Titanomachia . . . in response to “Urban Dreamcatchers,” from the Fife Psychogeographical Collective.

While commuting around London’s North Circular, I’ve noticed an accelerated downward mobility in gasworks buildings. Two near Tottenham Hale are currently staggering earthward. Those Titans of our fossil fuelled anthropocene bring to mind John Keats’s Hyperion poems. I feel sure the towers’ strut-and-girder “carved features wrinkle as they fall.”

I worked for a while in Salford, where Ewan McColl wrote and set his Romantic ballad “Dirty Old Town.” There’s a resonance to McColl’s bleak urban pastoral. The incongruous imagery of crofts and gasworks set in a Landscape with Chimneys (the title of the play for which the song was written) was intended to fill an awkward gap while scenery was changed.