A Felixstowe Hauntology Suffolk walk

What was I doing chasing ghosts on the Suffolk coast, staying in a nearly empty Orwell Hotel in Felixstowe named after the river that gave Eric Arthur Blair his pen name? George Orwell saw a ghost just up the Suffolk shoreline in Walberswick and wrote about it in a letter to his friend Dennis Collins in 1931.
“I happened to glance over my shoulder, & saw a figure pass along the line of the other arrow, disappearing behind the masonry & presumably emerging into the churchyard …” (George Orwell Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters vol. 1). But it wasn’t those kinds of ghosts that I was hunting. The fact that M.R James had set one of his better known ghost stories in Felixstowe was a coincidence.

Orwell Hotel, Felixstowe
Orwell Hotel, Felixstowe

What brought me to Felixstowe was the influential writer and theorist, Mark Fisher, who was largely responsible for popularising the term, Hauntology. Fisher lived, and sadly passed away, in Felixstowe. I’d decided at some point in the past, when trying to wrap my head around the idea of Hauntology, that I’d need to visit Felixstowe in order to fully understand the concept.

Hauntology had first been used by Jacques Derrida in his book ‘Spectres of Marx‘ (1993) in a political context following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fisher wrote in his 2013 book Ghosts of My Life – writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, that he’d found Derrida “a frustrating thinker”. Fisher had broadened the use of the term and applied it to electronic music, TV and film, exploring the idea of the persistence of the past in the present, often manifesting as a sense of spectrality or haunting.
Fisher pointed out how some critics had claimed Hauntology was just another name for Nostalgia. Which raised the question of, nostalgia for what exactly? Lost futures? Unrealised utopias? The idea would follow that somehow we’re haunted by these lost futures. There’s a nostalgia for them, but they’re also present around us. They haunt us, they follow us around. It’s an interesting idea. This could also be applied to the landscape, and I wanted to explore the landscape Mark Fisher had been walking at the time of his writings on hauntology.

Felixstowe Beach, Suffolk
Felixstowe amusement arcade
Felixstowe beach huts

My plan to follow the route taken by Fisher and Justin Barton for the recording of their album On Vanishing Land, north along the coast, then inland to Sutton Hoo, had been thwarted by the winter closure of the ferry crossing over the River Deben. Instead I decided to walk south along the coast to Landguard Fort then follow the River Orwell past the U.K’s largest shipping container port and as far towards Ipswich as possible in the available light.

Felixstowe container port

I filled up on the fried breakfast buffet in the grand dining room at the Orwell Hotel, where the only other diners were two solitary men slurping down plates of baked beans. Setting off along the seafront, I passed the mansion built in 1865 for a gun cartridge manufacturer where Augusta Empress of Germany stayed with her family in 1891, putting Felixstowe on the map as a place to come and look at the sea.

I’d read somewhere that Felixstowe was the first place to have permanent beach huts. So it was the home of the beach hut more than the home of Hauntology. Maybe we were haunted by the lost future of the beach hut and bathing German Empresses.

Plodding along the Suffolk beach it was impossible not to think of W.G Sebald and his Suffolk schelp recounted in The Rings of Saturn. In his review of Grant Gee’s film inspired by the book, Patience (After Sebald 2011), Mark Fisher wrote of how he thought Sebald’s book would capture the Tarkovsky-like landscape of the Zone that Fisher saw in the remains of pill-boxes, martello towers, and looming cranes. Instead he found that Sebald had “morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them …The landscape in The Rings of Saturn functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian’s listless daydream”.

Felixstowe WW2 defences

Fisher wrote about the ‘weird and the eerie’. And you saw that in spades around Landguard Point with its defensive structures and eerie robot-operated port where huge cranes shuffled shipping containers producing a symphony of metal music clanking, chains swaying and hydraulic sighs. He had a vision of staging a hauntology event in Landguard Fort.

The walk along the seafront to the port had taken three hours – the whole morning more or less. I needed to double back in a wide loop to circumnavigate the vast port, stopping for a large cafetiere of coffee in the Rainbow Tea Room which was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking on top of an antique dresser. My placemat was printed with a map of the Desborough Hundred, taking me back to home ground and the formation of the Desborough Hundred Psychogeographical Society with my sister Cathy in 2004. I was reading Herzog’s Of Walking In Ice which seemed the perfect companion as the chill wind whipped in. Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris had also taken place in December but in far less clement weather.

Felixstowe Port
River Orwell

By the time I’d rounded the container port and reached the River Orwell there was only an hour or two of daylight left. I wouldn’t make it anywhere near Ipswich, but I was more than content with the walk. The high banks that protected the marshes from the flood waters put me in mind of walking the River Blyth near Southwold – just north along the coast. And as I did a lap of Trimley Marshes in the dusk, I started to plot my return to walk the Orwell from Ipswich then continue along Mark Fisher’s Suffolk coast.

Video filmed December 2024.

Landscape and the transformation of reality

Patrick Keiller London book
Abbey Creek West Ham p.10-11 – near where Patrick Keiller taught at North East London Polytechnic 1983-92

Patrick Keiller, Mark Fisher, W.G. Sebald and Will Self on the possibilities created by engagement with the landscape

I came across an edited extract of the following quote from Patrick Keiller in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. This is the full passage from Keiller’s essay Landscape and cinematography published in cultural geographies 16 in 2009:
“I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the Thatcher era, after encountering a surrealist tradition in the UK and elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality. I recently came across a description, in Kitty Hauser’s Bloody old Britain, of O.G.S. Crawford’s photography: ‘Like photographers of the New Objectivity, clarity was his goal. Like them, he favoured stark contrasts, with no blurring or mistiness. His focus, like theirs, was on the object or the scene in front of him, which it was his aim to illuminate as clearly as he could. [. . .] It was commitment that lit up his photographs [. . .] Such photographs suggest a love of the world that was almost mystical in its intensity.’ I had forgotten that photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one, even if only by improving the quality of the light.”

Patrick Keiller - The Possibility of Life's Survival on the Planet

Elsewhere in the essay, Keiller cites Fredric Jameson. ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the break-down of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’ (The seeds of time, 1996). Mark Fisher also drew on Jameson’s statement for the animating thesis of his book Capitalist Realism, published in the same year as Keiller’s essay, 2009. Fisher identified Capitalist Realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” He argued that capitalist realism could only be overcome through the development of a new collective imagination, one that is capable of envisioning and creating alternatives to the current system. His proposed “politics of possibility” would open up new avenues for collective action and social transformation. Much like Keiller had seen the possibility of transforming reality through landscape film-making.

St George's Lutheran Church London E1
St George’s Lutheran Church

The Jameson quote was paraphrased by the author Will Self in a talk he gave the other night (20th December 2022) at St George’s German Lutheran Church in Whitechapel, entitled: The Ghost of Future Past – WG Sebald and the Trauma of Modernity. In his talk Self noted how Sebald was far more concerned with the looming ecological catastrophe and environmental breakdown than he is given credit for. He recounts a chance encounter he had with Sebald on Dunwich Heath in 1992 while he was living in the area writing his novel Great Apes. Self was ‘knuckle-walking’ like a chimp as research for the book when he came across Sebald’s path. Sebald was embarked on a walk along the Suffolk coast for his seminal work, The Rings of Saturn. Self did not know who Sebald was at this point, and it’s not clear if Sebald recognised Will Self who, although lauded for his excellent debut collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), hadn’t yet punctured the mainstream in the way he was shortly to do. Self recalled how their conversation had centred around the subject of ecocide. This encounter was retold in the early drafts of Rings of Saturn (with the Will Self character dressed in white silk pantaloons) and later edited out.

Greyfriars Friary Dunwich
Greyfriars Friary Dunwich

The fact that Patrick Keiller, Will Self and Mark Fisher are drawing from the same critique of late-capitalism should not be surprising given their shared interest in the changing nature of place and landscape. I’m not sure what Keiller made of Sebald’s writing but I found echoes of Keiller’s Robinson character in the eponymous central figure of Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Stephen Watts, who’d guided Sebald through the East End on his research walks for Austerlitz, was in attendance at St George’s for the Will Self talk.

David Anderson links Keiller and Sebald (along with Iain Sinclair) in his book, Landscape and Subjectivity in the work of Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair. Anderson points out that all three draw from two principle lineages: the tradition of the ‘English Journey’, and the continental ideas generated by Surrealism and Situationism. Mark Fisher was a great admirer of both Sebald and Keiller and there are connections between their ideas of the landscape with Fisher’s promotion of hauntology. “Walking in ruins places us in a strange state of temporal dislocation, in which the past is simultaneously absent and present, for which Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ (in Spectres Of Marx, 1993)” – Frieze magazine, 2008.

Despite the pessimistic tone that emerges from all the writers mentioned here in their engagement with the landscape, Keiller does raise the possibility that a better world could be created – merely by looking at it.