I’d been to Barrow once before, in the long summer of 1995. I’d shared a Liverpool student flat with a friend who’d grown up in the town, and one weekend we took the train to stay with his family. I remember the beauty of the journey from Lancaster to Barrow, taking in Morecambe Bay and the mountains. I remember the dusty walk across the hot August town from the train station. I remember the warmth of his family’s welcome, and the red welt on my arm after a Cumbrian horse-fly, a clegg, took a bite. But we had really travelled through Barrow, because my friend had actually grown up in a tiny hamlet outside the town, a place called Paradise.

Coming back, nearly 20 years later on a grey Spring morning for a walk around the town with Jenn and Beth, made me recognise the similarities with my own upbringing in Thames-side Essex. The salt marshes and tidal muds of Walney reminded me of Benfleet, Canvey Island and Pitsea; pillboxes marshalled the landscape; the black water of deep-water channels and the call of gulls were strangely familiar. Towns at the end of the railway, a terminus, places where no-one passes through on the way to somewhere else, because after here, there’s nowhere else to go – unless, of course, you are on the way to Paradise.

Through writing a critical book on Iain Sinclair, and beginning a project with an old friend from home, I’d been trying to come to terms with growing up in South Essex, a place I couldn’t wait to leave. The journey to Barrow, to the streets of a planned town, to big skies and grey-green water, to the smell of silt and salt, was in some ways a return. To think myself, or rather to feel myself into that place, a town I didn’t really know, was a chances to draw lines back to my own teenage years and a place I now visited infrequently, to see my own family.

Doors opened. And not just to my own past or relationship to Essex and to Barrow, but in this shared writing and imagining of the story of The Barrow Rapture. Ideas, images, locations emerged as we wrote, and Beth drew and painted. Sometimes I was surprised by what appeared on the page as I wrote myself.

Stories, I suppose, are both personal and shared, coming to life as the circuit between the text and the reader. The form of The Barrow Rapture emphasises that process of transmission and creation. In collaborating with Jenn, Tom and Beth, I’ve discovered how a project like The Barrow Rapture is both personal and shared, and in its transmissions gains a kind of unexpected life and shape, and I hope it continues to do so.

Brian Baker
http://sciencefiction365.blogspot.co.uk

Until May last year my experience of Barrow-in-Furness had been fleeting, rushed changes at the train station. Sprinting through the underpass with too much luggage to make a connection north up the west coast of Cumbria or south to Manchester and beyond, always transitory, somewhere I needed to pass through to get somewhere else. Over the last decade or so it has become a familiar and personal non-place to me, missing my connection, waiting in the sparse entrance, an icy sea wind cutting through winter layers – always somewhere I travelled alone to visit the people I loved.

Barrow is situated in an isolated jutting peninsula on the North West coast, a purpose-built industrial town sandwiched between power stations, off-shore wind farms and the Cumbrian fells, partially surrounded by sinking sands shifting between Morecambe Bay and the Ravenglass estuary.

For my first real visit to Barrow last spring, I didn’t take the train, I drove from further up the Cumbrian coast, south over the barren moorland of Corney Fell, where on reaching the highest point I had a clear view of the Irish Sea, the wind farms and the horizon blurring land, sea and sky. All the way to Barrow.

On the approach into the town there is a sense of industrial layers. A still functioning Victorian brickworks on the northern outskirts, the modern seemingly unpopulated cuboid industrial estates and leviathan sheds rising out of the centre, mocking the brick terraced houses at their base and imitating the mountain landscape.

Heading out of the town towards the docks, the roads are wide and straight, it becomes difficult to tell which warehouse is in use, which gas tower, which hulking metal structure. Piers and pillboxes on the beach, stumps that would have propped up a bridge look like ancient monolithic monuments.

I took photographs to try to remember colour, structures and where things were in relation to the sea or the mountains, but the Barrow landscape documents itself. Its memory washes up on the beaches and seeps out from under flaking paintwork, badly made facades or fading signage. After walking for hours, I stopped taking photographs and instead began to absorb.

The work for The Barrow Rapture became black, white, grey and yellow. Black and white like the drawings for a graphic novel. Grey for the hazy horizon and concrete architecture. Yellow, for the gorse bushes by the docks, for the edging on the train station steps, for the seagull’s beak and for the line of sunlight between sea and sky. Fading grey, yellow, grey. The landscape becoming more and more yellow. The yellow becoming symbolic of something more spiritual and ethereal. Barrow becoming a medium between this world and another.

And so the story begins and ends in transition, as we all do, with a voyage and a crossing. The protagonist steps off the train at Barrow-in-Furness station and walks through the underpass alone.

Beth Ward