Fairacres, Abingdon
Fairacres is a funny place, exotic almost, to my eyes. It is both a carpark and a retail centre. Well in fact the carpark is for the retail centre. If you are luck enough to walk there in the morning there are no cars yet, apart from a few employees.
It was born not long ago, at least for the Easter part, as you can see from this timelapse video dating from 2021
The shops... there’s nothing exotic about them. It’s the same shops you find everywhere in the UK, or perhaps just England, I don’t know: Dreams, a shop for mattresses and all things related to sleeping; Pets at Home, a shop for everything related to animals including a veterinary centre; B&M a discount shop selling from food to toys to any house related gadget including vapes, I go there sometimes if I have a vape liquid crisis; a gym, don’t ask me the name I forgot, but walking near there in rush hour, you pass near people with not much one, running or walking on a treadmill; Homebase, a décor shop with painting, furnitures, kitchen and bathroom building services and at the moment Christmas deco; Argos, the all in one shop for everything not food related; and the international brands: Subway with its perfumed bread found everywhere in the world and Lidl, the German supermarket, also to be found elsewhere in Europe and perhaps beyond.
Early in the morning, it is paradise. The place as an air of
postapocalyptic day-after disaster, you’d expect a few zombies or aliens to
appear, in the empty carpark, you trot along to go to work, alongside a few
others who have come to the place via the X1 the bus connecting Fairacres with
Oxford and Wantage. But the place can also be reclaimed by birds at this hour,
seagulls are there, they rarely go beyond Abingdon apart from when it’s week 0
in Oxford and the students have left lots of fish and chips on the pavement,
alongside vomit from young stomachs not sure to drinking much. So yes, the
seagulls are there, watching on you from the top of Pets at Home, maybe they’re
nesting there, who knows?
And then rush hour comes, which will be from 9 am to 5.30 pm mostly with a peak around lunchtime. The whole carpark is taken by people keen to buy this and that, there’s a bit of a zoo feel near the pet shop as anxious owners are bringing their dogs or cats to the vet, lots of distress calls can be heard then.
I go there briefly if I have forgotten to bring my lunch, which is often. I also like to stay there a bit and enjoy eating my pretzel from Lidl while looking at people. But you can’t do that too much, and there are no seats. The only seats available are from Costa, the coffee shop. But you have to pay for that. Otherwise, no bench.
You can sometimes see a few employees, mostly from B&M smoking near the only ashtray-bin available on the park, near the bed shop. Sometimes I join them, but since I have switched to vaping I find the smell of their cigarettes disgusting, or tempting, depends. So in a way, you find yourself walking, pretending to look at shops: beds, carpets, furnitures… standing still for too long makes you feel suspicious, suspicious of what I wonder? To be like Guy Debord, a Marxist, refuting the space presented to him? (1959) To refuse its ambiance? None of that really. True I’m a bit of a socialist, and will often buy second-hand but I too sometimes, succumb of the attraction of sales. Proof: I bought two beds from Dreams, I buy my vape liquids in despair in B&M and Argos well I have used Argos a few times.
Being musical, I really wonder what type of music we could hear in that space? American minimalist music, all in major tone to go with the optimism of the place? (though I'm sure the minimalists did not see their music like that). Muzak to numb your feelings? Mozart’s cheerful pieces to give the place a bit of grandeur? Or a mix of popular music songs, even a bit of the Rolling Stones to make people think they can still think? That they are still a bit against the system?
If you, like me, come early and go to work, which is on the other side of the retail park, you see the trucks coming along, and the huge trolleys staff use to put the goods in. From far away it all looks the same. There’s no branding there, only stuff under plastic. Same same. Staff wait there sometimes, or have a sneaky cigarettes, ennui ennui. Like me sometimes they count the hours before they are freed again. From carpark to carpark the same misery. But I’m lucky, I do not depend on people coming to ‘my shop’ to work, there’s always work to do in my place.
Is Fairacres ugly? Probably, to all standards, yes. But I remember what Will Self said during his talk at Google a few years ago (2007), answering a student/nerd/google person/AI already? who asks him what the point was, what the higher purpose of psychogeography was. Will Self, inflamed, and quite scary frankly with his ex-junky eyes, telling him that walking is key to many things, but especially to find oneself in the world, to truly measure the world and to also acknowledge places, all places. This includes, I’m sure, the Fairacres retail park, yes, even there. This is an ugly place. This is my ugly place. There is some beauty there surely because I walk there every day when I go to work, I have to justify and make this space mine. It has its little quirks somehow: the seagulls with their beautiful flights and awkward noises, the bits of grass that have escaped the weed killer products, the footpath from the busy road to the carpark near Homebase made by people, a bit of resistance against the order (de Certeau, 1980), just a bit before the official footpath where, in spring, bees abound near some purple flowers (oh don’t ask me what they are), meeting friends from Abingdon on their way to B&M or Argos, or Lidl - not sure, I did not ask them where they were going, and recently, there's a pink-red stain on the ground opposite Dreams - it could make you think about the wonderful colours left by the Holi festival but this is not the date. My favourite thing there really is to see a bit of weed or grass making it through the concrete. Whatever you do to a place, nature will always come back. Look at Chernobyl… it’s a green and pleasant land now.
"Dodgems/bumper cars, Pripyat amusement park, Chernobyl exclusion zone" by gpjt is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
References
Debord, G. (1959) Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AstzaqM2x8E (accessed 18.11.23)
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