite made it through the leisure transformations of the latter part of the 20th century. For the masses, whose predecessors once flocked to these seaside towns, the idea of what qualified as a suitable holiday location changed dramatically in a very short space of time. Air travel opened up the world to cheap international destinations and, not least, to the exotic: to holiday destinations where unbroken sunshine or other rather different attractions or new experiences could be guaranteed. Silloth seemed to belong to a bygone age of the British seaside. Today, outside of holiday times – when it draws in visitors from West Cumbria and from caravan parks found in this part of the county – it can seem a bit like an abandoned place; although one that is almost guaranteed to surprise anyone who visits it for the first time. Nikolaus Pevsner, once the measure of all things interesting about England’s huge variety of places, praised Silloth for its ‘marvellous’ views across the Solway Firth to the mountainous Scottish coastline and noted that its gridded streets and terraces were ‘mildly Italianate’ in style.

Perhaps, with its wide and expansive planted green – where people once played tennis, watched entertainers perform or were taken towards the sea in strange horse-drawn bathing machines – its Italianate streets and its manicured trees, Silloth could be best thought of as one of those rare, very early examples of what is called postmodernism; a place of contrast and contradiction that seems to have no natural roots in its terrain. As such, it is maybe not too different from other examples of transplanted Italian urban styles constructed in the same era, such as Venice in California, a ‘dream city’ that rose out of sandy marshland near Santa Monica, Los Angeles, but also with an eye to creating something that really belonged in another place.

Silloth, the first time I visited, also reminded me of a place where I had once stopped when I was driving through New South Wales in Australia, travelling between Melbourne and Sydney. It was a Victorian town called Cessnock, which I had visited on a quiet Sunday when the streets were empty and – perhaps it was for this reason – the place also seemed to have been abandoned, its wide streets emphasising the absence of people and traffic. Silloth’s own wide streets are very interesting and unusual, and one wonders why the town was laid out with so much space.

Today, the fact that the town’s main road surfaces – laid out in attractive granite setts that can easily be mistaken for cobbles – have not been altered by the addition of the kind of traffic-calming bumps found elsewhere and have been subjected to only the most minimal line markings where streets meet, adds to the perception of its being transplanted from another time and place. On the green near the roadside, a well-preserved version of the mid-20th-century black-and-white road signs that can be seen fading and rusting elsewhere around the county stands in pristine condition, the words ‘Cumberland County Council’ – the local authority that ceased to exist nearly half a century ago – running vertically down the striped post.

One local West Cumbrian I spoke to described Silloth to me – without so much as a reference to postmodernism – as an imaginary place. A place unlike Workington, where we stood as he told me this; a town that, by contrast, had been battered and moulded by the accelerated tempo and ceaseless grinding of the industrial age’s onward progress. I could see what he meant. From the glass pagoda that is situated on a mound at the edge of the green overlooking the sea – which may have replaced an earlier pavilion that was the subject of a well-known Raymond Moore photograph – to the planted shrubbery, the trees and the rose and bee garden, Silloth seemed like a dream place. From certain vantage points – and for different reasons than those suggested by Pevsner – I sensed that it could have existed on another continent.