Ground Work edited by Tim Dee review – anywhere can be a somewhere

In his poem “Going, Going”, Philip Larkin expressed the fear that one day our green and pleasant land would be laid waste by “concrete and tyres”. Tim Dee seeks to assuage such fears. In the introduction to this collection of specially commissioned work by 31 poets, naturalists, novelists, historians and anthropologists, he writes: “The paved world can be as articulate as the vegetated.” In our urbanised world, filled with soul-destroying non-places, the need to connect to a locale remains undimmed: “Place-making is a signal of our species.” The slow accretion of experiences turns the most banal way-stations of our lives into sites of deep personal significance. As he says, “anywhere can be a somewhere”.

This is eloquently expressed in Philip Hoare’s essay on his love for the scruffy, suburban coastline of Southampton Water, where he grew up and where he now lives: “This grubby, desolate, lovely shore, overlooked by a petrochemical refinery, by container ships and the rumbling of the docks, has become my common ground. It is everything and nothing.”

Mark Cocker braves gale-force winds and driving rain to visit Upper Teesdale in search of spring gentians