Haxted Thinking No. 12 / February 2024
Haxted Thinking is a newsletter for anyone interested in how buildings and spaces are designed, made and used.
Edition No. 12: February 2024
The Forbidden Playground
Something a little different this month. I have begun writing up a new project over on Substack called The Forbidden Playground. It's a collection of entangled parts - fragments from a life making space and somewhere to start writing freely, and building out my first photography book. It's fuelled by obsessive curiosity and a celebration of the abundant possibilities of holding uncertainty lightly. I would love you to join me over there so I have included some extracts below together with links to the first two essays.
The Forbidden Playground
"The Forbidden Playground started life as a photographic project. When I began to document a former Battle of Britain Fighter Command Air Force base, back in 2014. It formed the backbone of the final submission for my Masters in Photography. The Forbidden Playground was a personal attempt to understand my visceral connection with a space which had formed such an evocative backdrop to my feral childhood. However, what was initially designed as a critical visual investigation into an edge-land environment on the border of suburbia and the outer London greenbelt, morphed into something more."
"The way to creative fulfillment is in finding this middle space where relentless drive can reside more comfortably with uncertainty and doubt and exploration. I’ve noticed more and more that wherever there is a predilection to high achievement there is the need for moderation, for an offset with curiosity and creative discovery. There is always a deeper meaning to be attained than the one found on the frontline in business. I know, I’ve been there and it’s exhausting and it’s lonely. I can’t be this because I’m this we tell ourselves. The Forbidden Playground released me from that dualistic absurdity. Here was a space in which I could become so much more.
We all have a Forbidden Playground, a space for multitude and the resolution of what appear to be contradictions. In this place you become neither one thing nor the other, but both, or better still the manifestation of all your entangled parts. It’s the place where you bring radical honesty and forgiveness, and where intuition trumps logic."
Our Possible Pasts
"On the Croftleigh Estate, sandwiched between the wild, overgrown woods and orchards of Hayes Lane, Kenley, and the Old Lodge Lane valley, a motley crew of dirt-encrusted kids compete for second hand resources. In the mid 1970’s, camp building provided outdoors escape from the everyday drudgery of being stuck indoors with just three channels to choose on our black and white TVs. In the post-war flats where all of us lived, our mothers were more than happy to see the back of us on long summer days. So off we went, a few coins and a sandwich and a penguin biscuit stuffed into jacket pockets, free, unconstrained, limited only by our imaginations. We made things. Bows, arrows, catapults, go-karts from old prams, and later wooden skateboard ramps. But most of all we made camps - our places of refuge from grown-ups. These were places to dream. Places to dream of voyages, of escape, of daring lives on the open sea, in the big cities, and in colourful foreign countries with exotic smells and beautiful, alluring girls. We dreamed of the adventures our parents and grandparents had enjoyed during the war, and we wondered excitedly about what was to come for us. We heard the historic echoes of the Merlin Spitfire engines as we puffed on stolen cigarettes in the re-purposed tattered old remains of wartime Anderson shelters."
"These were low rent buildings and spaces, but they were spaces imbued with spirit, and full of soul. The souls of the ghosts of long-lost strangers, friends and relatives. Soul was everywhere in the dense woods and the dilapidated structures, and we absorbed it. In our own little way, with our feral exploits, we left our own souls there too. And there was one unexplored forbidden playground of an altogether different nature, and it held a magnetic appeal that surpassed all the others.
A short 5p bus ride away, a couple of miles further south, where creeping suburbia gave way to greenbelt, was an expansive array of Victorian buildings that retained disturbing and scary secrets."
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