Japanese ghost towns, Scottish nuclear bunkers
Look, a Japanese ghost town, as captured by a traveller with a camcorder and posted on YouTube. I like this wee film – there’s something quite eerie about its quietness and slowness, with no soundtrack except for the footsteps of the person with the camera.
There are ghost towns all over the world – empty, crumbling places destroyed by wars, or abandoned as industries died and populations moved on. If the Japanese ones are particularly fascinating, it’s partly because Japan is generally thought of as a place crammed with people from border to border, partly because the fact that it’s such an alien place to Western eyes anyway makes its ghosts towns seem all the more otherworldly. There are, if you’re interested, lots of beautiful photos of Japanese ghost towns here.
Curiously, everyone involved in Swimmer One is slightly obsessed with places like these. Growing up near Carlisle, I spent much of my childhood riding my bike around a disused military barracks called Hadrian’s Camp, and the experience has always stayed with me. I still love tracing the routes of old, overgrown railway tracks, finding hidden tunnels, or wandering around the abandoned army bunkers on Cramond Island near Edinburgh. Laura, meanwhile, once put on a theatre show in a disused railway tunnel, and her MySpace page (now a ghost town itself, mostly abandoned as everyone we know moves to Facebook) lists her main hobby as ‘walking through building sites at night’.
Hamish and Daniel (who designs all our artwork and has made numerous films with us) spend a lot of time in these places too, and travelled around Scotland a couple of years ago visiting various abandoned nuclear bunkers. This particular trip was for professional reasons – they were making a short film based around Edwin Morgan’s poem In Sobieski’s Shield. As I write this the film is still a work in progress, but there are lots of photos from the trip at Daniel’s Flickr page.
One of Daniel’s nuclear bunker photos has now ended up on the cover of our new album, Dead Orchestras. Lyrically, as explained on a previous blog, the album is all about the things we leave behind when we’re gone, so the nuclear bunker photos fit this theme very well. During the Cold War, they existed all over the country – little underground outposts which would monitor radiation levels in the event of a nuclear attack. A lot of them are inaccessible now, but armed with a key bought on the internet, Hamish and Daniel found about half a dozen small hidden rooms full of windspeed charts, maps, and random personal objects like postcards from Benidorm, sent to the bunker staff by friends. On one visit, they nearly got caught by the military – Hamish had to lock Daniel inside the bunker with his camera while he got rid of them by pretending he was a tourist who just happened to be passing by the bunker while innocently out walking.
Look, here’s an amateur film by some fellow Scottish nuclear bunker enthusiasts. There are a lot of us about, it seems…
I love the photo Daniel chose for the cover of the album – a red phone, which would be used to phone in information to the War Room near Edinburgh, where (in theory) the government would be sheltering from the nuclear fallout. Out of context, it’s a really evocative, enigmatic image, like a post-apocalyptic version of the phone box from Local Hero. In the background are little clues as to where the phone is - a windspeed chart, references to radiation and nuclear fallout (and, poignantly, a plastic shopping bag). The phone is ringing. Will anybody answer it? And what will they say if they do?
Andrew
