Memory Maps

A new genre of literature has been emerging strongly in recent years: moving between fiction, history, traveler’s tales, autobiography, anecdote, aesthetics, antiquarianism, conversation, and memoir, writers who choose this form are exploring people, places and their history, and expressing an infinite curiosity about the relations between them. Sometimes writings of this sort are caught under the term ‘psycho-geography’. But the literature really belongs in an older, very English tradition, that of the personal, even eccentric essay, the wide-ranging, meditation and the anecdotal almanac. Recently, contemporary authors such as W.G. Sebald (The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn), and Iain Sinclair( Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital) have revisited it in their own inspired way, patterning personal associations and experiences from ideas and stories attached to locality.
Memory Maps is a new website, designed to inspire and foster work which will continue this approach. It begins as a joint venture between the Dept of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and the website team of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It includes works in many different media, posted here to stimulate ways of thinking, writing, recording and inventing: for example, a Tattooist parlour, Southend; Old Grand Theatre, Colchester; abandoned Merry Go Round ; portrait of Francis Bacon, East India Company coffee pot; child’s sampler, etc. )
Many of the images come from the archive of Recording Britain, which Kenneth Clark commissioned during World War Two, and is kept at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The first gathering of images unfolds the county of Essex and its neighbours. This part of England offers a perfect point of departure for a journey that takes word and image together, for the skies, trees, ponds, rivers, and light of the regions still resemble the vision of some of the country’s greatest artists –Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable. Pictures, paintings, artifacts such as fabrics and crockery, tools and instruments, toys and tapestrieswill attract more images and objects from among you, visitors to the site, and stimulate your ideas.
The University of Essex will teach a course in their Creative Writing MA. Other universities are planning to join in.
Throughout, you, the public, are now invited to respond and contribute, stitching new thoughts, dreams, and history into the map.
Because a memory map is a collaborative enterprise, as it unfolds over the country, it will go on connecting different people and places across time and in the present.
At a deep, often undeclared level, writing in this vein engages with two issues of great contemporary urgency:
identity and belonging;
ecology and stewardship.
The two are inter-connected through the stories we use as compass bearings and the way they give us a thread through experience. Today, in a country braided from different peoples, cultures, and systems of thought, inquiry of this kind can draw out even more richly coloured and densely tangled strands.
Memory Maps will search out ways of enriching and deepening connections between us: history that has been submerged, fantasies that have faded and lost their vigour like old photographs detached from their names and circumstances. The interchange between images and writings releases energy: the energy of stories.