One man’s parking pilgrimage

An urban explorer seeks hidden meanings in Britain’s car parks

Car parks are strange, mysterious and, sometimes, threatening spaces that can help unlock the meaning of the world in which we live. This unexpected perspective informs Car Park Life, a new book by Gareth E Rees. As an author and musician, Rees is drawn to mystical and marginal places. In his 2013 book Marshland, Rees toured the post-industrial spaces of Hackney Marshes while last year’s The Stone Tide was an exploration of Hastings, one of England’s decaying seaside towns. He also explored themes of dislocation and lost history in an album of spoken word and chamber music A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes (2013). 

Rees’ new book is another exploration of landscape, society and history. However, instead of natural wildernesses, his chosen terrain is the car park. Specifically, Rees believes that the retail car park has as much mystery, magic and terror as any mountain, meadow or wood. “I have stood in the psychedelic plains of Patagonia, thumb out in the hope of a passing vehicle,” he writes. “I have walked through a smoking lava flow in Iceland; but here on the central barrier of the concrete access ramp to Herne Bay’s rooftop Morrisons, I am a true pioneer.”

Rees’ proposition is that car parks are commonplace urban landscapes that are little explored and rarely featured in art and music, yet they shape the aesthetics of our towns and cities. “Car parks are hotspots for crime, rage and sexual deviancy, a blind spot in which activities go unnoticed: skateboarding, car stunts, drug dealing, dogging, murder,” he writes. “Car parks are an intrinsic part of the landscape, like them or not, and if they are going to encroach on the space where our common grounds, marketplaces, municipal buildings, factories and marshlands once were, then we have a right to interrogate the space, find a way to embrace it, even learn from it.”

In Car Park Life, Rees sets out to prove his argument by exploring car parks across Britain, journeying across the country from Kent to the West Country, through the Midlands and into Scotland. 

Having settled on the car park as his subject, Rees refines the challenge he sets. He excludes multi-storeys and private car parks, limiting himself purely to chain retail parking. Luckily for his narrative, shoppers car parks prove to be places full of human life as well as cars. “Car parks are not only places for cars but also thoroughfares for pedestrians. Hangouts for teenagers. They’re places to rendezvous. Bump into neighbours. Exchange goods. Get some cash out. Have an argument with your partner. Make an awkward phone call. Eat a quiet lunch away from your colleagues.”Along the way Rees has some intriguing encounters, including finding traces of Sir Francis Drake outside B&Q, standing stones in a retail park and a dead body beside a Sainsbury’s.

Over the two years of his travels, Rees comes to see car parks as hidden sanctuaries in the urban consumer landscape. “I have been seeking the magical possibilities of bland corporate space in the hope that there is a potential channel of escape from neo-liberal hegemony, even if that escape is purely psychological and subjective, a new way of seeing the urban landscape foisted upon us, and embracing it in a way that offers a possibility of a future.”

Car Park Life by Gareth E Rees is published by Influx Press

www.influxpress.com