Estuarine: The betweenness of place

Between town and countryside, land and sea, Albion Parade - a passageway in the edgelands of the Thames Estuary, is an inbetween place. A public footpath closed to the public, a mixed-use complex of decaying factories, abandoned warehouses and unkempt storage yards redolent with ghost signs and crumbling facades. It is an ex-industrial zone, lingering in the shadow of demolition and redevelopment, a place (mostly) abandoned by humans, where urban nature is rewilding the cracks in and between the buildings. Albion Parade is a place of contested and competing ideologies, caught between discourses of value and use, memory and desire, between visions of past, present and future. By exploring the edge as interaction between the self and place, this research raises critical questions about marginality, stigma, displacement, urban policy and planning, asking what can entangled encounters with the estuary teach us about ourselves and our place in the world? By developing new methods to read and write with the estuarine edgelands, this creative-critical thesis offers fresh and timely perspectives on how to revalue, reinterpret and rewrite our inbetween places before they become lost places.