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Park
Life in the Lake District
by
Karen Guthrie
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"Fuck!"
A macho Yorkshire voice.
"Fuck me!"
Another.
You look up from your weeding on the abject asparagus patch to
see a kaleidoscopic cluster of mountain bikers, relieved to have
reached the bottom of a perilous forest track at speed. They suck
their water bottles and throw their bikes down on the best vantage
point in your garden to eat lunch.
I’m trying to enjoy an al fresco lunch of last night’s
leftover beetroot when a stringy white dog with an upright stubby
tail and an unusual sense of purpose, stops dead in his tracks
on the road above and bounds towards me over the rockery. Taking
this approach for friendliness I greet him, but by the end of
my salutations his face is looking up from my now-empty dish,
a lurid purple mask of sauce now. In the distance I hear a distant
hunting horn and he vanishes into the forest.
A knock at the cottage door.
"Yes?" I say, opening it with what I hope is obvious
reluctance.
"We’re walking in the forest and it’s such a hot
day we’ve run out of water. Could you fill up our bottles
for us?" asks the ten year old voted the messenger by his
family, who stand at the end of the drive expectantly.
"Well, the thing is we don’t drink the tap water actually
as it’s straight from that stream out there". I reply."Our
stuff’s all bottled".
He looks blankly at me, and moments later I return to the door
with our last litre of Evian.
Round us, large houses - and by that I mean the kind of idyllic
cottages with roses round the door, blinding security lights round
the back and 4 SUV’s in the drive - have to put up signs
to prevent tourists from beating a path to their doors for inglenook-and-ensuite
hospitality.
They say ‘No B & B’.
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I recently picked up a novelty Christmas book at a till. It was
‘ The Guide to the UK’s crappest places to Live’
and I was genuinely disappointed to find none of my home-towns
featured.
Before I lived in the landscape-themed leisure facility that is
the Lake District National Park, I lived in a grotty but aspirational
part of South London where a cappuccino bar had recently opened.
When you ordered a croissant you watched the waitress pop across
to the Co-op for one and then re-serve it to you with a 600% mark
up. Opposite it was a restaurant serving overpriced ‘Modern
British Cuisine’ - mainly permutations of celeriac, quail
and scallops - to 30-somethings brought up on baked beans and
Mr Kipling.
And a while before that I lived in the kind of Scottish seaside
town now described in ironic Sunday supplement travel guides as
‘charming’ on account of its crumbling but tenacious
Italian ice cream empire and legions of hardy pensioners bracing
themselves and their lapdogs against the windy promenade.
The woman at the Lake District Tourism office is already suspicious
of me "You should really talk to our Press Officer if you’re
writing an article. I mean, I have some statistics here from 2001
but that was The Foot and Mouth Year, so thing’s weren’t
great……but of course the number of farmhouses doing
B & B has increased enormously because there’s a new
grant they can get…."
National Park population = 42,000
Annual visitor days spent in the National Park = 22 million
Annual overnight guest capacity in the National Park = 10.75 million
National Park plumbers listed in the Yellow Pages = 14
From anecdotal evidence, I am far from alone in my weekly commutes
beyond the Park boundaries to work, but in truth the reverse commute
is much more common: ‘The doughnut effect’ as a regeneration
big-wig called it recently (I think he was also alluding to the
topography here). It’s impossible to ignore the feeling that
you are living in a leisure facility - with few city-bound direct
trains out until mid-morning, the bland comfort-food filled café
menus, and the only train timetables in Japanese I have seen in
the UK.
Try and get a cleaner, a plumber, a plasterer in the Park and
you will have a long, long wait. However, taxidermy, tent-peg
makers, hand-woven basketry or a short course in orienteering
can all be had to the power of ten, within ten minutes from my
front door.
It’s not at all strange to call yourself an artist round
here. In fact I can believe that some even manage to make a living
at it via the numerous small commercial galleries. But without
beating about the bush, this work is a predominantly, and I don’t
doubt heart-felt appreciation of landscape and traditional rural
culture. What does seem unusual is to articulate a critical perspective
on being here specifically. Occasionally, usually while driving
(and I am driving usually), I wonder if this work is being made
out there and I just haven’t seen it because neither myself
nor my fictional spiritual co-artist bother to show in the local
galleries, and as we’re not in the same studio block and
we don’t have broadband, we just haven’t found each
other. Well, this is the place that saw Wordsworth slide from
revolutionary to reactionary, Schwitters from avante-garde to
local portraitist to dead.
Of course, ‘people from off’ (as we’re called round
here by the remaining locals) who don’t like it round here
could just bugger off and stop complaining. One of the reasons
for the monocultural aura of the Park is just this kind of self-selection:
those affluent enough to move here in the first place can certainly
afford to move out – even to back down south, such is the
cost of living and house prices here. The trap-door can be left
open for these migrants, whereas in Barrow-in-Furness, a mere
20 mins drive away from the Park border, a 3 bed house costs £9000
and there’s no way their population can move even a few miles
closer to their low-paid jobs in the Park, or elsewhere in the
UK for that matter.
But name any great city on the planet, and what makes it so compelling
is its ‘cultural mix’. This may sound naff to you, but
then you’re probably reading this in a culturally-mixed city.
What happens to culture if it becomes monoculture, if the discourse
and debate that should be the function of art just isn’t
within hearing range, either to other artists or to the public?
The myriad of cultures here fascinates me – sporting, agricultural,
leisure, craft, history and even spiritual but they don’t
mix. They tacitly sit beside each other, each protected by a security
blanket of actual and metaphorical space. The density of a city
imposes real cultural friction but necessitates at least attempted
solutions. In the Park, this is absent and the rural space enables
conflicting cultures to sit and smoulder. It becomes a laboratory
of juxtaposition, an experimental environment where stake-holders
can compete to buy it, sell it, and rent it.
I choose to make work which directly addresses culture and society
here. ‘The Festival of Lying’ (2000, with Anna Best,
Nina Pope & Simon Poulter) was a live / web-cast event inspired
by Cumbria’s traditional liars (lying is a kind of story-telling).
We collaborated with the liars and hosted a day of talks on lying
from speakers as diverse as the journalist Jon Ronson, web company
XPT and magician Peter Lamont.The festival format was selected
as it’s an acknowledged lure to tourists here, with the just-outside-the-Park
town of Ulverston holding the UK record for the most festivals
annually – they started a Dickensian one a few years ago.
Despite occurring during the petrol crisis, the Festival became
sufficiently assimilated locally that Whitehaven Council (not
in the Park) actually approached us to restage the event. I was
glad of this – I didn’t want the work to be an empty
satire and I guess I was also relieved it hadn’t been vilified
as the work of ‘people from off’.
More recently, in a solo work ‘Welcome To’ (2003) I
made a 5 minute 35mm film for showing in local cinemas as a trailer.
It is a micro-musical, the result of a summer spent choreographing
local dance groups to participate in an overtly nostalgic image
of rural Britain. In some ways, it is a satire on tourist expectation,
as the central characters – 6 tourists – experience
locals dancing around every corner. But it is also a statement
about the invisibility of real rural cultures from the space of
mainstream media like the cinema, and an acknowledgement of their
compelling conflict.
Karen
Guthrie
Karen Guthrie is an artist and lecturer who works in Cumbria and
in London, often in collaboration with Nina Pope.
http://www.somewhere.org.uk/grizedale/
http://www.somewhere.org.uk/welcome/
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