This project will investigate the potential for poetic intervention in the post-industrial landscape, concentrating on Brutalist and Modernist architecture scheduled for demolition, regeneration, or left in various states of disrepair. I will insert myself into these spaces, embodying my poetic practice in remnants of industrial Northern heritage and the politics of urban development, with a focus on working-class histories and narratives. Irreplaceable industrial objects, such as Fiddler's Ferry Power Station in Widnes and the Dorman Long tower in Teeside are being removed from the environment at an alarming rate, and, along with this, visual evidence of working-class history in the landscape. Research Questions 1. How does urban planning policy psychologically impact the people who live in and know a particular area? How is language deployed within policy infrastructures? 2. Can we experience our relationship with architecture as a form of kinship? How can we seek to preserve, reform, and learn to live with our buildings rather than destroy and replace them? 3. How can creative writing and a mythogeographic approach to Brutalist and Modernist architecture function as activism and intervene in debates around regeneration? Objectives 1. To critically evaluate how narratives of urban development are shaped and played back to us, with particular consideration given to the so-called regeneration of Northern towns and cities. 2. To produce a body of poetry in dialogue with the post-industrial city environments of the North of England. 3. To produce a theoretical framework for approaching, considering, and relating to undervalued public spaces and structures, and to promote creativity, imagination, and small-scale myth-making as a method of response/resilience, highlighting the value of topographic associative memory. RESEARCH CONTEXT Owen Hatherley calls Brutalism "a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people", (Hatherley, 2011), and suggests that many Brutalist architects were Northern and from working-class backgrounds, while "most Brutalist buildings were council housing" ("Strange, Angry Objects", LRB, 17 November 2016), making the destruction of such architecture, or its regeneration for a new demographic, appear as a "ruthless rubbing out" (Hatherley, 2011) of working-class industrial histories. In Cities of the North (2016), Jones and Matthews talk about being born into the ruins of the industrial revolution in a way that implies Northern cities are apologetic or embarrassed by their own decline ("the problem for the North is that it has been in relative decline for a hundred years"). Minton, in Ground Control, discusses the dangers of selling off civic assets to third parties, and the surreptitious privatisation of once-public realms (2009). Post-industrial Northern cities, stripped of their prior identities and defined by what they are not, are vulnerable to "reconceptualis[ation] as hubs for property development and consumption" (Hatherley, "Manchester's New Ruins, Ten Years On" GMHA, 4 June 2020) and sites of dereliction, neglect, and construction are commonplace. Meanwhile, overlooked and non-commodified architectural spaces "open up possibilities for regulated urban bodies to escape their shackles in expressive pursuits and sensual experience" (Edensor, 2005), and sites without clear function, in "fluid states of material becoming" (ibid.) offer spaces to play, interpret, and experience. Bollas talks of the ambiguity of structures, of buildings as "play-space[s] in the death zone," and of how "the living animate" the object, which is by nature "evocative" (2008). He claims our environment is always acting on our "idioms of self" (ibid.).