From Real Life Magazine:
A Shopper’s Heaven
Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden grounds,
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease …
These paths are stopped – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon and destroyed them all.—John Clare, “The Mores” (1812-31)
In England, the transition to capitalism was marked by a parallel process of enclosure — the transfer of common land to private hands, a practice that peaked by the 19th century. For landowners, enclosures boosted agricultural efficiency and increased their private wealth and power. But for the people who worked and walked these spaces, the seizure of land represented a “class robbery,” as the historian E.P. Thompson famously put it.
John Clare, the 19th century “peasant poet” of Northamptonshire, described this “robbery” in “The Mores,” perhaps the most well-known poem about the enclosures. In the poem, fences are the material symbols of the restriction of people’s movement and the barring of communities from land they had previously held in common. Yet for Clare, this restriction had a wider meaning beyond the economic appropriation. With the blocking of their movement, the political rights of rural communities — what Clare calls their “paths to freedom” — were diminished in favor of the landowners’ cultivation of sheep.
Today, fences are thrown up and “little parcels” of land obstructed once more, but for a different purpose. Land is emptied and human movement “stopped” not for the production of goods, as in Clare’s time, but for their frictionless circulation in an economy that revolves around consumer convenience. The more that profit depends on the acceleration of consumption, the faster the fences are erected.
Fifty miles north of London, John Clare country has now become part of the largest concentration of logistics and distribution operations in Europe. Between Northamptonshire in the south, Nottingham to the north, and Birmingham out west — a space traced by the noisy borders of the M1, the M6, and the M42, some of the UK’s busiest roads — sits the “Golden Triangle” of logistics. If you buy something online in the UK, it almost certainly passes through there.
The complexity and scale of the operations are impressive. Leicestershire’s Magna Park claims the title of Europe’s largest distribution center, a cluster of warehouses nearly twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. The three interchanges of the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal cover nearly a thousand acres. East Midlands Gateway, further north at Derby, is meanwhile the UK’s largest site for pure freight. Across these sites, and in the tens of smaller nodes that accumulate around villages and motorway junctions in between, the world’s biggest real estate companies —Prologis, Segro, GLP, Panattoni — do battle to provide the most convenient and efficient sites for the likes of Amazon and other global retail brands and delivery companies, as well as the UK’s supermarkets and department stores.
All this has made the Golden Triangle home to twice as much warehousing space as Greater London, Wales, and Scotland combined. It may be great for the logistics industry, but it makes for a strange place to live. Villages are overshadowed by the characterless walls of warehousing, and nature sites are bordered by the steely coldness of distribution parks and the roar of passing traffic. Residential roads change scale and warp into the thoroughfares of international commercial flows — and, as in Clare’s time, paths are stopped or redirected, channeled through fenced-off alleys between commodity storage, between sites that are intimidating and alienating by design. These are not new enclosures of public lands, but they serve as stark reminders for residents that the places where they live and walk, their “paths to freedom,” may soon become inaccessible.
The experiential inhumanity of the spaces of logistics, of course, won’t stop their proliferation. According to the real estate firm Knight Frank, every £1 billion spent online demands 1.3 million square feet of further warehousing....
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