Cities, thanks to their multiple roles and functions, rarely get associated with any one particular event to the extent that it defines their identity. As complex places they enjoy a wide range of roles and imagery, and even the most awful fates that happen to them have relatively little impact on how, in the long term, we see them – as places. The London Blitz and the 9/11 attacks on New York, devastating though they were, in time became assimilated into the larger histories of those cities, even while the scars, physical and psychological, endured. A visitor to present-day Berlin will find the several very different and deeply traumatic epochs from that city’s story absorbed into a metropolis that is thoroughly modern and future-facing. The Hitler years, the near-annihilation of 1945, the Wall, and much else, are not forgotten, but none of them defines the city, which rises above its past. Horrible though these events were, over time - collectively, learned from, put into perspective - they are paradoxically strengthening, enriching, atmosphere-providing and place-making. A lesser city could not have withstood and survived in the same way.
World cities have a resilience of their own; lesser places may be less sturdy in adversity. In the age of single industry towns, place identity was often linked to a specific type of manufacturing – Sheffield was cutlery; Northampton, boots and shoes; Dundee, marmalade; St Helen’s, glass; Luton, hats. When industries fail in such places, the effects may be devastating. Naturally, many other factors can help to lend a sense of place, a genius loci. Smaller communities might find their identity strongly influenced by some famous or notorious individual (Jarrow, Stiffkey), or an unusual historical event (Tolpuddle, Eyam). The same is true of our own shallow era; oh yes, “The last of the summer wine” was filmed around Holmfirth. Lucky Holmfirth, in consequence now so much more of a place than nearby Glossop or Sowerby Bridge. Fame, televisual fame ! And of course, Pontypridd is the birthplace of … someone-or-other. Unlike nearby Maesteg or Ogmore Vale, both lacking a comparable voice of their own, mere non-places in comparison.
Recent events remind us that still other places have their identity forced upon them in an unwelcome and far from frivolous manner. And I’m not referring obliquely to the American girls who accosted me at King’s Cross and asked about trains to Grantham. Senseless and heartbreaking though the scenes were in Boston this week, the city will recover, and in time its identity will be linked in the popular imagination with this particular pointless atrocity no more than it is with the legendary tea party or the baked bean. Boston is big, multipurpose, cosmopolitan and complex enough to move on from these dark days; it is full of creative and clever people.
The small town of West, between Waco and Dallas, which has also had its Warholian fifteen minutes, unasked, may not be able to shake off the week’s horrors quite so easily. I’d never heard of West before, in exactly the same way that I’ve never heard of thousands of villages and small towns across Texas and the United States and the World; such is the chance nature of the mishap that puts somewhere briefly, or permanently, “on the map”. The fertiliser plant may rise again, and the community will pull together and pick itself up, no doubt, because that’s what communities do.
From the outside, a large-scale catastrophe in a small place so easily becomes all-defining, becomes the publicly-perceived identity of that place : Dunblane, Aberfan, Beslan, Belsen, Lockerbie, Chernobyl, Seveso, Hungerford, Bhopal and countless more - all codes for tragedies of human behaviour, errors, delusions, miscalculations, obsessions. Names which, until the day in question, few who didn’t live nearby had heard of. And now they wish they hadn’t. Symbolic abbreviations of human folly and evil. The new identity is acquired, in the public imagination and in the media, while the locals and the other victims mourn and try to carry on as before.
Remember Flixborough ? Another catastrophic bang, cyclohexane this time. Unlike Flixborough - an unusual name, handy, therefore, as a label - West is a word in common usage. Even its notorious role as a homicidal Gloucester surname doesn’t adhere and taint its regular meaning; it’s far too verbally useful to be appropriated as jourmalistic shortcode for “community devastated by industrial explosion” or “issues around fertiliser manufacture safety”. One may expect, consequently, that the remains of this small place in Texas will sink back into relative invisibility to the rest of the world. One hopes it will thus be able to rebuild in peace, its name invulnerable to simple stigma, and to find its own identity again, maybe a stronger one.
Such are a few of the chance factors which determine what becomes a place, a place with an identity, and what remains a non-place.
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