Every week the council street cleaning team visit my local pocket park in Armley but they rarely bother emptying the bins.
I’m not accusing the workers of dereliction of duty. Far from it in fact. The council cleaners do a positively Herculean job of removing the trash from the midden the park becomes in the week. The reason that they rarely empty the bins is because people round here rarely use them.
I’ve just walked through the place. Since the park was cleaned yesterday, I spotted…
Which is lovely.
The amazing thing about this is that there are two litter bins within ten paces of this bench. One bin is literally – litter-ally – within arms length. And whoever left the fish and chip paper passed at least one other litter bin on the way out.
This is only the most obnoxious and repellent example. The place is already strewn with takeaway cartons, pop cans, crisp packets, cigarette packaging, discarded food, sweet wrappers, and little pots of jelly… who the hell eats jelly in a park?
But today’s detritus is nothing compared to what it’ll be like by the weekend. By Saturday each bench will be surrounded by a colourful scattering of beer cans from around the world – litter being something all nations, creeds and cultures have in common it would seem – and smashed bottles of Lambrusco. I have no idea why so much lightly sparkling perry is consumed on park benches. Back in the day when winos were winos they had some self-respect, and drank proper stuff like Thunderbird, Mad Dog and Wild Irish Rose; they would not be seen dead with the gaseous gripewater on offer these days. I consider this a tremendous cultural decline.
Here are some pictures I took last Saturday and Sunday.
As I was taking the snaps a dog walker stopped and told me how one of her pooches had permanently damaged his paw running over a broken bottle in the park. And only last night she’d “got an eyeful” of a man openly urinating behind a bench (hopefully not literally!) after lobbing his empty bottle in the general direction of the primary school. “What can you do?” she said.
And a couple of old guys drinking on one of the benches in the social semi-circle in the middle of the park stopped me to reassure me that I wasn’t taking photos of their rubbish. “We hate the litter,” they said, “it spoils everything. But when the guys who do it come into the park, we leave…”
I can’t say I blame them. I avoid the place too when the litter louts are about. What can you do?
Yesterday as I cycled through Kirkstall & past a line of stationary traffic, a man opened the passenger door of a car are and deposited a half full carton of potato salad (and plastic fork) on the road. I am normally vehemently opposed to capital punishment, but sometimes my belief wavers.
At least he stopped to tip his trash. I see people just chuck things out of a speeding vehicle, who cares where it lands or who it hits… What kind of capital punishment do you think appropriate? I’m warming to the idea too.
Hello Phil
Not too sure what to make of this latest blast on the ills of Armley – I thought you were supposed to be a cultural commentator but you are turning into Mr Grumpy of Leeds 12.
Your piece is half way to an examination of the culture of littering but tips too readily into judgementalism for my liking. Using “winos” is presumably a deliberate attempt to shock.
Obviously you know that it is through the study of its minutiae that we develop and understanding of the everyday life of ourselves and others so although you give us a description of these found objects and give some indication of what they represent to you – “tremendous cultural decline” – you don’t seem to offer much in the way of explanation as to any wider meaning that might be attached to this pattern of disposal particularly attaching to the disposers themselves. You should be talking the language of the contemporary archaeology of consumption and itemizing much more semiotically the items which remain.
I also think you miss an opportunity go into much greater detail on the actual nature of the debris scattered around in terms of the insight it gives in to the lives others particularly those with minority tastes and patterns of consumption. You are right to ask who drinks Lambrusco but you don’t really give a satisfactory answer.
Let me offer you more – First of all this shall be call random disposal is not a phenomenon confined to west Leeds I see much the same on the “greenspace” adjacent to Lincombe Bank on the Brackenwood estate or in Roundhay Park itself. But I read it very differently to you.
Surely it represents a stolen moment of pleasure in the humdrum struggle for life: a party to which I have not been invited; an opportunity for cultural celebration with songs and games. In that sense it is no wonder food is brought along to further the enjoyment and sense of occasion.
Should these remains be taken away – I think not since as they say there is beauty in decay and the notions of loss and ruination in relation to what these objects represent is particularly poignant.
In the case of Roundhay Park the detritus is often associated with a sports event where the struggle of competition, an inspirational personal performance or a famous team result is being memorialized with orange peel and sports drinks bottles. Other droppings perhaps are reminders of a family party, barbeque with friends or a romantic encounter a deux. The debris is the participants’ way of inscribing their memories on the landscape for others to share and enjoy at one remove. It is surely an act of vandalism to remove them.
Of course one can also make a political reading to the remains – is this disposal an act of defiance or resistance in the face of the sanitized and purified world which is increasingly being created for us? Is this a claim to space which denied to the disposers by their position vis a vis the market? Are these actors seeking to find a place beyond the reach of CCTV or formal policing to perform some ritual or engage in some illicit or deviant cultural activity? Is this an act of Dadaist provocation to draw out the do-gooders to “bring the community together” for some kind of community clean up?
Finally, I’m sure you remember Walter Benjamin’s description of his friend Siegfried Kracauer. “In the solitude of his craft” he is “A rag picker at daybreak, lancing with his stick scraps of language and tatters of speech in order to throw them in his cart, grumbling, stubbornly, somewhat the worse for drink”.
This seems to fit more what you are aiming at.
Regards
Sour
Yes, Kracauer was a picker of rags not a dropper of litter.
And interesting that you are against the sanitizing of the streets but all for the dettoling of demotic language… “Wino” doesn’t shock me in the slightest, it’s a perfectly valid expression.
As for itemising semiotically the debris around the benches in my local park, I went by less than an hour ago… 2 bottles of Vodka, more cans of a certain brand of lager than I could count, and many packets of of specific cigarettes… I shan’t name the provenance of these items, but lets just say they weren’t Absolut, Carling or Bensons.