Our Nothing-Lands 2: How To Make A Mint

What can you learn from a good walk wasted?

Hi! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about curiosity, wonder, and trying to discover what you never knew you didn’t know.

If all of that sounds like a lot, try starting here (that was the very first edition, back in 2021).

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I hope you’ve been having a good week so far! Apart from revisiting the hoax of San Serriffe, this has been mine:

For that reason, I’m very glad to get back to what we were talking about last time - a look at the near-invisible islands of ‘nothingness’ all around us in the places we live…

And we start with what novelist Harry Leon Wilson described as “too much walking to be a good game, and just enough game to spoil a good walk.”

In just a few months, the quiet Scottish town I live in will go absolutely bananas with visitors. Wander down the length of its high street at this time of year, and you’ll only see fifty to a hundred folk - but in July, more than quarter of a million people will be arriving by car or train, via road-trips or the airport just a few miles away, packing out this tiny town in a way it’s incredibly hard to imagine right now. 

The last time this happened was in 2016, and it would have happened again last year, were it not for a worldwide pandemic knocking it out of its recurring seven-yearly cycle. If you own property here, you’ve been prepping for years - it’s a time for vastly inflated rental rates, for an orgy of price gouging, for moving out of your home for a month so you can rent it for a kingly sum to anyone willing enough to pay. (And according to some folk I’ve talked to, if you decide to stay home and ride it out, you might want to do your shopping out of town - if you could even get the car out the drive.) 

It’ll be a fog of sweaty desperation, vast queues, frayed tempers - and a few bent golf clubs. Once again, The Open Championship is coming to Troon for the tenth time since it began in 1860, and everything will go golf-crazy.

Not that it isn’t already, of course. Many guest-houses round here are golf-themed, to cater for visitors to the 29 (!) golf courses in and around the town - the plush tartan carpets, the colossal, wobbling Scottish breakfasts (like an English breakfast but with extra everything, plus square sausage and haggis) and signed photos of Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.

When he was younger, my landlord earned good money as an amateur caddie alongside his normal job as a plumber and electrician. There’s a swimming-pool-sized patch of grassy land down by the beach that, rumour has it, the BBC rents all year round just so it’s available to turn into their broadcasting headquarters for the two weeks the Open is running. There’s what happens to people’s faces when they mention the event: they take a deep breath, their eyes twinkling with excitement, but with the hint of a thousand-yard stare. It’s going to be a lot, they radiate.

The Open is only happening in one place: Royal Troon, at the southern end of town, which is strictly speaking two courses, the Old and the Portland. The former is the really famous one, and it’s eye-wateringly expensive: £390 for a day of golf, compared with green fees of £30-£40 on Troon’s other courses. Golf at this level involves attracting punters with the deepest of pockets - which is exactly why the Turnberry golf course just a few miles down the coast was snapped up by Donald Trump in 2014.

(Turnberry hosted the Open back in 2009, so Trump has been investing heavily in the course in the hope of attracting the event back to Turnberry and turning a big profit. Instead, the championship’s owners have blacklisted him, and said in no uncertain terms that while he remains owner he’s too much of a public security risk for the Open and “would have to sell up” before anything changes. As for how the rest of Scotland feels about Trump? According to a YouGov poll in 2020, around two-thirds view him as “dishonest” and “terrible”.) 

So, a lot of golf will be happening in Troon this summer, on all its courses. And what I’d really want for a visiting golfer is probably the last thing they’d be looking for: I want them to get lost. Not in the rude sense, mind - in the navigational sense.

Let’s say you’re playing a round at Darley, the closest course to the middle of town, and you’re suddenly and unbearably caught short. You make your apologies and dash into the bushes for a pee. On the way back you take a wrong turn and blunder into the vast overgrown no-man’s land buffering the course from the housing estates beyond it. 

Woah. It’s actually - rather nice here?

Your curiosity gets the better of you, so you plunge into the trees where they’re thickest, down a half-path carved by dog walkers, and…

Well, isn’t this lovely. One could have a picnic here, what? Shades of Swallows & Amazons or Robin Of Sherwood. Good lord. 

Maybe it’s partly the contrast between the fiercely managed greenery of the golf course, but over here, beyond the reach of the mower cars and the enraged swipings of golfers who have just mucked up an easy shot, there’s nothing to stop everything growing as it likes.

When the sun hits this scene, you want to paint it. There are magical childhoods here, just waiting to be discovered if you’re young enough to find them. The trees block the distant noise of traffic, so you can hear the birds again. Something in you that’s been tense all day seems to relax.

I’d wish that experience on any golfer coming here. But that’s not really on the agenda. If they wanted to visit “the countryside,” they’d go south to the hills of the Galloway Forest Park, or east to the wooded Smugglers Trail winding its way past a quarry and down into the hamlet of Dundonald.

Golf is a different thing entirely. To its critics, it’s a miserably over-edited approximation of the Great Outdoors on rails, where you’re mostly concerned with your own skill (or, depending on how the day’s going, your own incompetence). You’re on a mission! You just don’t have the time to fritter away on idle curiosity.

So instead, these liminal scraps of wildness are mostly used by the dog-walkers, the joggers, the occasional schoolkid taking the long way home and the recreationally bone-idle (hi there) - and nobody quite knows what to call them.

In our ownership-obsessed human world, naming a thing is a first step towards taking control of it. If it’s a new name, that can be the beginning of a land-grab, of someone riding roughshod over history with enough influence and money to turn “theirs” or even “ours” into “mine”. The most famous case of it in the UK right now is hedge fund manager Alexander Darwell’s assault on the public right to wild-camp on Dartmoor (the only remaining place in England you’re legally allowed to do so without permission from a landowner) which ended with a win for the wild-campers, along with the Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA), the Open Spaces Society and the Right to Roam movement.

As Antonia Malchik says in the introduction to her upcoming book No Trespassing (which she’s currently serializing on Substack):

“Even another’s enforcement of their own property rights can ruin yours. European countries’ colonization of much of the world should be a lesson in this fragility: private property rights are yours to keep, until someone more powerful wants them.

Ownership is a potent tool for creation, but far more often for destruction. It should never be wielded lightly. If this planet is to sustain future generations of humans, it must be wielded very differently.”

But if non-places don’t have a name of their own, if they’re just “disused land”, why would anyone care enough to claim it?

It’s doubtful many people were bothered when 12 bungalows were announced for the end of Troon’s North Drive, taking a big bite out of a patch of those trees lining the Darley course.

This is how I think I’ve discovered the current owner of those edge-lands. Like many, I assumed it was common land in the care of the town council in some fuzzily-understood way, but according to that bungalow-development news story, the historic owner is the local laird the 9th Duke of Portland - or was, until he died in 1990. 

His nearest successor is the Earl of Portland - who, bizarrely enough, is currently the actor and writer Tim Bentick, best-known for playing a leading role in the BBC radio soap opera The Archers, for doing voice-work on videogames including Warhammer: Total War, and for being spectacularly ousted as the Minister for Social Affairs in the very first episode of The Thick Of It.  

So - Tim technically owns all this land around Troon, and it’s his right to sell it off? Maybe, but perhaps not to profit from it, since “under a long-standing agreement cash from a sale would be put into the Troon Common Good Fund which is ringfenced to be spent in the town”. So it does belong to the town really? Not sure. What a tangle.

Someone who really cares about names for neglected public spaces is Baltimore-based public artist Graham Coreil-Allen. Early in his career, he grew obsessed with the most boring pieces of Baltimore’s urban landscape, and started asking why they couldn’t be made less boring.

You can imagine the conversations that followed:

“Wait. Why couldn’t what be made less boring?”

“Oh you, know, the - uh - well, you know there’s that bit of concrete and grass between the…um….I don’t quite know how to…”

None of these boring places had names - or if they did, they were so dull that they slid right off your mind like butter on a hot pan. The result was a kind of invisibility, a chronic unworthiness of anyone’s attention. They only existed as the um, something-something between the actual places, the kind you could arrange to meet at, or point to on a map…

So Graham decided to name them into existence.

Void: A framed, open space imbued with the psychic presence of a former mass and or the deadening siphon of unforgiving nothingness.

There are three ways you can get an idea of what Graham’s doing here. The first is to download his book, The Typology Of New Public Sites, which is available as a free PDF for download here.   

Displaced Forest: A manicured patch of trees standing in isolation.

The second is to visit the New Public Spaces website, and browse your way through the examples until you find something you recognise but have mostly put out of your mind - or you could pick something, like the ones I’m quoting here, and rack your brains to remember if you’ve seen an example in your own neighbourhood…

Desire Line: A path developed by pedestrian footfall erosion, marking the shortest and most easily navigated route between origin and destination.

(I already knew about this one, via Robert Macfarlane.)

The third way, and the most fun of all, is to listen to Episode 60 of the podcast 99% Invisible, “Names vs. The Nothing”. There’s a Web player version behind that link, so you don’t need a podcast or music app to have a listen.

This will take you about 12 minutes, it’s all about Graham’s work, and it’ll make you suspect you really should have started with that episode instead of reading my newsletter, which is entirely correct. (There are hundreds more episodes for you to enjoy, and they’re all absolutely fantastic. If you never have the time to read me again, I completely understand!)

Freeway Eddy: An interstitial fragment of space between intersecting curves of highway pavement.

I also really like Graham’s definition of beauty in relation to places like these, which are often deemed too aesthetically ugly to love: instead, he sees a beauty in what they can signify, often being “shared by so many, yet completely undesigned.”

The process of reappropriating - or perhaps reclaiming or rewilding might suit better, depending on the context - an unloved patch of land can follow three steps:

1. Give it a name if none exists (or resurface its old name if it does).

2. Give it a new (or renewed) meaning and role.

3. Decide how it can better fit that meaning and role, and make some changes.

This process often happens for the least compelling of reasons (“hey, let’s make loads of money”) - but it doesn’t have to.

“Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening – raising food, plants, or flowers – on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property. It encompasses a diverse range of people and motivations, ranging from gardeners who spill over their legal boundaries to gardeners with a political purpose, who seek to provoke change by using guerrilla gardening as a form of protest or direct action.

This practice has implications for land rights and land reform; aiming to promote re-consideration of land ownership in order to assign a new purpose or reclaim land that is perceived to be in neglect or misused.

Some gardeners work at night, in relative secrecy, in an effort to make the area more useful or attractive, while others garden during the day for publicity.”

- from “Guerrilla Gardening” at Wikipedia.

I covered briefly covered the guerrilla gardening beat in my first online writing job a decade ago, and I’ve loved the idea ever since.

Yes, if it’s done badly (too overtly and incautiously, or in a place regularly maintained where it’ll easily be spotted), it could indeed get you into all sorts of trouble, thereby squandering all your effort.

But if you’ve done your scouting work properly, and you’re sure it’s a bit of land where your efforts will largely escape attention until it’s grown in and looks like it’s always been there - hey, what fun!

(And what a great way to pay a new kind of attention to the urban environment around you: hey, how would I garden this up without it being obvious?)

And with that, I’d like to introduce you to Kevin.

Kevin is a spearmint, and when I got him from the local supermarket late last year, he was reduced to 10p because he was in such a tattered and bedraggled state.

He’s been indoors over the winter, and I thought it was touch & go whether he’d make it - but mints are tough, the Special Forces of the herb world, and they always surprise you. I should have remembered the enormous mint that my late Ma had in a plastic half-barrel in her garden: every January it would look utterly dead, nothing but twigs, and by April it would once again be a pungent riot of greenery reaching up to find the sunlight.

Kevin’s the same, as you can see. Another couple of months and he’ll need a new pot!

But that’s not my plan. I’m not repotting Kevin - I’m planting him. Kevin is going wild, in a location I’ve already scouted out - good for the sunshine, a bit of wind protection from some nearby bushes, and unlikely to be nibbled to death by the wild rabbits nearby.

He’s going into a corner on a bit of land (possibly owned by the council, or David off The Archers) that always looks sad and forgotten to my eyes - in New Public Sites terminology, it’s an Epic Embankment With Adjacent Anti-Berm - and with luck, he’ll brighten up the place for much of the next decade.

I’m certainly not going to advise you go off and do something similarly rule-bending. Of course not! (Mike’s lawyer: “let me reiterate, OF COURSE NOT.”) That would be naughty, and get me into more trouble than I’m worth.

But I’ll say this: the process of wandering round looking for a place for Kevin has been marvellous at opening my eyes to all the anonymous islands of land around the town that clearly need some tender loving care. (It’s also given me a few ideas for venues for open-air talks!)

As a way for finding the near-invisible places near where you live, guerrilla-rehousing a mint is now top of my list. Give it a try! You never know what it might show you.

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Images: Nicky M; Peter Drew; Mike Sowden.