Ghosts in the coalfields: the spectral geographies of post-industrial spaces in Sunderland

Abstract

The social and material landscapes of post-industrialisation in the North East of England are replete with the ghosts of past. It is important to consider and examine the area’s demolished buildings, buried identities, people lost and ideas forgotten because they are important in contextualising contemporary issues of social inequality, economic disparity with the rest of the UK and lack of infrastructure that persists in the region. Transformed uses of colliery spaces, visually serve to re-ruralise the spaces between colliery towns, however, the spectral legacy of industrial heritage remains in economic, historical and ideological imaginings of place. This short essay offers a literary walk through Elemore Park and Herrington Country Park, sites Former colliery sites situated in the Coalfields area of the City of Sunderland. I walk through the present landscape, but imagine, in italicised interpolations, the ‘ghosts’ of people, ideas, ideologies, actions that still haunt the contemporary endeavour to renovate. I address the unease that remains in re-ruralised post-industrial spaces in a literary style that seeks to perform that spectrality.