ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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Recent research by a team of biologists from Bristol University has shown that our passion for brightly lit streets is having a detrimental effect on the lives of bats. Evolution has hard-wired these creatures to avoid daylight, to make them less vulnerable to predators, so if the flight path between their colonies and their feeding grounds is served by sodium street lights, the bats avoid the light and take the long way home, which may expose them to greater risks from birds of prey.
Perhaps, in the future, town councils will invite C-list celebrities to turn off their lights for Christmas, to celebrate the festive season by plunging all the streets and squares into planet- (and money-) saving darkness. Then as the lights go out, the assembled members of the public will hold up their mobile phones like candles at a vigil.
CCTV has become a way of looking at ourselves, and of seeing the banal present crumbling into pixelated myth and horror. The timestamped images of the toddler James Bulger being led from the New Strand Shopping Centre, while his mother bought lamb chops from A. R. Tyms butchers, will resonate for a generation, but they might have led us to consider how there was an edge to such surveillance, a blackout zone in our midst where cameras were far less frequently stationed. The boys who took James from the brightly strip-lit arcades and bargain shops of the Strand headed out into the gloom of February, taking the child on a long and desperate two-and-a-half-mile march through busy streets, where they were picked up again on cameras, but, in the end, some awful escalation of events on that cold evening finally led them on to the railway, near a disused station, the kind of place well known to truanting children and teenagers as a private space, a space where nobody could see you.
There are still darker places, beyond the city’s edgelands. Ten years after the Bulger murder, in the summer of 2003, the country was puzzled and disturbed by the disappearance of a doctor called Richard Stevens, who was last seen arriving for work on a Monday morning at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. With his jacket on the back of his office chair, his briefcase on his desk and his Audi ticking in the car park, he walked out of his life and was gone. Apart from the CCTV footage of his arrival captured on an antiquated workplace system, he had simply vanished without trace. An international police search turned up nothing, bar a few false sightings and leads: a tourist picked up on CCTV at John Lennon Airport was mistaken for him; he was spotted on a flight to Florida. In the end, Dr Stevens’ body was found — six months later and in the dead of winter — by walkers inside a disused slate mine on Coniston Old Man, a dark place beyond the reach of surveillance and high above the distant incandescence and glare to the south. The coroner ruled that he had taken his own life.
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