Unlike past disasters it didn’t cause shockwaves around the world; The world was far too distracted by its own problems to really care, but for a short-time at least the forgotten land was news. Even now to say the Cumbrian Emergency causes a ripple of recognition to flash across the face of anyone the right age to remember, and for those whose memory is better than most, the term ‘hinterlands’ causes neurons to light up in the memory, but cause no more than quick pulses of electric to flash across the brain before dimming to nothing.
The Event caused the world’s media to pause and reflect on their own good fortune for those few days, before slipping back into their twenty-four hour drone of constant updates on the new ‘all-time-low’ ratings for sovereign state finances, or the peaks and troughs of commodity and stock prices respectively. If nothing else, for most of the Western World, The Event provided a story of interest away from their own troubles, the hungry and the homeless, the dispossessed and the angry, before their own issues took over once again; snuck back up in the freezing nights where without any heating in their empty shells of homes they tried to sleep with ice forming crystalline fingers across the window panes.
Since the collapse of the Euro and the fall of the great Imperial powers of Europe some three years ago, the death throes of Western Capitalism had gripped the continent. The world had grown weary of images repeated ad infinitum, shocking at first, of masses of humanity, glimpsed through a fog of fear, clouds of tear gas, grouped together in a sea of heads, ducking beneath thrown missiles, torching their way through once great capital cities, aiming for the rogues and politicians, bankers and beaurocrats whom they blamed for creating the hand-to-mouth existence they now found themselves in.
It was only the southern states that fell to their people. At first they were propped up by the northern powers with their ‘expeditionary forces’ and ‘response teams’, aiming to protect their investments in the countries’ economies. As time wore on it became clear that they lacked the political will to take on their own people in battles the politicians felt were imposed on them from outside by the overly aggressive economic policies by those same states now trying to prop them up. These countries took only months to be overrun from within. Splitting into their ancient city states, people lost everything they had earned in their previous lives – or was that when the northern states incited their governments to raid their pensions to keep paying back the loans taken out to repay the nations debts, there isn’t the appetite to look back there now. The armed contingents did nothing to protect the northern countries investments nor to contain the ‘contagion’ spreading inexorably across the continent despite the scorched earth between them and it. It jumped steadily northward, in fits and starts, then fluid leaps, finally engulfing them, turning them inwards on the issues it created in their midst.
These great Northern European world ‘super-powers’ turned to nationalistic rhetoric, blaming the problems on anyone outside. Over time, this worked, whilst demonstrations became increasingly violent at first, in time, the night belonged to the ‘security forces’, and eventually so did the day.
On an island nation, marooned in the North Atlantic, cities once famed for their manufacturing prowess, the engines of the Industrial age, appeared to convulse and collapse from within. With no jobs, housing repossessed, people on the streets, anger pouring out over every small issue, each becoming as important as the last to fight the state which put them in this state. Physically manifesting itself on the streets in running battles with the police, widespread anger over the striated society which had appeared in the public consciousness over bankers bonuses was seen more and more widely as a societal problem, the rich protected by the elite. Built from the elitist remnants of a bygone age, a new party began to rise and take control, The Power, coupling themselves to the apparatus of state, the rich became the de-facto rulers of the nation. Men from every political party, high on the privilege that their exalted positions in government had given them rushed under this new umbrella:
‘The National Coalition –making Britain Great again!’
The National Coalition whipped up a nationalistic fervour, ‘British is Best’. Pandering to the masses, laws were passed with quick succession by the National Coalition, steam-rolled through Parliament by The Power: ejecting foreigners (who took jobs away from the ‘hard working people of this Great nation’), granting the executive direct control of the Police through the politicisation of the Police Commissioners introduced only years before to answer to the people, and the creation of a new paramilitary arm – the Reactionary Corps - to prevent a splintering of the state as occurred in the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’.
With no jobs left in the large northern cities, policies were pulled from the darkest days of the early 1980s riots. ‘Managed Decline’ it had been called. Let cities fail. Let the people move to where the jobs were. With the state almost bankrupt and no chance of further borrowing from abroad, ‘redevelopment’ or ‘re-adjustment’ away from traditional industries was scrapped. ‘Creative Relocation’ was enacted. The National Coalition for its capitalist, elitist rhetoric had never been popular in the North-West and as such it became the hardest hit – “You would think that they would have learned by now” became a familiar phrase echoing around the increasingly busy halls of Westminster as regional governments ‘Creatively Relocated’ southward. You would never know the pain that the policies caused, tearing whole families, communities, cities apart, from the television pictures the nation received. Documentaries financially supported by The Power showed only smiling faces packing their bags, placing their ‘allowance’ into their identical matching suitcases, happy to discuss with reporters their ‘delight to be involved in this innovative programme’.
The largest migration of people the UK had ever seen was underway. The Power paid for people to move, spread the disaffected ‘lawless’ of the North, scattering them across the rest of the country to prevent the build up of support that placing them together in one region could provide, toppling them from their airy perch.
As people began to drift south and east, the plan was to allow the hot spots of decline to to find their ‘Stabilisation Point’, to leave as many people living there as the remaining industry and jobs, without any government intervention could support. This under a massive relocation of state services to the south; Police, Fire and Health provision all moving on, taking with it the jobs and benefits they provided, so leaving towns unable to support any more people than could live directly from the land.
Pockets of resistance to this ‘progressive act’ remained, taking the streets and reclaiming it for their own. Periodically exploding into monumental ‘days of rage’ where whole swathes of the country erupted into steadfast resistance to the regime. The Corps became known as the heavies of The Power, travelling in convoy from town to town, city to city, with their rubber bullets, tear gas and scorched earth tactics making them the focus for the people’s impotent rage. In towns condemned to die, what was the problem in a little collateral damage to the built infrastructure, who would need it anyway?
The battles in the streets began to resemble images only years that had beamed into living rooms from Ramadi or Kabul. After some time, these were reported without fail from the viewpoint of The Corps, fighting ‘terrorists in our midst’. The Censor had begun to exert an influence over the press that was unheard of before. The newspapers and television were only too happy to acquiesce; they were, after all, owned by the powerful and the elite.
As the insurrection raged on, people in the south could not claim to be unaware of what was happening to their northern neighbours, however, as with any ‘war’, there were benefits to be felt somewhere. As more and more young men were conscripted to join The Corps, so the pay cheques began to arrive back at their parents houses. It seemed to unbelievable to many that this country, this government, with its benevolence in providing jobs for the youth could be systematically wiping whole towns off the map.
In time, the ‘independent’ towns of the north began to resemble fortifications, as the tide turned against the National Coalition; The Power reached breaking point. Those who were going to accept their ‘Creative Relocation’ had left, those still there were never going to give up, and The Power did not understand being beaten. They tried hemming in cities in huge semi-improvised earthwork fortifications, stemming the tide of help and mutual cooperation between towns that was their lifeblood. So too did the residents create huge mounds of detritus in the streets to prevent the columns of The Corps moving in. A stalemate was met.
On the day of The Event people did not know what to do. Blanket coverage flooded the airwaves, radio, televisions and computer screens, twitter accounts and social networks, images reaching right around the world; slicing through the tough exterior built up during the insurrection years, penetrating into the deepest parts of the human heart.
This was why The Event was chosen.
The Event was one thing that was not understand. It stood for mortal dread and worry. When something like The Event happened people would follow from wherever the loudest voice came.
It was the Barrow Revolt that finally caused The Event to occur. Whitehaven and Workington had fallen to the insurrection, and now the whole west Cumbrian coastline was cut off. The mountains which had contained it for centuries previous prevented access to the submarine base, the nuclear materials of the coastline, and the myriad of military-industrial complexes in between.
The Event was simple.
The Event required no proof.
The Event could not be questioned.
The Event would solve everything.
The Event occurred.
The tremor was felt from Stranraer to Sunderland to Southport. Satellite images appeared to show a whole mountainside obliterated. The Censor sprang into action, informing media of what to say. A ‘Nuclear Problem’ was what they said. The wording carefully chosen to sound like a government in control. The Corps moved in to reassure and evacuate, white suited figures with respirators and rifles. Now accepted as saviours from the horrors the nuclear winds could bring, people quietly acquiesced to their demands and moved out at speed. No time for packing. No time for questions. No time for goodbyes. News channels flashed the aftermath on repeat over and over. Low flying planes were seen, odd mega-structures hanging below them to prevent the crew being overwhelmed, tailgates open as bundles of paper were pushed out, falling over the towns and villages below.
A line was shown on the maps. From Siloth to Grange-over-Sands, curving through the peaks of the Lake District. The Uninhabitable Zone. Historically cut off by the hills that now formed the Lake District, repeatedly inhabited, attacked, pillaged and invaded by the Romans, the Scottish, the Kings of Northumbria and England, and for a short time a thorn in the side of The Power. Now a place for no man.
The ‘Nuclear Problem’ had caused an explosion so large whole tracts of land were now uninhabitable. The very reasons the area had been chosen for the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, its isolation and the structure of the rock in the surrounding Lakes, had saved the country inland from the same irradiated fate as the hinterlands suffered.
As the clearance operation progressed, the mood in the country became sombre. The uprising became less vocal and began to die down. The ‘emergency powers’ The Power gained after The Event quelled unrest swiftly across the country. Whilst other nations soon forgot The Event had even occurred and went back to their own internal strife, for the United Kingdom the disaster was a game changer. The Power were back in control.
Google had immediately begun posting before and after satellite imagery, as it had done with natural disasters in the past, collating the stories of people who left the area in the first wave of evacuations. They were scattered so far and wide that tracking them down became something of a hobby for unemployed journalists the country over. The internet providing an outlet for their creative talent that the mainstream media was no longer able to do.
For some time people puzzled over the before and after images, questioning how with a nuclear explosion the coastline had escaped unscathed; the epi-centre appearing to be the foothills nearby. Updated images provided by Qinetiq began to show a different story. Having had a satellite ‘fortuitously aligned in a relative position over the affected area’, their images showed that the result was clear; Sellafield was gone. The home of Britain’s civilian nuclear industry, reactor after reactor placed side by side with nuclear waste, was no more. The whole coast irradiated. Uninhabitable for generations to come. The earlier image, it was said, showed the origins of The Event; a landslip, ‘which engulfed the less defensible eastern reaches of the complex, triggering a minor explosion in a containment facility followed by a progressive destabilisation in the remaining active areas of the plant’.
Rumours were abound. ‘I mean isn’t kinetic (sic) part of the government?’ questioned one vocal blogger, later arrested for paedophile offences. ‘The Power has conned us all!’ shouted another, his blog soon disappearing into the cloud of lost data the internet harbours. The dissent though was drowned out in the clamour for reconciliation as the violence abated.
The totalitarian regime had won.
Fortifications began to appear. It was a return to the architecture of defence seen hundreds of years before, Pele towers housing Corps sprang up across the rugged terrain of the demarked edge of the Uninhabitable Zone. Earthworks more akin to those which protected silos at Broughton Moor RNAD in the mid twentieth century than any subsequent building typologies guarded entrances through the multiple razor wire fences, itself reminiscent of the security around the original Sellafield site. Marching across the landscape, through hurriedly cleared cuttings in forests, no respecter of terrain, typology or history, cutting towns in two, the twin rows of fence marched onwards, from coast north to coast south, a single track pitted road between, Land-Rovers hurtling down them at indeterminate intervals, surely keeping anyone or anything out.
If you could pass over the artificial terrain controls beyond the exterior perimeter fence, you would have found yourself face to face with signage graphic in its portrayal of the consequences of entry into the Uninhabitable Zone. Adorning the brutal fence along its 65 mile length all the accoutrements of control in the twenty-first century, physical barriers, psychological scars, noise and light control mechanisms.
A true Hadrian’s Wall of the future.
Years later, the trains were what first peaked people’s re-interest in the area. Not running from the mega-city of Carlisle, home to 375,000 people, but along the Morecambe Estuary into Barrow and beyond. These monstrosities, behemoths of ingenuity, mocking the populations they passed, unable to afford public transportation let alone their own cars, the carraiges rumbled along, their exterior skin clad in concrete and steel; slit windows home to flashes of eyes or condensating breath. The physical manifestation of the long held belief that something was still ongoing in the area.
There was talk of a new town. Outside the old Sellafield site. Laid out in a military grid with all the services expected of a modern city but instead of pavements and roads, connected buildings of skywalks and trams, as ugly as the trains, from which people alighted inside the hulks of the overbearing structures. Surely it was just talk?
Fifteen years passed before the tales of animals emerged. Animals with odd deformities roaming the Uninhabited Zone. Grainy, much-copied images from those who still had access to the old ‘outernet’ circulated the Education Academies amongst the Leaders of Tomorrow. As much as they loved the tales, they could not believe them, and their parents, whilst they whispered amongst themselves in the dark on a night, told them to forget it and threw the images away. Images of decrepid buildings amongst leafy, grass filled streets. Rotting bricks collapsed across the roads, smoke blackened facades, the backdrop to barricades of chairs, tables, concrete blocks. But flashes of things which didn’t look right, here and there, freshly sawn wood, cannibalised buildings with slender and delicate alterations appeared if you looked carefully enough.
“Today’s Radiation Count 23 millisievert.” Buzzed the Info-Board.
“The following LoTs have reached their prescribed maximum outdoor allowance and must make their way back into the building immediately…”
I N T E N D E D T O B E C H A P T E R O N E O F A S E R I E S
I N T E N D E D T O I N F O R M + T O D E S I G N F R O M
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