Grimsby, Cleethorpes or Ashford, but they were the first places I wanted to scrutinise on the map, to wander around in my febrile imagination.
Hard though it may be to believe, those first two maps represented a glimpse of the exotic. And it was a very specific kind of exoticism that appealed to me. Even at that early age, I had become fascinated by endof-the-world places and communities, set at the far end of bumpy tracks and sliding lethargically into the sea under lowering, leaden skies. Part of it was undoubtedly the call of the ocean. The sea holds a very specific place in the psyche of a Midlander. When you only see it once or twice a year, and that’s when you’re on holiday and there are endless ice creams and amusement arcades to accompany it, even the steely Scarborough briny comes to represent all that is exciting, infinite and free.
Of all the 11,073 miles of British coastline (19,491 if you include the offshore islands), the two areas that I first chose to own by proxy of a map seem strangely perverse, even now and even to me. This is not the Kiss Me Quick seaside; more the Wring Me Out and Leave Me For Dead coastline. But each of those first two maps held one feature that enthralled my besotted mind. On the Grimsby & Cleethorpes map, it was the long spit of land known as Spurn Head at the mouth of the River Humber, while on Ashford & Romney Marsh, it was the ethereal swell of marsh, bog and nuclear power station known as Dungeness. Spurn Head and Dungeness. Even the names sound vaguely suicidal.
Hours I spent poring over those obscure corners of this island. Nowadays, a precocious seven-year-old with similar tastes would merely tap the names into Google, and find himself presented almost immediately with galleries of images and reams of facts. Nothing so instant in 1974. It was left to my overheated mind to create images of these weird-looking landscapes. On the map, the lack of contours, the ruler-straight lanes and irrigation ditches, the banks of shingle and the odd names all conjured up a misty melancholy seeping over the bleak countryside like an unseen plague. Back in my Midlands bedroom, I hugged these unknown, unknowable places to my chest and swore that one day I’d get to meet them.
Spurn Head I managed to tick off my list decades ago, although it took until very recently to make it to Dungeness. My love affair with end-of-the-world landscapes has continued into adulthood, and, in my twenties, I was fortunate enough to have a good friend who shared this strange passion. Jim and I would borrow a car for the weekend and head off to places whose sole criterion for us was that they just looked weird on the map. Hours we spent poring over my OS collection, trying to find just the right balance of oddities in any one place. Hence the Isle of Thanet, the Suffolk coast, Portland, the Forest of Dean, the Wash, the Isle of Wight and the Humber estuary all came under our critical gaze at some point or other. Best were those places that not only afforded the opportunity to look out over marsh and mudflat, but also gave us the chance to hang out in its dead-end urban twin, the out-of-season British seaside resort. Thus Skegness was a great base for the Wash trip, Thanet gave us chance to be depressed by Margate long before Tracey Emin gentrified it, and Bridlington was a superbly moribund HQ for that ultimate trip to my long-awaited paramour, Spurn Head.
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