3.1 Abandoned shoe amongst fly tipping in Micheldever Wood, Hampshire.
The creation and disposal of waste is an everyday experience, and litter belongs to this quotidian realm. It is part of the visual landscape of the everyday in both country and city, and it is made up of everyday things: cigarette butts, tissues, drink cans, sandwich cartons, chocolate wrappers, fast food packaging, flyers. These items are products of modernity, they are the flotsam and jetsam of mass consumerism. They bear testament to the routines that shape the daily maintenance of the body: eating drinking, expelling, and servicing addictions. Their presence also marks the regular routines and transitions which constitute the everyday: work, meal times, commutes and dog walks.
Sometimes litter also contains things that are out of the ordinary, where it is difficult to understand how they have come to be discarded and their presence cannot easily be tied in to an everyday narrative. The ubiquitous single shoe is an instance of this (Figure 3.1). It has a disconcerting effect, it is an everyday object but it is not in its everyday place, it has become inserted into a different sequence of events with possibly disturbing undertones. It could be evidence of an attack, or perhaps it has been dumped as part of a whole load of other things and has become separated from its pair. Perhaps this has happened in the course of its owner’s intriguing albeit chaotic lifestyle and has been dumped because of its singleton status. The presence of litter in the countryside, whether it is the common or unusual forms, is not benign. It creates a range of emotional responses from slight annoyance to outrage, from nervous curiosity to actual fear. Litter in the countryside feels out of place, uncomfortable, anxious – feelings that result from its power to inflame a set of deeply ingrained binary relationships that define the non-metropolitan: litter is man-made in comparison to the landscape which is seen as ‘natural’, litter is a product of modernity, whereas the rural is timeless or outside of modernity, litter is urban and when it appears in the countryside it is evidence of the urban invading the rural.
This chapter is structured around three instances of litter-induced anxiety. First it examines the case of litter trails that were recorded in the Cambridgeshire countryside during the Second World War. These trails were thought to be laid by fifth columnists leaving signals in preparation for an enemy invasion. Here litter is an agent in revealing the countryside to be an unstable and potentially dangerous place. It also reveals an illicit league of traitorous insiders and a threat of invasion from outsiders. The reports on the trails form part of the Mass-Observation Archive and add an unusually rural perspective to the archive’s early holdings. They can be seen to be in dialogue with Mass-Observation’s strategies of the collection of fragments as a way of accessing the everyday dreams and anxieties of the population. The second instance of litter anxiety also accesses fears of invasion, however in this instance it is not soldiers but tourists who are the focus of these fears. Through examining the histories and concerns of anti-litter campaigns from the 1930s into the 1960s, this section shows how litter can be seen as a sign of the blurring of established boundaries between the country and the city. The breaking down of such established orders is a product of mass tourism and population change in the countryside, and this section argues that reactions to these changes, such as anti-litter campaigns, can be read as designating people, as well as litter, as being out of place. The final section examines the work of artist Stephen Willats, in particular his methodology of mapping litter as a tool for revealing the uses and interrelations of everyday spaces. Willats’ investigations once again access the notion of outsiders and insiders in relation to the ownership of space and show how dropping litter can be a demonstration of ownership and belonging.
First however, it is necessary to explore some ideas about litter and its relationship to the everyday and to the non-metropolitan. Items which turn up as litter, such as used condoms, used tissues, used nappies, bagged dog faeces, and half eaten or decaying food stuffs, certainly arouse disgust and could be thought of as abject. In Kristeva’s (1982) formulation of this concept, powerful feelings of abjection are caused by objects which effect the breakdown between self and other, subject and object. As evidence of bodily processes, fluids and excretions these forms of litter can, according to this theory, disturbingly signal our own materiality by transgressing the psychic boundaries between the self and the world. This reading of litter designates it as a potentially phobic object, a term which does not seem so far fetched if we think about the equipment issued to litter pickers, which often includes thick gloves, long handled grabber sticks, and high visibility jackets.
This psychoanalytical approach to the analysis of waste does have its limitations. Gay Hawkins (2006) argues that this perspective does not take account of the changing cultural meanings of waste over time. Hawkins also importantly argues that rather than being a threat to the formulation of the self, our relationship with waste and the everyday habits and disciplines that this relationship produces, are a vital part of how the self is repeatedly performed. The designation of an object as waste names it as other to the self, the subsequent procedures of disposal perform that distinction. What therefore becomes psychically troubling in the case of litter is not the nature of the waste itself, but its visibility. The re-appearance of waste signals that the performance of the differentiation between self and other has been unsuccessful. An abiding image of horror is the landfill site with its abundance of waste. However, in terms of everyday contact, litter in the landscape can carry a similar charge to the landfill, what litter lacks in volume it makes up for in contrast with the surrounding landscape and physical nearness.
The effective disposal of waste is seen as a characteristic of civilised modern living. The wide range of consumer products designed to facilitate processes of instant and hygienic disposal, such as spotlessly white bathroom suites and in sink waste disposal units, stand testament to this (Lupton and Miller 1992: p. 26). So when waste turns up again, as litter for example, it causes anxiety. Referencing Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (2004 [1900]) Hawkins asserts that for modernity to appear to be effective it is important that things circulate, that they remain in motion: goods, money, people. When objects re-surface as litter they are essentially out of circulation, they are stuck. In this instance the all important consumer cycles are brought to a halt, and in this moment shown to be malfunctioning, allowing the spectre of unsustainability to rear its ugly head. For the effective disposal of waste fuels the fiction of its disappearance, disposal is a euphemism for another cycle reliant on the power relations of capitalist society, with much of the waste generated by western countries being shipped to less economically buoyant states for ‘processing’.
The modern fictions of flow and the dynamic cycles of consumption and disposal are reflected in the way litter has been aestheticised. The famous scene in the film American Beauty where the flight of a plastic bag is buffeted by the wind into a dance of ephemeral beauty, implicitly enacts the fleeting and the impermanent. Themes which belie the weighty burden that the plastic bag bears of impending environmental catastrophe (Hawkins 2001: p. 4). In his analysis of trash and manufactured mass-culture Julian Stallabrass says that:
The constant flux of objects onto the streets, and their removal or disintegration, has a rhythm which is usually too slow and disjointed to grasp, although we might get an impression of it when papers are blown about in high winds, or carrier bags lifted into the air like balloons. When snorkelling once I caught sight of something which seemed to summarize this process: swimming between two narrow rock faces, I saw that the sea bed at their foot was carpeted with garbage and unidentifiable detritus forming a thick mass which shifted in and out with each tug and push of the waves, changing its form subtly as it did so (Stallabrass 1996: p. 182).
Although on a much larger scale than the plastic bag film, both images access the sublime in the constant almost ungraspable movements of trash. However, what such interpretations of waste overlook to some extent, is its materiality rather than its symbolic nature. What happens if, instead of thinking of litter as part of an ever changing process of movement and change, we start recognising it as stuck? It is almost easier to make this move thinking about litter in the countryside rather than in the city. Litter in the countryside, is not subject to shifting patterns of movement generated by large amounts of people or traffic and it has fallen out of any institutional systems of collection and disposal. In the countryside it sits, it decays, and interestingly it sometimes becomes colonised by its new environment as in Figure 3.2.1 In this respect one of the differences between representations of litter in the city and litter in the countryside, is that litter in the city is seen as a product of modernity, and in the countryside it is seen as a failure of modernity.2
It is possible to argue that litter is an historically specific phenomenon and one which saw its birth with the twentieth century. Claire Jack, in her Short History of Litter in the Twentieth Century (2005), situates its development as an identifiable phenomenon and simultaneously as a problem, as being a product of the coincidence of two aspects of modernity: the decline in horse drawn transport and the increase in the mass production of consumer goods. During the nineteenth century, all waste that was left on the streets, a large proportion of which was horse manure, was gathered together and passed onto farmers to use as fertilizer. In the first decades of the twentieth century horse drawn traffic significantly declined, while at the same time new forms of consumer products and packaging came onto the market, meaning that not only did forms of litter increase, but it also became newly conspicuous for its recognisable wrapping. Without the horse manure there was no profit to be gained from collecting the refuse from the street and litter started to be regarded as a serious issue and a municipal responsibility. In their study of the aesthetics of waste, Lupton and Miller (1992) note that the model of easily recognisable branded packaging for food items, which became popular in the US in the late 1800s, had spread to most consumer items by the 1930s. They argue that the disposability of the packaging, and particularly the emphasis on streamlined forms and smooth surfaces, of both the packaging design and the goods themselves, indicated seamless flowing movement, and contributed to the notion of the disposability of goods, a mindset that was essential to the consumer cycle of purchase and disposal. They add that ‘The policy of ‘planned obsolescence’ pictured the economy itself as a ‘body’, whose health depended on a continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion’ (Lupton and Miller 1992: p. 5). From horse manure to metaphorical human excretion the history of litter is tied to processes of modernity and its close relationship with waste. The story told by Jack of how litter came to be defined and thought about as a problem, accesses the persistent narrative that sees litter/waste, and by extension signs of modernity, as being generated by the city and gradually moving outwards into the countryside. When litter is found in the countryside it is out of place, an insidious sign of modernity seeping out from the city in these polluting fragments.
3.2 Trainer colonised by the environment, found at the edge of a footpath.
Definitions of litter as a noun and as a verb refer to its connection with disorder. To litter is to strew with objects scattered in disorder, it refers to odds and ends, fragments and leavings lying about, to states of confusion and untidiness, and disorderly accumulations. Litter is an agent of the disruption of order, it pixelates the binary edges between city/country, modernity/anti-modern. Through this disruption assumed orders and ideologies are revealed. No matter where litter lies (except perhaps in a litter bin) it is out of place. The Keep Britain Tidy campaign’s definition of litter is ‘waste in the wrong place caused by human agency’ (Keep Britain Tidy 2010), a description that echoes Mary Douglas’ classic definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1991 [1966]: p. 35), made in her famous study Purity and Danger.3 Douglas argues that from an anthropological perspective, examining aspects of pollution and taboo can reveal the rules, value systems and classifications which constitute that society, summarised by the classic maxim ‘Where there is dirt there is system’, followed by the not so neat, but still insightful ‘Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter’ (Douglas 1991 [1966]: p. 35). Similarly, littering practices and reactions to them can be seen to reveal systems of order, value and assumptions about place, in England over the past hundred years.
Litter in the countryside as opposed to the city is seen as being particularly incongruous, to the point of causing outrage among many otherwise placid citizens.
The contrast between mass produced, brightly coloured packaging and the landscape in which it resides, reaffirms deeply held notions that the countryside is natural and eternal, and at risk of being corrupted by the synthetic and the throw away. Such ingrained ways of thinking about the countryside, places it outside of modernity, or at least as the helpless victim of modern developments, rather than as a legitimate space of modernity, with its own agency.
In 1940 strange montages of litter started to appear in fields and woods, on grass verges and village signposts. Assemblages of cigarette cartons pegged up on sticks, scraps of packaging with intricate cut outs, readymade chocolate wrappers displayed in series, and drawings chalked onto gateposts. These were not, despite their appearance, remnants of surrealist practices or the beginnings of land art interventions, they were in fact litter trails. Or rather this is the name attributed to them. Explanations for their presence ranged from the covert activities of fifth columnists to secret signals between lovers, however the origins and intentions of such unlikely material practices remain unclear to this day.
The story of the litter trails unfolds through a set of documents which has found its way in to the Mass-Observation Archive. It consists of a collection of correspondence and detailed reports generated by a group of Cambridge academics almost a year into the Second World War. These papers reveal suspicions that a fifth column of enemy agents was in operation in the Cambridgeshire countryside, and that their presence had become apparent to the sharp eyed observers through their use of carefully laid trails of litter and outdoor drawings as forms of covert communication.4
The reports are in themselves as carefully and as artfully put together as the phenomena they describe. In addition to detailed textual description of the found litter constructions, they also contain meticulously rendered sketches of the notable scraps and drawings which they encountered, together with hand drawn maps plotting their findings. These include a detailed drawing of a fragment of a Craven A cigarette packet, in which the distinctive lettering on the packaging has been diligently imitated, as has the brand’s logo – a small cat. The reason for including the drawing in the report was to illustrate the presence and position of a small notch that had been deliberately cut out of the packaging. The presence of unusual yet barely perceptible details like this notch, was all part of the case that this was not an ordinary piece of litter, but one that had been deliberately manipulated and thus marked as a signal. The drawing of this cigarette packet demonstrates the extreme attention to detail which characterises this report, not only with regard to the facts that were being recorded in the text, but also in the way in which these facts are supported by the act of making precise drawings. The process involved in making these drawings requires that every detail is observed and recorded. In a case like this it is never clear what will turn out to be significant. It is of note that the investigation was led by T.C. Lethbridge, who was a trained archaeologist, a discipline which places much importance on the accurate recording of finds, often fragments in themselves, through making detailed drawings.5 It is also worth noting the importance of waste in archaeological method. The reconstruction of patterns of behaviour through the analysis of discarded fragments of material is recognised as an important archaeological procedure. In their key text book on archaeological practice Renfrew and Bahn cite numerous instances of how, what they term ‘debris scatter’, has led to greater understanding of ancient settlements (Renfrew and Bahn 1994: p. 168).
3.3 Drawing from the Litter Trails Report, 1940. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive. © The Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive.
The litter trail drawings show that the observers were working in a heightened atmosphere of surveillance, paranoia and anxiety, where the most everyday and overlooked scraps might be of national importance. That drawings were used rather than photographs can be explained through war time shortages of film and developing materials, but I think it also points both to an obsessive trait enacted though the concentrated repetition necessary in making observational drawings, and to the amateur and somewhat outsider nature of the observers, a status which may have contributed to the fact that their findings were often not taken very seriously by the relevant authorities.
The litter trails are a fascinating example of extreme reactions to litter in the countryside. They enact and complicate a number of recurring ideas about the countryside that form the basis of this chapter. Perhaps most obviously, they introduce the idea that the presence of litter in the countryside signals some sort of invasion, or at least indicating the presence of strangers. In this case litter is seen as part of the preparations for a full scale enemy invasion in the wider context of the Second World War, and evidence of strangers or people who were not what they appeared to be, living amongst the community. While the realities of this interpretation are questionable, it is perhaps more useful to think of the litter trails as communicating something about the anxiety which the presence of litter in the countryside generates. This anxiety is born out of the idea that litter is out of place in the countryside and that in this way it is related to both outsiders and modernity, most fundamentally it creates anxiety around the anticipated change that both these things might bring.
It is also possible to see these fragments of litter as a form of spatial collage. Litter and collage both stem from over production, the excesses and disposability of mass production generate both collage and littering as cultural practices (O’Reilly 2008: p. 17). Spread out over the Cambridgeshire countryside these brightly coloured shards shine out in contrast to the greens and browns of earth and vegetation, creating a contrasting jolt that is not unlike the shocks Benjamin saw montage capable of providing as a medium for representing modernity. Benjamin said of the Dadaists’ incorporation of litter in to their artworks ‘the tiniest fragment of everyday life says more than painting. Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text’ (Benjamin [1934] 1970: p. 90). These fragments of a different reality have the power to disrupt a smooth rendering of any narrative, be it the illusionistic art works of which Benjamin is critical, or the illusion of the rural as being safe, stable and outside of modernity.
That the litter trail material may have come to rest in the Mass-Observation archive is perhaps somewhat of an anomaly as it did not result from the activities of the group’s members or observers.6 However, the material certainly belongs in the archive as it indirectly animates many of the methods and concerns of the organisation which are sometimes neglected. In particular engaging with Mass-Observation through these documents accesses the importance of the collage as a methodology for recording the everyday, a way of thinking which was central to the operation of the organisation. In the litter trails we see fragments of litter recorded, collated, and used as evidence of a wider national narrative. In a similar way Mass-Observation itself sought to access the mass feelings of the nation through the montage of fragments of everyday experience. As this section will detail, it is also possible to see further correspondences between the litter trails material and the concerns of Mass-Observation in their attempts to reconcile artistic and scientific methods of investigation, in their concern with coincidence, and in their attunement to symbolic anxieties.
Mass-Observation officially launched in 1937 with a letter to the New Statesman and Nation announcing the organisation’s aims: primarily the urgent need to develop an anthropological approach to studying British society, an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ (Harrisson et al. 1937). The letter was signed by Charles Madge, a published poet and journalist for the Daily Mirror, Humphrey Jennings, an artist and poet who is most well known for his documentary films made with the GPO film unit, and Tom Harrisson a self-trained anthropologist with a background in ornithology, who had just started working as a mill hand in Bolton in order to study the working class experience.
The three parties approached the project with different concerns. Madge and Jennings were particularly interested in the possibility of using poetic and psychoanalytical methods in the service of social investigation. While Jennings’ involvement with the project was short lived, he was instrumental in instigating collage as a form of investigating and presenting the everyday.7 Whereas Tom Harrisson’s approach owed more to his experience of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Pacific Islands and his interest in methods of participant observation. Such differences in intellectual position and approach makes Mass-Observation a fascinating attempt to try and fuse these two often opposing cultures together. While a geographical as well as ideological split in the organisation between Madge in London and Harrisson in Bolton is often used to characterise the workings of the organisation, it is worth remembering that both parties were to some extent engaging with the interface between art and science. Madge and Jennings were attempting to use aspects of surrealism as a form of social science, and Harrisson’s more traditionally anthropological study of Bolton included contributions from the artists William Coldstream and Julian Trevelyan (Hubble 2006: p. 7). It is the early work of the organisation, particularly that carried out by Madge and Jennings that has the most interesting relationship with the litter trail material, and which is the primary focus of this section.
Prior to meeting with Harrisson, Madge and Jennings, together with a small group of artists and writers in Blackheath, had already been exploring ideas around how to capture what they called ‘mass wish-situations’ (Madge 1937) or the thoughts, feelings and experiences of the nation.8 They framed their enquiry into the everyday using elements of psychoanalytic theory, stating that what they were trying to observe and record was ‘so repressed that only what is admitted to be a first class upheaval brings them to the surface’ (Madge 1937: p. 12). Madge and Jennings argued that poetic rather than purely scientific methods might be the key to accessing this region. Outlining the development of an anthropology which would yield meaningful results when applied to the study of the home nation Madge wrote that:
Fieldwork, i.e. the collection of evidence of mass wish-situations has otherwise to proceed in a far more roundabout way than the anthropologist has been accustomed to in Africa or Australia. Clues to these situations may turn up in the popular phenomenon of the ‘Coincidence’. In fact it is probable that in the ultra repressed condition of our society they can only materialise in this form, so mysterious in appearance (Madge 1937: p. 12).
In the context of Mass-Observation it seems the idea of coincidence can be thought of in two similar but slightly nuanced ways. Firstly, Madge refers to the influence of Freud’s work in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in which parapraxes (slips of the tongue or pen, misreadings, errors and forgetting things) act as evidence of repressed fears, desires or memories surfacing in everyday actions (Freud 1975 [1901]). Such errors, are not only evidence of repressed thoughts but are actually caused by their wilful re-emergence through sub-conscious behaviour. An example of how this idea fed into their investigations can be seen in their interest in newspapers as active venues for coincidence. From this changed perspective the newspaper sheet itself becomes a collaged mass of visual and symbolic imagery with numerous apparently unconnected stories presented side by side. Madge describes how the coincidence of fragments of stories which make up the front page of a newspaper could be read as a different form of text ‘Humphrey Jennings and I had been noticing the way in which the items on a newspaper page, especially the front page, added up to make a kind of poem – or so we interpreted it’ (Madge quoted in Marcus 2001: p. 6). This led them to look for connections, coincidences and moments where these daily forms of communication might symbolically register the temperature of the nation. One of these moments came with the Abdication of Edward VIII followed by the destruction of Crystal Palace:
… when the papers were full of Edward and Mrs Simpson we saw them as in part an expression of mass wishes and fantasies, and were on the look out for other symbolic news-material that might be related to them. At the end of November the Crystal Palace was burned down, and the flames were visible from 6 Grotes Buildings [the headquarters of Mass-Observation in Blackheath] as a distant glow in the sky: the shock that this seemed to evoke at a symbolic level was perhaps akin to the shock that the abdication crisis bought to our stable monarchy (Madge 1937: p. 12).
Here we see the interconnection of fragments or coincidences, revealing what might be thought of as a mass subconscious. This is an example that introduces the idea that the psychological effects of a national crisis might be registered or enacted visually in other ways. In this case the fire stands in for the shock of the perceived instability of previously unquestioned national institutions that was caused by the abdication crisis. In the case of the litter trails the coincidence of pieces of litter in the landscape, begin to stand in for, to become evidence of another form of national crisis: the threat of invasion. A psychoanalytic perspective can also come into play here, with the idea that the mass anxieties of a nation at war, are manifested through the obsessive recording of fragments of litter.
The second reading of how coincidence was important for Mass-Observation is in its association with simultaneity. For Mass-Observation any form of mass consciousness needed to be alert to the heterogeneity of ‘the mass’. This meant that a picture of mass desires, opinions or experiences need to be based on multiple and simultaneous voices. This approach is particularly evident in the first full scale Mass-Observation publication May the Twelfth (1937), in which Madge and Jennings worked to provide a picture of the events around the coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937. The book contained day surveys from the national panel of observers.9 In addition mobile observers were sent to report their experiences on the streets of London in shifts which covered the full 24 hours around the event. Leaflets were also distributed amongst the crowds asking ‘WHERE WERE YOU ON MAY 12? MASS-OBSERVATION WANTS YOUR STORY’ (Jennings and Madge 1937: p. 89). The book also includes a substantial section at the beginning which performs an extensive newspaper survey in the run up to the coronation, consisting of extracts demonstrating the extensive if sometimes eccentric or controversial preparations for the day that were reported in the national and local press. The publication is endlessly quotable and full of vivid description of how the day was lived by many different people. I hesitate to single out any particular accounts for quotation as it seems this would be against the spirit of the endeavour which was indeed to evoke the multitude, each one of their fragmentary accounts building a kaleidoscopic depiction of the populous which pivots around this extraordinary set of events.
The litter trail material is unusual in the archive as it did not result from a directive issued by the organisation, nor were its authors part of the volunteer observer panel. It resides with the material on wall chalkings (graffiti) that was collected by Mass-Observation in 1940.10 The collection of such material speaks of Mass-Observation’s concern with not only the detail of the everyday but in finding ways in which public opinion might be communicated through alternative channels. The walls of the city have often been a place where the disenfranchised can express their voices, and recording slogans and messages chalked or painted onto walls could be seen as an effective way of gauging mass feeling. Given the timing of this project, much of the street graffiti was to do with war time figures and policies, including slogans such as ‘End England’s Shame Demand a Second Front Now!’ and ‘Mosely is a Rat’ (TC41/1/A).11 However, a comprehensive report on the Fulham area also notes: faces, cricket stumps, arrows, dartboards, scoreboards, hearts and swastikas amongst the wall chalkings, and goes on to detail notes and doodles found in telephone boxes and in public lavatories (many of which are carefully drawn in the report). This desire to record not only substantial pieces of graffiti but also minor doodles in phone boxes and toilet cubicles relates to the idea that a certain mass sub-conscious might come to light through the collection and examination of the fragmented textures of the city. Kathleen Raine (one of the original Blackheath group) wrote of the idea that hidden and fleeting aspects of the everyday might be captured by attending to the forgotten fabric of the city and reading it as a text:
We hoped to discern on the surface of dingy walls, on advertisement hoardings, or written upon the worn stones of pavements, or in the play of light and shadow cast by some street-lamp upon puddles at the corner of a shabby street, traces of the beautiful, degraded, dishonoured, suffering, but still the deus absconditus (Raine quoted in Marcus 2000: p. 15).12
Perhaps with this approach in mind the initial pamphlet issued by Mass-Observation lists ‘Litter on the streets’ (Madge and Harrisson 1937: p. 49) amongst a selection of possible topics for study that had been suggested by the panel of observers. While this idea was never formed into a directive, litter has made its way into the archive in other forms. In accounts of the London streets in May the Twelfth litter is both metaphorically and literally an underlying presence. In describing the aftermath of the celebrations the editors add a long footnote about the many and various ways that paper has played a role in the day, from bunting to improvised shelters from the inclement weather (Madge and Jennings 1937: p. 145). They note the idea that throughout the day the rain combined with the movement of people has broken all these preparations – these paper goods, down into a mush that now litters the streets an inch deep. They even suggest that the abundance of paper everywhere affected the sale of special issues of newspapers produced with haste in order to report and commemorate the event. It was as if people were so surrounded by paper based debris that they couldn’t bear to introduce more of it into the street by purchasing a newspaper. In a fascinating essay Steven Connor (2001: p. 57) sees the mush of paper underfoot as being symbolic of the mass-conscious that Madge and Jennings were trying to access, and that the figure of the periscope (a large number of which were sold on the streets to enable spectators to get a better view) can be thought of as the individual raising themselves above the crowd in order to add their personal perspective to the mix. Connor neatly points out the inter-related nature of the two figures – the paper mush and the periscope, the crowd and the individual – as the periscopes were made of cardboard (pulped paper). The image of a mass of spectators all viewing the event through fragmented shards of mirror either encased in the cardboard periscope, or as some did on small mirrors brought from home, adds a vivid enactment of the importance of fragmentation and simultaneity in Madge and Jennings’ ideas about how to represent a mass-consciousness.
While a systematic study of the litter on the streets never became part of a Mass-Observation directive, it was realised with a different intention by the litter trail investigators. A letter from Mass-Observation reveals the connection between their wall chalkings project and the litter trails documents. The connection is Mr John Parker MP, General Secretary of the Fabian Society and chairman of a committee interested in the possible activities of fifth columnists. In the summer of 1940 he had a piece published in the socialist weekly newspaper the Tribune, in which he raised concerns about the use of wall chalkings as a form of communication between enemy agents. This was a topic which had reached a level of general concern at this time and an order from the War Office had been issued to the Local Defence Volunteers (Home Guard) to look out for markings on telegraph poles (TC41/1/A). Tom Harrisson heard about Parker’s interest in this material and wrote to him:
We regularly collect this material in Bolton and Fulham, and if you would be interested to have some sort of base line for normal activities of this sort established, we might be able to help you. It is particularly easy to confuse ‘doodling’ with deliberate designs? [sic] And there is an easy mysticism in random numbers (TC41/1/A).
At this point Mass-Observation under the leadership of Harrisson was now working for the Home Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Information. The techniques Mass-Observation had developed for the detailed study of public opinion were seen by government organisations to be of ideological use to the war effort, an affiliation that troubled Madge and eventually led to his departure from the group in 1940 (Highmore 2002: p. 77). Initially one of the motivating factors for Mass-Observation was a feeling that the people were denied access to what they called ‘the facts’ (Madge and Harrisson 1937: p. 47) by a press which neither expressed the opinions of the electorate, nor adequately communicated the debates or policies of the elected leaders. There was also concern about the ever widening gap or ‘gulf of ignorance’ as it was described, between the ruling and the working classes (Calder and Sheridan 1985: p. 3). Mass-Observation aimed to gather information about the everyday lives of ordinary people and their opinions and relay them back to the public in as accessible a manner as possible. Working for the Ministry of Information was contrary to these aims, and compromised its independence.
Less than two months before Harrisson’s letter, John Parker had also been contacted by M.P. Charlesworth, Fellow and President of St. John’s college, Cambridge and one of the academics involved in the litter trail investigations. Charlesworth had read Parker’s piece in the Tribune and, after unfruitful attempts at attracting the attention of the authorities, hoped that he might be interested in their findings. Charlesworth sent Parker the reports compiled by Lethbridge Observations upon Unusual Phenomena noted in the Cambridge District, June–August 1940 and Litter Trails (TC41/1/A). It seems Parker was interested in the material and replied by return of post, however no more correspondence on the subject is in evidence and what happened next, if anything remains a mystery. Lethbridge’s reports, however, make fascinating reading and it is here that the connection between wall chalkings and litter becomes evident.
The reports disclose that when the Home Guard were ordered to look out for markings on telegraph poles, strange drawings which seemed to be working in conjunction with carefully placed bits of litter were discovered. On closer inspection, observers became increasingly concerned about the unusually large amounts of litter in locations around the Cambridgeshire countryside. The tone of Lethbridge’s report, which it is worth quoting at length shows both his fixation with applying logical method to what might easily be regarded as paranoiac fantasy and reflects current feelings about littering at the time:
Now it is of course obvious that the British are one of the filthiest races where litter is concerned; they do not hesitate to scatter paper of all kinds broadcast everywhere. From this it follows that verges of all kinds in the lowlands have a varying amount of old paper, cigarette cartons, etc. lying upon them. This litter however is proportional to the amount of traffic upon the road in question, and tends to be much more concentrated at bus stops or any place where people wait. It is perfectly easy to observe a distinction between the quantity of litter to be expected on the sides of a main road with heavy traffic upon it and that on the verges of a by-road or cart track. When the quantity upon such a by-road or cart track is far in excess of the normal amount observed on a main road some other explanation than ‘love tokens’ or ‘Acts of God’ is necessary (TC41/1/A).
It was not just the quantity of litter which aroused suspicion; it seemed that much of the litter had already been already been pierced by a litter collector’s spike and redistributed. The presence of items such as bus tickets from Birmingham also indicated, as Lethbridge puts it ‘that litter collected in towns has been placed in the countryside’ (TC41/1/A). As has already been shown with reference to Jack (2005), the movement of litter from the town to the countryside is a recurring theme. In this case it indicates the idea that the relatively rural Cambridgeshire district would not have been capable of generating the amount of litter needed to produce the reported litter trail phenomena, it therefore being necessary to import litter from the city, where it is of course abundant. The assumption that extra litter is needed, inscribes the binary notions that I will be exploring further in the chapter, specifically that the countryside does not make its own litter, but essentially suffers the litter of others, and that litter is particularly out of place in the countryside, in this case it seemed to literally ‘belong’ in the metropolis of Birmingham.
In addition to the out of place-ness of this litter and its unusual quantity, strange assemblages were also reported. These included ‘cigarette cartons pegged up on sticks’, ‘small heaps of stones and sharpened sticks’ ‘two gold flake packets both cut and torn’, and brightly coloured cigarette cartons ‘often mutilated or defaced in certain definite ways, viz. corners torn or cut off, long slits and holes roughly square or oblong, neatly cut out’ (TC41/1/A). The voluntary team of observers mapped the location of each occurrence. An exercise which appeared to show that the litter was marking trails which if followed would allow access to military installations in the area avoiding local defence posts and main roads.13
The documents show that Lethbridge was quite clearly convinced that these instances of litter in the countryside were the work of fifth columnists preparing the way for a military invasion. He states that ‘we maybe fairly confident that we are observing the handiwork of traitors’ (TC41/1/A). Of course Lethbridge was well aware of the apparently fanciful nature of his theory, where scraps of throw away rubbish stand in for a full scale enemy offensive. This is obvious in his endless justifications and refutations of any idea that the appearance of these litter trails could be put down to the activities children, tramps, boy scouts or lovelorn locals. He states that, ‘it should be remembered that, if we are right in thinking that these phenomena are due to enemy agents, that is precisely the effect that they are probably intending to produce. Anyone who is not on the lookout will regard it as just simply untidy litter’ (TC41/1/A).
There is much to suggest that these were indeed litter trails laid for nefarious purposes, for instance, the presence of military grid points in some of the drawings found scribbled close to the litter, and reports that leaving trails of cigarette cards had been a military tactic used in Flanders (TC41/1/A). However, the trails were dismissed by the authorities. John Parker MP, in his correspondence with those investigating the litter trails wrote ‘[we] have found great difficulty inducing Scotland Yard to take action, as they regard the matter of little importance’ (TC41/1/A) and of course no invasion took place. Although it is possible to argue that an invasion attempt was foiled by the discovery and subsequent destruction of the trails. Lethbridge concludes his report:
We are strongly of the opinion that plans had been made to aid some kind of hostile immigration in the neighbourhood of Cambridge about the beginning of July, and that this came to nothing … It seems probable that we are still finding the arrangements which were made in preparation for an invasion which has been deferred and it may be thought there is no need to do anything further about it. To this the answer is that the people who made these arrangements are still with us, and are capable of making others at a suitable moment (TC41/1/A).
A chilling finale, which reminds us that this litter has been dropped by a dangerous form of outsider: enemy agents posing as locals, or perhaps even more disturbing, members of the community who were in fact traitors.
This is in fact a very rural narrative. All the locations in which litter trails were observed were in the countryside which in itself reveals some ideas about the different characteristics of litter in the country and in the city. The idea that perhaps litter trails as a method of communication would not have been practicable in the city shows that we think of the city as a place perhaps so replete with litter that specially laid trails would be invisible amongst the existing detritus, whereas in the countryside the trails would stand out as there is less litter, and more of a contrast in the surroundings. Perhaps conversely it also shows that there is an acceptance that there is enough litter in the countryside for the trails not to look entirely out of place. It also reveals an assumption that litter in the city might be moved or swept along either by a municipal employee or by the general flux of people, transport and the localised currents of the city. Whereas in the country there is an assumption of less movement, and fewer people meaning that that litter will remain relatively stationary, it will stay where it is dropped until it is broken down by the weather.
The figure of the ‘outsider’ in these debates is ever present. The geographical other, for example the figure of the urbanite sprinkling litter throughout the countryside, is a habitual image and will be discussed in the next section of this chapter, but what the litter trails bring to this story is the idea of the metaphorical ‘outsider’ actually being an insider, a local, who secretly stands in ideological opposition to the mainstream, whether it be in terms of the morality and meanings of dropping litter or in their foundational political principles (i.e. wartime traitors). Lethbridge surmises that the litter trails must have been left by ‘not only aliens or naturalized aliens, but also natives, who for any reason are discontented with their position or prospects or who may be honestly convinced that our country needs purging and a different form of government’ (TC41/1/A). In this story we see litter as evidence of illicit activities taking place, enacted by residents of the countryside. Litter becomes evidence of a parallel world with different values.
Andrew Biswell (2009) has written that the litter trail investigations could be seen in the context of the popular enthusiasm for detective and spy stories of the time, citing many examples of tales of infiltration and treachery. Particularly relevant is Graham Greene’s Short story The Lieutenant Died Last, which was made into the film Went the Day Well? (1942). It tells the chilling tale of the vanguard of a German invasion team, infiltrating an English village by impersonating British troops, an operation which is facilitated by the village squire who is revealed to be a German spy. Biswell argues that ‘What might look at first glance like a paranoid over-interpretation turns out to have its roots in the common belief, largely created by novelists and poets, that a vast network of foreign agents were everywhere’ (2009: p. 27). While feelings of anxiety were obviously heightened at this point in time and were undoubtedly both fuelled and reflected by cultural production, it is also necessary to situate this reaction to litter trails as part of a wider story of anxiety about the disruption of order, which has been enacted through reactions to litter in the countryside from the early years of the twentieth century.
This anxiety around disruption or change in what is assumed as an eternal English countryside can be seen by adding another film to the set of references proposed by Biswell: Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944). A parable of the ancient and modern in the English countryside which combines the trope of unnerving hidden activities with almost surreal events, set against a bucolically patriotic image of England, signified by the ancient landscape of Kent and Canterbury Cathedral. Made and set during the war, it is the story of two soldiers and a land girl who arrive in the small Kent town of Chillingbourne late one night. As they make their way from the station to the town hall in the black-out darkness the land girl becomes the latest victim of the ‘Glue Man’, whose trademark is to pour the sticky substance into the hair of girls who have come to work in the area. The trio involve themselves in attempting to uncover the identity of the ‘Glue Man’ who is finally revealed to be the local magistrate and erstwhile head of the town. His actions are motivated by a hostility to one of the most recent changes brought about by the war: women performing the roles traditionally occupied by men.
In addition to revealing evidence of a parallel world of activities and beliefs taking place in the countryside and their role in revealing anxieties around change, the litter trails also demonstrate a synecdochical structuring that runs throughout these discussions of litter, where a specific countryside location – in this case the Cambridgeshire countryside – stands in for the nation as a whole, and the litter fragment stands in for something much bigger and more important, on this occasion an enemy invasion. Fundamentally the story shows that narratives around litter and by extension other overlooked aspects of the everyday, are often denigrated and thought of as unimportant, however the habits, reactions and relationships which they engender point to a much wider significance.
The next area I want to examine, is how anxieties about litter reflect worries about the relationship between town and country. It explores how objects (litter) and people become designated as being in the wrong place and how maintaining the disorder has been conceptualised in terms of national identity.
One of the first campaigns against litter in the countryside was initiated by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) in 1928. The campaign can be seen as a response to the opening up of the countryside at this time as a space of leisure. Significant developments in transport such as the construction of railway branch lines and the increasing use of automobiles and charabancs (early motorised buses) made it much more appealing for urban dwellers to travel to the countryside at the weekend. In fact access to countryside at this time not only became desirable but was seen by many as a right, one that was fervently exercised by the often politically aligned walking clubs that were a feature of this time. In the same year that the CPRE’s anti-litter campaign began, the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) was established as a nationwide organisation with an emphasis on walking. It joined the already multiple regional hiking groups, and in 1930 the Youth Hostel Association was formed to provide low cost accommodation for hikers (Solnit 2002: p. 164). In 1932 this new found right to the countryside was tested when the famous mass trespass, organised by the BWSF, took place on the Kinder Scout peak in Derbyshire, as a part of a campaign to open up access to footpaths fenced off by landowners. The trespass resulted in violence and arrests, but succeeded in strengthening the cause for free access to the countryside.14
The Shell Guides, as detailed in Chapter 2, were a product of this enthusiasm for exploration of the countryside. Here the Derbyshire guide describes a typical weekend in the Peak District:
The Peak in summer is extremely popular with young men and women of the industrial towns; it is positively yellow with their nether garments. If you dislike these people you had better spend your week-end in the mud-bath at Smedley’s than on Kinder Scout. Aesthetically, the Peak is grand enough to stand any number of them and any amount of their litter (Hobhouse 1935: p. 46).
This vivid image presents the walkers not only as bringers of litter as but as human litter themselves, with their yellow nether garments adorning the countryside like a mass produced version of Wordsworth’s daffodils. This is striking in contrast to the private motorist who might opt for the spa treatment at Smedley’s as a more luxurious and fittingly private health giving leisure pursuit.15
The CPRE’s campaign was not only directed towards walkers and motorists, but those seen as more of a scourge: the picnicker. Often arriving en masse from nearby cities, charabanc parties are represented as the urban working class at their worst. In Landscape and Englishness, David Matless frames the presence of working class city dwellers in the countryside as a kind of ‘cultural trespass’ (Matless 1998: p. 67), and that in this tension the city dweller was often cast ‘as a cultural grotesque, signifying a commercial rather than industrial working class whose leisure is centred around consumption and display’ (Matless 1998: p. 68). These visitors were seen as uneducated or disrespectful in their treatment of the countryside and were blamed for a significant increase in littering. CPRE commentator C.E.M. Joad wrote that they leave the land ‘so covered with paper after the last of the charabanc parties have left that those ignorant of the tastes and habits of Englishmen on holiday would have imagined a convolution of nature in the shape of a summer snowstorm’ (Joad 1937: p. 72). This statement aligns the visitors with something that is against the natural order – ‘a convolution of nature’.
This hostile position is, however, complicated by Joad’s insistence on the countryside as a right. His negative comments about city dwelling tourists’ use of the countryside come from an essay entitled ‘The People’s Claim’ in which he asserts that ‘the people’ have a right to access the countryside and that littering along with other countryside faux pas such as leaving gates open and picking wild flowers should be tackled through education rather than exclusion. In the tone of a benevolent patriarch he argues that the bad behaviour of the “common man” must be tolerated in the hope that through time, education, and exposure to the supposed civilizing properties of thecountryside, it will right itself: ‘the only way to create good taste and good manners is to provide occasions for their exercise and to persist in providing them despite their abuse’ (Joad 1937: p. 75).
In some cases, such as the Women’s Institute (WI) campaigns detailed below, it was the countryside residents who were expressing concern, but in many cases those who lived in popular countryside destinations were able to take full economic advantage of the increasing number of visitors to the regions – this does not of course mean that they welcomed the litter these visitors brought. However, many of the most vocal commentators at this time were metropolitan intellectuals or activists, who saw themselves as custodians rather than residents of the countryside.
The anxieties about litter and by extension about the new leisure class should also be seen in the context of other technological and cultural changes which were recasting the rural as a site of modernity. At this time the CPRE were also protesting against new housing developments, electricity pylons and advertising hoardings which were appearing throughout the countryside. The 1930s recorded the greatest annual losses of land to urban use. Local council legislation was not sufficiently effective at this time at preventing development, meaning that agricultural land could be bought cheaply and built upon. At the same time growing transport links meant that, urban dwellers were not just able to visit the countryside at the weekends, but increasingly they were choosing to live outside major conurbations and commute (Rogers 1989: p. 97).
Anti-litter campaigns have continued to the present day through the activities of the Keep Britain Tidy organisation.16 Initiated in 1954 by the Women’s Institute (a social and campaigning organisation for rural women), The Keep Britain Tidy Group was originally a reaction against litter in the countryside, although as the group developed it began to include members with more urban interests. The passion with which the WI expressed themselves on the matter speaks of the outrage that litter in the countryside can provoke. At the WI’s 1954 AGM a motion was passed to create the Keep Britain Tidy Group:
That this meeting requests the National Federation of Women’s Institutes Executive Committee to inaugurate a campaign to preserve the countryside against desecration by litter of all kinds, and urges every member of the WI to make it a personal matter to mitigate this evil (NFWI Archive 1954b: p. 123).
The idea that the countryside could be ‘desecrated’ by the ‘evil’ of litter is one that reveals the connection between the British landscape, and national and religious identity. An association which was at the heart of the WI organisation, perhaps most vividly demonstrated by the adoption of the hymn Jerusalem as their anthem, in which landscape, Christianity and nation are tied together in its lyrics:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green
And was the holy lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen? (Blake 1804: p. 2).17
The KBT group sought to access feelings of patriotism through both its linguistic and visual rhetorics. Its early posters made use of national emblems seemingly indicating that action against litter was every citizen’s duty. Plates 3 and 4 show Britannia on her chariot and the English lion, both transformed into litter pickers. The lion squashes a piece of collaged newspaper into a litter bin whilst flying the union flag from his tail, while Britannia is transmuted into a male street sweeper armed with broom rather than trident. The thrust of such images would seem to be that litter bugs are in essence traitors, a visual echo of the relationship between litter and patriotism developed through the litter trail documents.
The use of the word ‘tidy’ in the campaign’s name is perhaps a strange choice. It is more of an indoor word, a domestic word, the idea of tidying your living room is more apposite than the idea of tidying the street or the footpath. It has the effect of domesticating the outdoors, turning the countryside into a living room and encouraging the application of the same feelings of ownership to the communal space of the country as you might feel towards the private space of the domestic. The privileging of tidiness as the preferred aesthetic relates to Lowenthal’s (1994) emphasis on the importance of order in conceptualisations of the countryside (detailed in Chapter 1). This is a notion of order that is played out not only in terms of stewardship of the countryside but also with regard to maintaining social order: everybody as well as everything should be in its place. Edensor interestingly points out that this aesthetic has also been rigorously adopted by the National Trust in the organisation’s quest to represent an essence of the English countryside as neat and tidy (Edensor 2002: p. 41).
This idea of domestication may also relate to gender. Much of the documentation shows those involved in the co-ordination and the hard graft of litter picking to be women and children. Of course the Women’s Institute members played a large role in the efforts of the KBT organisation, but earlier examples also bear out these gendered roles, for instance a newspaper article from 1930, covering a litter pick in the New Forest in Hampshire, reports that it was girl guides mobilised by female members of local gentry (Lady Montagu of Beaulieu and Lady Frankfort) who were responsible for recovering ‘some 70 sacks, bulging with scraps of paper and the relics of careless picnic parties’ (The Times 1930). There are a number of significant things to draw from this, firstly and most obviously that tidying and keeping things clean fits into the traditional spectrum of women’s work, and the vocabulary used in the campaigns situates this activity in the domestic realm. Related to this is the idea that women have a different relationship with the abject, their traditional role as mothers and carers, is often characterised by a closer relationship with bodily materials, blood, vomit, excreta. Essentially they are aligned with an aptitude for dealing with abject and contaminated material. The high proportion of involvement of women in these activities has also placed the removal of litter from the countryside in the voluntary realm, rather than in the public/paid sphere which to some extent it inhabits in urban locations with the paid role of the municipal street sweeper, characterised in Plate 3.
It is therefore interesting to view this subject in relation to Gillian Rose’s arguments that the landscape has been consistently gendered as female in the discipline of geography and in representations throughout art history (Rose 1993: pp. 86–112). Many writers have also made the argument that while nature is gendered as female, culture – that which invades the landscape – is gendered as male (for extensive bibliography see Taylor 1994: p. 207). The development of this binary opposition covers everything from the male gaze of knowledge and ownership, to the forces of capitalism exploiting and despoiling a feminised and therefore subservient space. It is interesting to see a form of visual re-enactment of these symbolic repetitions in an archival photograph from the KBT campaign, showing members of the WI forming a defensive (albeit smiling) barricade, literally barring the way into the landscape beyond (Figure 3.4).
3.4 Image from Women’s Institute Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, c.1955. Courtesy of Keep Britain Tidy.
So far this chapter has explored the relationship between litter, order and ownership. Litter is synonymous with disorder and therefore runs contrary to the narrative of order that is a necessary part of the conceptualisation of the countryside. The anxieties around litter can be related to anxieties about disruption of order in the countryside, be that in terms of different people accessing the space (tourists, new residents, or even enemy invaders), or new things, signs of modernity (new housing, roads, power stations, advertisements). Essentially these anxieties could be characterised as a fear of pollution. Edensor has shown how idealised portrayals of the countryside (such as the magazine This England, detailed in Chapter 1) attempt to communicate rural England as a space of purity, uncomplicated by things that don’t fit in with an easy rendering of the rural scene, such as agribusiness, housing estates, television aerials and parked cars. In this purified national space ‘anything ‘out of place’ stands out as un-English’ (Edensor 2002: p. 43). We have seen that litter in the landscape has been equated with un-English activities in the litter trail documents and in the nationalistic images used by the KBT campaign. Being out of place, or standing out as un-English, also relates to the experiences of many Black and Asian residents of, or visitors to the countryside. This is an aspect of perceived change or disorder in the countryside that can also be related to attitudes towards litter.
A competition was run by the WI to encourage its members to send in inventive ideas in response to the problem of ‘How to cure litter’. One of the favourite ideas was the suggestion that a poster should be made showing ‘A large sow leading her litter into a sty, with the caption: “Please follow the example of this good animal and TAKE YOUR LITTER HOME!”’ (NFWI Archive 1954a: p. 149). Although I can find no evidence of the piggy poster ever having come to fruition, the slogan became central to the WI’s campaign, although in the slightly amended form ‘Please Take Litter Home’ as seen in Figure 3.4. This phrasing has since become widely used in the anti-litter lexicon, and the ‘your’ is not always omitted as in recent example in Figure 3.5.
This statement works from the assumption that your home is elsewhere – that you are not at home in the countryside. The apparently polite request, barely conceals its undertones of hostility. When considered in conjunction with the WI respondent’s conflation of the two meanings of litter as brood or off-spring as well as rubbish, then the idea of taking your litter home, becomes newly connected to the idea of people and their families being ‘invited’ to return home, a dimension that opens up questions about access to the countryside not only in terms of class, which as we have seen was the concern of C.E.M. Joad and campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s, but also ethnicity.
3.5 Litter sign in Avebury, Wiltshire, 2010.
This could be seen in the context of Britain as undergoing radical changes in terms of immigration during the 1950s.18 However, exclusion of black and Asian people from the countryside is still very much a current area of debate. Sarah Neal and Julian Agyeman’s collection of essays subtitled Ethnicity, Nation and Exclusion in Contemporary Rural Britain (2006), explores racism in the countryside and extends the idea of what constitutes the ethnic outsider with an examination of New Age Traveller and Gypsy communities’ experiences in rural Britain. The work of photographer Ingrid Pollard is a key visual mapping of outsider subjectivity in the British landscape. For over 20 years she has used the conventions of landscape and portrait photography, to articulate the complex experiences of belonging and un-belonging as a black British woman. Her most cited work Pastoral Interlude (1987) was made in the Lake District and is comprised of self portraits in the landscape overlayed with stream of consciousness statements which reveal her feelings of conspicuous discomfort and trepidation. In the same year as Pollard was walking and photographing in the Lakes, V.S. Naipaul published The Enigma of Arrival (2002 [1987]), a novel which in part enacts the author’s immigration from Trinidad and Tobago and the process of re-constructing a home and identity through the landscape and stories of a rural Wiltshire village. In 2004 a report by the Commission for Racial Equality showed that although ethnic minorities make up 8 per cent of the UK population they represented just 1 per cent of visitors to the countryside. Then chairman of the Commission, Trevor Phillips, suggested that a form of ‘passive apartheid’ existed in the British countryside (BBC 2004). The report, perhaps predictably, sparked a wave of protest from rural residents with many newspapers interviewing black and Asian residents of rural communities for their views on the subject, most often recounting positive experiences (Smith 2004; Carlin 2004). The subject seems to return on an annual basis, being re-visited in Sunday magazine features each summer, just as city dwellers begin to hanker after the wide green spaces of the countryside. For example the Sunday Times profiled a mixed race family’s move to the small town of Lewes in Sussex, and the instances of racism the encountered there (James Smith 2010). In the previous year the same publication ran a headline ‘Is the Countryside Racist’ on the cover of the magazine linked to an article by Sathnam Sanghera, on efforts by the National Parks to encourage visitors from ethnic minorities (Sanghera 2009).
The visual rhetorics of the anti-litter campaigns made it possible to make the connection between inorganic ‘rubbish’ and unwanted others in the countryside. They also demonstrate that maintaining order ‘keeping things tidy’ is a mark of belonging and ownership of a space. The next section complicates this idea by re-thinking litter in the countryside not as being brought in by visitors but as being the product of activities of residents. Furthermore that it is the leaving of litter that asserts ownership rather than the act of tidying it up. I want to make this shift through an examination of the work of British artist Stephen Willats.
Stephen Willats is an artist who uses the everyday as his material. Since the early 1960s he has made work which investigates and documents societal structures, codes of communication, and relationships between people and the places in which they live. His practice is framed by urban experience and is often the result of collaboration with the residents of inner city housing estates and tower blocks.
My reading of his work as it contributes to this chapter on litter, focuses on Willats’ projects on pieces of waste ground and footpaths and their use by residents of the surrounding area. Specifically his work Dangerous Pathway (1999), which unusually for Willats takes a semi-rural/semi-urban footpath as its location. This work is important for thinking about the non-metropolitan everyday because in line with Willats’ other projects it shows this non-metropolitan space as an everyday site of codes of control and strategies of resistance. What it contributes to this chapter is a disruption of the persistent association of litter with outsiders or visitors that was explored in the previous sections, and complicates the relationship between feelings of ownership and littering.
Stephen Willats is part of a generation of young artists who in the 1950s and 1960s rejected the traditional modes of art making with which they were presented in favour of developing an art practice concerned with mapping processes and behaviours. At this time traditional modes of artistic approach were still very much focused on the idea of the artist as a sole producer and that the production of art was essentially a personal journey, relatively unconcerned with the role of the audience. Willats and his contemporaries – artists and teachers such as Roy Ascot, Brian Eno and Gustav Metzer, founded an approach that was grounded in interaction with audiences. For Willats the primary audience of the work was simultaneously involved in its creation. This is particularly true of the work conducted with residents of housing estates in which the results of questionnaires and other forms of research collected by the artist would be displayed and the residents responses would inform and become part of the next stage of the work.
Willats was a student on the Groundcourse at Ealing College of Art, which was a form of foundation course developed by Roy Ascott in the early 1960s. Ascott was particularly interested in the science of cybernetics and its emphasis on process and mapping informed his structuring of the course (Mason 2008: p. 56). The influential writer on cybernetics W. Ross Ashby, drawing on the formulation put forward in a seminal text by Norbert Weiner, characterised cybernetics as ‘the science of control and communication’ (Ashby 1964: p. 1). It is the study of behaviours and processes rather than things or objects, which means it can be used across disciplines to map processes involved in complex systems. Ashby states that what is most important about cybernetics is its ability to conceive of complex systems with simultaneous multiple variables. Such thinking mirrored the turn away from objects and towards processes or concepts taking place in the development of conceptual art practices at this time. Cybernetics provided a framework for thinking about society as an infinitely variable machine operating within certain structures of control and methods of communication.
The Groundcourse became an experimental form of art education in which the emphasis was put on developing theoretical frameworks using mapping systems and drawings, rather than traditional standalone art objects. There was a collaborative approach between staff and students, disrupting the notion of art as a singular process of personal exploration. The focus throughout was on relationships and networks. Subsequently continuing this collaboration into multi-disciplinary practice, Willats formed working relationships with scientists, mathematicians, architects and advertising creatives (Obrist 2009). Ascott, with whom Willats later worked at Ipswich Civic College, emphasised the idea that ‘art could become a powerful force for change in society and believed that the artist should be conscious of the didactic and social role of art’ (Mason 2008: p. 58). This notion of combining scientific and artistic methods for experimental social investigation echoes the early experiments of Mass-Observation discussed earlier in this chapter. Willats’ work continues to reflect this foundational training in thinking about society as a set of systems, and his interest in investigating how people and communities work within or react against such systems, is key to his practice, as is a multi-disciplinary approach which draws on cybernetics, information theory, sociology and anthropology.
An example of how societal systems and structures inform Willats’s practice can been seen in his attention to how local systems and practices are formed by the physical architecture in which communities are contained. It is significant that his training and early practice as an artist took place against the backdrop of the grand social planning initiatives of the 1960s which famously changed the non-metropolitan landscape with the development of the large New Town projects, and smaller scale housing developments on the edges of many towns and villages. The ubiquitous concrete tower block was a manifestation of these plans in inner city areas. For many these projects significantly improved housing conditions and there was a utopian feel to them. In its early years the tower block became synonymous with a brighter post war future:
If you’ve been to Notting Hill Gate you’ll know that right outside the station there is a huge tower block and this tower block was a very important cultural symbol in London; it was one of the first and became quite famous. I’d come from the wastelands of west London and for me this building was a fantastic phenomenon and it seemed a sort of signpost to the future in an optimistic way. The building for me at that point was an iconic symbol of a way forward, affecting all different kinds of realms of culture and life and society (Obrist 2009).
Even in this initial atmosphere of optimism Willats began to see the restrictions imposed upon the residents through this new form of architecture:
I noticed that the structure was very segmented. Here was a uniform façade, which was monumental, but on the other side of this monumental façade there was a complex segmented structure containing people’s lives (Obrist 2009).
This attunement to the impositions of modernist architecture has resulted in a body of work over the last 40 years which closely documents the restrictions, interactions and strategies for self organisation and resistance, experienced by individuals and communities in the UK and Continental Europe. Over this time Willats has developed a distinctive aesthetic which, perhaps unsurprisingly given his continued interest in cybernetics and information theory, is characterised by diagrams, flow charts, arrows, maps, photographs, films, essays and interviews. Rather than artworks as such they are the visible products of process-led research developed through interaction with residents.
The work of Stephen Willats may seem to be a strange choice for a study in to the non-metropolitan as so much of what he is known for centres on urban communities and their patterns of living. However, I want to focus on a part of Willats’ practice that reoccurs in many of his pieces, namely his treatment of litter as evidence. Litter has featured in pieces such as The Lurky Place (1978), Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp (1981), Dangerous Pathway (1999) Person to Person, People to People (2007), and Starting Afresh with a Blank Canvas (2007–2008), in which it variously acts as a marker of disenfranchisement, use, resistance and ownership of space. These works are not all strictly studies of urban spaces, but include projects undertaken amongst the New Town architecture of Milton Keynes (Person to Person, People to People) and, as mentioned above, Dangerous Pathway (1999) is a study of a semi-rural footpath. Willats’ work ties litter to structure, and ways of resisting this structure. In this way it reaffirms the statements made at the beginning of this chapter by Douglas (1991[1966]) who identified that the designation of certain materials as dirt reveals fundamental societal structures, and Hawkins (2006) who shows how the practices of identification and disposal of waste repeatedly perform the relationship between the self and the rest of the world. Willats’ approach to litter also develops the themes implicit in the anti-litter campaigns which see litter as a signifier of the disruption of order regarding who inhabits certain spaces.
In the rural anti-litter campaigns detailed in the previous section, litter was always regarded as being dropped by visitors. What is interesting in Willats’ work is that litter is seen as being dropped by residents, a factor which complicates these assumptions around litter in the countryside. To begin with it is useful to think about one of Willats’ more urban surveys of litter The Lurky Place which attempts to map the meanings of litter found on waste ground, close to a housing estate. It is significant that in order to find a discussion of litter dropped by residents rather than visitors it is necessary to turn to an urban practitioner, however the places described by Willats are not exclusively urban and their non-metropolitan equivalents are easy to bring to mind. The Lurky Place centred on a piece of waste ground on the outskirts of West London which was bordered by residential areas and industrial sites. Using the visual methodology that has become a distinctive characteristic of his work, double images linked by a thick black line, Willats pairs an image of a piece of litter with one of the surrounding cityscape, creating a connection between this overlooked material, the land, and by extension the people who use or inhabit it. The litter documented in the piece includes, a squashed aerosol can, a paper target with shot holes in it and a piece of dress material.
Willats sees the litter he found in The Lurky Place as evidence of how the place is used by local residents almost as a zone of resistance. He contends that this place is an unofficial place, and acts as a realm of relative freedom for the inhabitants of this area, where activities and fantasies which are outside work and everyday chores can be exercised. He states that:
The way people’s destinies are largely determined by the dulling routines of their daily lives is contrasted with the freedom of pursuits and interests carried out within ‘The Lurky Place’ (Willats 1978: p. 1).
Perhaps we can all identify a Lurky Place of our own, most likely from childhood or adolescence, and non-metropolitan Lurky Places certainly abound in spaces such as woodland, unused railway lines, abandoned structures and farm land. The Lurky Place becomes an alternative space to everyday life and as Willats sees it, a place to assert individual identity. But what sort of pursuits does this litter signify? Essentially we are talking about drug taking, lighting fires, shooting air rifles, drinking and having sex – Willats also notes that activities as diverse as track bike racing and horse riding are also taking place (Willats 1996: p. 29). One could question if such activities can really be seen as forms of creative resistance? However, Willats argues that it is necessary to shift our perceptions of what might be thought of as anti-social behaviour: ‘the destruction of the environment is not destruction at all, but it is creative; people are simply registering their mark to show they exist. Acts of so-called vandalism as counter-consciousness are no more than anarchistic exhibitions of people’s energies and individualism’ (Willats 1996: p. 28).
The materiality of litter in Lurky places is also interesting. Willats argues that the meaning of objects changes as they pass from the everyday world into this place of festive disorder. In line with the idea that this place provides a space which is counter to dominant mainstream culture, objects brought into the space undergo transformation into an alternative realm. An example of this is glue, a substance which in the everyday world is used for construction and repair, in the Lurky Place is transformed into a drug – a means of communal exuberance and escape (Willats 1996: p. 30). A similar transformation can also be seen happening in places where the results of fly tipping or joy riding are evident, car seats, builder’s rubble and discarded white goods all become components in homemade camps.
In the previous section we saw that anti-litter campaigns aligned the idea of keeping a place tidy i.e. not littering, with taking ownership of that place. This was specifically conducted through advertising campaigns which aligned the countryside with both the nation and the domestic space of the living room, a double construction of ownership. The majority of rural campaigning was directed towards tourists, and it was implied that dropping litter was an act carried out by those who were not residents of the countryside such as urban visitors, or ‘outsiders’ more generally. Willats’ work however complicates this notion by allowing us to think more broadly about litter in the countryside not only being the product of visitors but also of residents. Willats shows that litter can indicate a hidden everyday, a parallel world of perhaps illicit activities which spaces such as this enable to exist; a parallel world where litter can signal ownership, of certain spaces, including rural Lurky places, it is evidence of practices that assert identities and communities that are counter to the mainstream, if only in very temporary ways.
In 1999 Willats employed a similar methodology to examine ideas of litter and ownership in a more rural location. In his piece Dangerous Pathway which consists of a super 8 film and a series of paired photographs, Willats examines a footpath bordered by trees and hedges, a ubiquitous space of the non-metropolitan. This is an in between space which is neither entirely rural nor urban. What it represents is the ordinary everyday bits of countryside, which are usually surprisingly easy to access from many built up areas and speaks of the undecided nature of the non-metropolitan. These bits of countryside are essentially unremarkable and for that reason are frequented by locals, rather than day trippers meaning that the litter found along the footpath can be thought of as being left by residents rather than visitors.
The film is made with a hand held super 8 camera and takes the form of a walk along the footpath, pausing to zoom in on things found along the way, these include bits of litter, but also barbed wire fences, padlocked gates and keep out signs. In the accompanying photographs each aspect that has been focused on in the film is reproduced and paired with an image of various parts of the footpath, presumably the location where the bit of litter or other item of interest was found, although there is no definite indication of this. The pieces of litter Willats came across were a mixture of the usual – crisp packets, junk mail, drinks cans – and the unusual – bits of rope and rubber tubing.
So what makes this pathway dangerous? We’ve seen from the litter trail documents that litter has been recognised as a signal of a very real danger – the threat of invasion. Through the anti-litter campaigns we have also seen how the presence of litter gave an implicit signal of the danger of disrupting established structures of who inhabits the countryside. In this piece there are a number of reasons that the pathway and specifically the presence of litter along it becomes dangerous. The title of the piece may refer to the uncomfortable feeling that the presence of litter can create, this is different from the outraged feeling already discussed in relation to the anti-litter campaigns. This discomfort is more like a form of anxiety as if the presence of the litter evokes some hidden forms of elicit behaviour, giving the pathway an uncertain charge, marking it as having another life removed from the ordinary everyday uses. This anxiety is also tied up with the idea that perhaps you might come upon such dubious activities taking place should you continue along the path. In an unlikely parallel with the activities of the litter trail fifth columnists, anxiety is also caused by the realisation that while this litter has been dropped by residents, the very act of dropping litter marks them as ‘outsiders’ in some way – outsiders who reside within the community, littering might represent a momentary lapse into outsiderness, or a concerted attempt to resist everyday societal norms.
The connection between litter and danger is made explicit in the ‘clean and safe’ policies investigated by Anna Minton in Ground Control (2009). The conflation of the words ‘clean and safe’ creates an opposing phrase in which dirt – and therefore litter, is aligned with danger. Minton’s study demonstrates that urban planners and managers of commercial districts place a high level of importance and significant economic investment on keeping streets, together with shopping and business areas free from litter, in the belief that people/consumers associate litter with crime and therefore feel threatened in places where litter is evident. Encouraging a ‘non-threatening’ experience of place has obvious benefits for both the feel and economic success of residential and commercial districts. However, Minton shows that a high level of litter management often enforced by private firms of security guards, has the subsidiary effect of functioning as a way of managing who uses these spaces. In a similar way that anti-litter campaigns in the countryside were directed at certain groups of visitors, so anti-litter strategies in urban areas are used to control who occupies certain spaces, once again creating human litter. Minton states that:
Clean and Safe is really about far more than safety, its about creating places that are for certain types of people and certain activities and not others. Exclusion is either covert, by making people feel uncomfortable, or overt, by banning them, with the list of undesirables spanning far more than the usual suspects of beggars and the homeless to include groups of young people, old people, political protestors, photographers [and] really anyone who is not there to go shopping (Minton 2009: pp. 45–6).
Enforcing a clean and safe policy allows a space to be kept clear of unwanted people by seeing them as potential creators of litter or other undesirable pollutions.
In terms of its ability to signal enemy invasions, or alternative illicit activities or cultural transgression, litter can be associated with danger. The phrase ‘dangerous pathway’ is more usually associated with coastal paths which are being undermined by erosion and it could be argued that a different form of erosion is taking place here, the erosion of accepted forms of ownership. By depicting barbed wire, fences, padlocks and no trespassing signs, alongside the litter, the pathway becomes an interface between different forms of ownership, the barbed wire of economic ownership and the litter signalling a parallel world of unofficial ownership.
As the litter trails, the Keep Britain Tidy campaigns and the work of Stephen Willats have shown, litter is an agent of disruption. The presence of litter physically and symbolically disorders rural space, and in so doing reveals those assumed orders to be constructions. In World War II, the montage of litter in the countryside punctured idealised notions of the English landscape and revealed a potentially dangerous parallel world of treacherous activity. The vehement reactions against litter perceived to be brought in by visitors to the countryside, as articulated in the anti-litter campaigns, points to constructions of the rural as a pure space, which is outside the various ‘pollutions’ of modernity. Ideas of belonging and un-belonging in this space creates forms of human litter – people perceived to be ‘out of place’. Here ownership of the landscape is exercised through an attitude of defence – tidying is patriotic, littering is once again treacherous.
Just as the litter trails revealed a parallel world of subversive activity, Willats’ projects show how litter can evidence the creation of alternative zones, spaces in which practices take place which run counter to the mainstream and the everyday. In these scenarios it is the leaving of litter, rather than the clearing of it, that signals a conceptual ownership of space.
I referred at the start of this chapter to litter’s ability to pixilate the binary edges between the city and the country, and between the modern and the anti-modern. The idea of pixilation seems appropriate here as it is often seen as a kind of corruption or degradation of an image (much as litter is seen as a corrupting force), but pixilation also makes the boundaries between objects and places less clear. Litter complicates the boundaries between what characterises urban and rural space, and who belongs where.
Modernity is figured in the changes in population and use of the countryside, with which litter has been associated. While the modernising rhetoric of development and preservation is perhaps less overtly evident in this chapter, in comparison to the last, it is possible to see the shadow of these tensions in debates around litter. The preservation of the countryside (and indeed the country as a whole) was enacted by the anti-litter campaigners and litter trail academics. While the changes in use and ownership of rural places which generated much of the anxiety around litter could be seen as a product of development.
So far this book has examined the everyday practices of driving and littering. Through their alignments with modernity, both of these practices are more usually associated with the urban. However, through an examination of visual and archival materials, different stories have emerged which allow them to be re-thought from a rural perspective, in turn showing how the non-metropolitan can be recast as a complex site of modernity. The following chapters focus on practices that are more traditionally embedded in the non-metropolitan, Chapter 4 centres on the activities of Women’s Institute and Chapter 5 examines calendar customs and folk art. These sections perform a slightly different manoeuvre in that rather than re-situating urban practices in a rural narrative (as in Chapters 2 and 3), they think about how these traditionally rural practices might be re-situated in discourses of modernity.
1 Aesthetically this difference can also be seen as belonging to the register of the picturesque rather the sublime. The definition of the picturesque has always incorporated ‘strange sights, and signs of ageing and decay’ with picturesque subjects including old mills, gnarled oaks, well worn paths through fields, sluices covered with moss, backyards filled with junk and ramshackle cabins’(Taylor 1994: p. 265). While Stallabrass’ reef of litter might be sublime, the abandoned shoe in Figure 3.2 could be considered picturesque.
2 This is also the case for other perceived forms of littering in the countryside such as the visual littering of advertising signs detailed with reference to the Shell Guides in Chapter 2.
3 Steven Connor notes that while this definition is widely attributed to Mary Douglas, she did not formulate it, rather she referred to it as an ‘old idea of matter out of place’ (Connor 2011).
4 Litter trail documents show that reports were also being made of litter trails being found in different part of the country, specifically records are made of similar occurrences in Salisbury.
5 T.C. Lethbridge, was a somewhat infamous archaeologist whose many projects include the discovery of ancient hill figures in Wandlebury, Cambridgeshire (Lethbridge 1957), and went on to develop controversial occultist archaeological methods involving using a pendulum to douse for objects (Lethbridge 1976).
6 The documents came to the archive through a connection made by Tom Harrisson with John Parker MP who was concerned with litter trails as a threat to national security at the time.
7 Jennings left Mass-Observation in late 1937 (Hubble 2006: p. 7). His interest in collage as methodology is evident in his later projects such as his posthumously published Pandemonium (1985) which builds a picture of modernity through the collation of fragments of texts. Jennings film Listen to Britain (1942) also employs montages to map the nation.
8 This group included Kathleen Raine a poet and married to Madge; David Gascoyne a poet and writer with an interest in French surrealism; and Stuart Legg who was working with Jennings on the GPO film unit (Highmore 2002: p. 76).
9 Several international examples were also included, which the authors asserted were to provide a ‘control’ measure – a vocabulary more often associated with quantitative scientific methodology, and one that reveals their seriousness in experimenting with collage as a mode of investigation.
10 This is because on some occasions it was believed that the litter trails were being used in conjunction with messages written on walls and gates.
11 TC41/1/A refers to the Mass-Observation Archive Topic Collection: Wall Chalkings (41), Box no.1, File A, which contains the litter trails documents.
12 ‘deus absconditus’ refers to the idea of a hidden God.
13 Artist Tim Brennan remade these maps, for the exhibition English Anxieties (John Hansard Gallery Southampton and Ffottogallery, Chapter, Cardiff, 2009). Brennan used the Isotype visual system developed by Otto Neurath and the Isotype Institute in the 1940s, which was utilised in the Mass-Observation publication Exmore Village (Turner 1947). Brennan’s exhibition and subsequent catalogue also included a fascinating selection of photographs of archival material, which visually enacts the methodology of fragmented and simultaneous accounts used by Madge and Jennings in May the Twelfth (1937).
14 The activism which started with the mass trespasses eventually resulted in the successful passing of The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, which required every council in England to publish maps detailing all the rights of way over the land in its constituency (Solnit 2002: p. 166).
15 Smedley’s Hydro was a famous water spa in Matlock, it closed in 1955 and is now used by Derbyshire county council as County Hall (Peakland Heritage 2011).
16 The KBTG received government funding in the years after its initiation by the WI and eventually became independent from the organisation. In recent years the organisation has been re-branded several times, in 1984 it became the ‘Tidy Britain Group’, in 2001 it became ENCAMS, which was short for Environmental Campaigns and was intended to reflect the group’s concerns with the environment on a wider scale than just litter. In 2009 it returned to Keep Britain Tidy, its most widely recognised branding, but one which does not reflect the fact that the organisation only works in England. Its most recent campaigns have targeted chewing gum, coastal litter, graffiti, drug litter, fly-tipping and dog fouling (Keep Britain Tidy 2010).
17 It is interesting to note that in recent times this hymn has been subject to a ban at Southwark Cathedral by the Dean who stated that the lyrics are too nationalistic (Borland 2008).
18 Between 1948 and 1962 Britain experienced a large amount of immigration from Commonwealth and colonial countries. Government rhetoric centred on the colonial right to migrate to the ‘Mother Country’, however many accounts show that British society at large was riddled with overt and covert racism at this time (Marr 2007: pp. 192–201).
