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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
