Dr. T. Bertie Ansell - On the importance of marginal spaces

What happens after we reclaim the land?

The resurgence of land rights movements within the UK spotlights the increasing necessity of access to nature in the face of climate catastrophe. Accelerated by movements such as ‘Land In Our Names’ and the ‘Right To Roam’ campaign, the question of who has access to green-spaces and for what uses has predominantly focussed on agricultural and privatised land, but extends also to those protecting woodland destruction from violent HS2 contractors or advocating for community-led allotments. The spirit of these campaigns stands in testament to the necessity of their demands, which have been discussed passionately elsewhere within this zine. Instead, I want to consider what happens after land access has been obtained. What does it mean to occupy reclaimed land and what do these spaces offer?

The importance of marginal spaces

The human desire to be in nature and to cultivate ecology is innate and indispensable for our survival and mental health. Examples of entwinement between land reclamation, political and social struggles appear again and again throughout history. These include communal veg-plots built under highways to combat systems of food apartheid in Detroit, to the creation of a garden by Nelson Mandela and fellow incarcerated peoples on Robben Island. The act of growing facilitates transition from spaces of confinement to spaces of transformation. In short, reclamation enables expansion both literally and also by transcending the intended purpose and boundaries of a space.

Examples of transitory or marginal spaces exist in Oxford too. Both the Trap Grounds in Summertown and Aston’s Eyot in Iffley were built on top of old rubbish dumps. Port Meadow has a long history of transient occupation from use as a race-course, rubbish heap and airfield to the flood water which smoothens its wrinkles each winter. My own existence has been intertwined with Bartlemas Close Allotment, the site of a 12thcentury leprosy hospital and later a hang-out for shellfish loving monks, evidenced by the abundance of clam shells which surface from the soil of the most land-locked allotment in the UK!

As a trans, queer person, I find myself drawn to these marginal spaces far more than the manicured lawns and regimented borders of Oxford’s colleges, parks and botanic gardens. There is a recognition between marginal spaces and existing as a marginalised person – a half-formed, rough, weedy, unbounded kind of recognition. Spaces like Aston’s Eyot, where broken crockery and steel pipes puncture through its blackened skin, feel familiar. An in-betweenness that is found also in so many existences, like being non-binary or displaced from your home. The word human comes from the latin word ‘humus’ meaning soil.

These reclaimed spaces also offer reprise; a break from the homogenous, formality of Oxford colleges or fancy estates which are legacies of empire. Reclamation means existing in spaces which have been shaped by (often destructive) political and industrial motives, and to acknowledge the history of space within the act of reformation. To occupy land is to front a liberation against the violent mechanisms of our oppressors, and to the levers of empire which stole the land originally. To reclaim space through growth, cultivation, healing and beauty is radical in that it reframes the narrative of activism in the emotionality of the activists rather than as a necessary combative system against the oppressors. In writing this, I have deliberately refrained from using the word ‘fight’ because a) it falls short of the palpable reciprocity of reclaiming natural spaces and b) we deserve better than ensnarement to the language of our oppressors. There is no knock-out punch in the same way there is no final sunset.

And so we must go! To sit. To listen. To thrive in reclaimed spaces. To converse with the comings and goings, giving’s and takings, ebbs and flows, rises and falls of nature. The eternal cyclical currents of dynamic entanglement which underpin our connectedness; both of human and non-human beings. Hope for a different kind of re-building.

Margins can be moved

An intriguing thing happens once within the green lodgings of reclaimed land. The boundaries of those spaces, which seemed so easy to define from the outside, suddenly become rather unclear. Take the Trap Grounds for example. Where do the margins of that space lie? Between the train tracks and housing estates? The rubbish and the soil? The tracks of mycorrhiza between trickles of leachate?

Spending time on reclaimed land allows us to re-evaluate where (and whether) such boundaries exist. Margins become movable entities, which extend beyond physical human enclosure. Humans are given the space to rest and connect to their internalised identities. Physical barriers like fences, walls and sign-posts become inconsequential when compared to the ivy creeping between wooden slats or the chaotic ambling of animal tracks. What do marginal spaces look like for non-humans? Worms inside the middle of old clay pipes or wasps feeding from the strange acrid nectar of old glass bottles do not care what we name as ‘rubbish’.

It is this complexity which is so fundamental to the continuation of natural spaces. We must consider our place inside the history of reclaimed land, the human conflicts which arise there including e.g. the ecology of our ‘waste’, and how to enrich access to those spaces. Finally, we must recognise that reclamation is a process not an end-point – the hub from which we begin to expand our margins outwards.