Along the banks of the River Mersey on the southern edge of Trafford, the Bridgewater Canal and its adjacent floodplains mark a transitional zone between Manchester's industrial history and contemporary urbanisation efforts. This landscape is crossed by part of the Trans Pennine Trail, a well-maintained national route for walkers and cyclists, contained within Manchester’s Outer Ring Road where the M60 meets the A56 motorway. Remnants of the historic manual labour that built Manchester’s industrial reputation converge with the contemporary built environment around this ‘edgeland;’ a term coined by Marion Shoard (2000) to define a place that is neither fully developed nor completely abandoned, but exists on the fringes of the urban and rural fabric.
This edgeland exhibits a sense of informality that fits John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s description of the vernacular landscape (1984), one shaped by local activity and everyday land use as opposed to grand design or formal planning. “In England a landscape almost always contains a human element” (Jackson, 1984:5), and Stretford's edgelands are defined by this entanglement of the man-made, built history of the urban with free-form eruptions of the natural.
Inspired by Raymond Schafer’s call to attention of ongoing changes to sonic environments as the natural is encroached by urbanisation, I set about to use soundscaping to capture what Schafer refers to as the ‘acoustic ecology’ (1977) and what Stephen Feld calls ‘acoustemology’ (1992) of the edgelands, focusing on the distinct elements of earth and water. These soundscapes, recorded with a Gh5 ZOOM recorder, are paired with photographs taken with a Nikon DSLR camera over the course of a single afternoon. “Our gaze has been constructed and our imagination shaped by photography” (Solá-Morales 1995:118), and by engaging the long history of landscape and urban photography, Stretford’s edgelands are revealed as a vague terrain, a terrains vagues, “land in its potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which we are external” (Solá-Morales 1995:119). This portfolio attempts to embody Rebecca Solnit’s claim that “while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors” (2001:12, emphasis my own).