CAR PARKS can give you the creeps. Blank spaces regimented between strips of white or yellow, meaning nothing without a machine to fill the void.

Belfast has more than its fair share of them: windswept nowhere places that are never more than half full, tier upon tier of dark recesses in which nothing meaningful hides, dead space sprinkled with gravel in which to measure time in vacuum-packed fifteen-minute slots. But think again, and car parks become symbols of priorities; of what was, of what could have been, of canceled futures, of what might yet be.

Their names are ghost limbs—dead industry, fragile commodities, withered delicate hands, sterile space awaiting beautiful things. Places in time far from anonymous or free from baggage, differing realities, ulterior pasts, struggles over present priorities and future possibilities. Dead fish markets, foundries and textile factories, military bases and gargantuan vats that belched out the waste matter required to allow a city to see itself in the dark.

Now, people leave their rubbish, not just their cars, in these spaces. Arriving in the dead of night or in the early morning to empty their boots onto the asphalt. What can be scavenged or salvaged from among these mounds? What can be saved?

‘All users are deemed to have received and read the Terms & Conditions. Access, irrespective of method of entry, is deemed to be acceptance of these Conditions. Anyone found abusing the system may have their means of access removed.’

There’s a man I know who scavenges from car parks, scavenges from everywhere, but really digs a good car park. He owns a small van, but only takes it out with him if he’s going hunting on motorway verges; in the city, he prefers to walk and to lug what he finds home with him on his looted trolley.

The car parks in this town are never nearly full. They weren’t made to be full. They rolled out tarmac, glooped out white plastic resin or threw out gravel to head off people with dangerous ideas… No houses for stinkin thievin undeservin troublemakers. Now, the space is filled with fire, waste, foundation myths, castaways…

Cruel jokes… Bag of sand for mixing with concrete, scaffolders’ polls with which to scale the growing walls, gleaming new screws in waterproof packaging, components for guttering, grate for drain

• Dumped
• By the Kerb
• No Utility Here

‘Sit down there,’ says the Scavenger, ‘rest your feet for a while among the rubbish, but watch that stone doesn’t scratch your spine. Let your eye linger on what you might salvage.’

City of fireside stories, town of mudlarks and pyrotechnicians, city of lignite, city that doles out just about enough to keep on.

‘Dust the salvageables down and take them home for inventory,’ my friend the Scavenger says. ‘Try not to harm anything small that’s been squatting in the wares. But don’t let them put you off. It’s us and them all the way down.’

RESOURCES
Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding by Rebecca R. Falkoff
Take Back the City map: The State of Belfast | Take Back the City
Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher