This guest article is by Cal Flyn, an author and journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. Her first book, Thicker Than Water, was published in 2016 and was selected by The Times as one of the best books of that year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment, is expected 2021.
The Ardeer peninsula, on the Ayrshire coast, is a strange place. Once the site of the largest explosives factory in the world – a 2,000 acre complex employing 13,000 workers, with its own bank, train station and dentist on site – it is now a quiet, overgrown landscape where derelict buildings crumble into ruins.
Tall grasses grow up through the disused railtracks, while sea buckthorn and goat willow push their way through weak spots in the tarmac of the old car park. Here and there, dune-like piles of sand disguise small concrete huts where local women once filled dynamite cartridges: these are blast walls, artificial mounds created to absorb accidental explosions, now colonised by heather and marram grass. A labyrinth of animal tracks through the woods lead past cooling ponds, strewn with rusted pipes, black-eyed bunkers laced with graffiti and the occasional Narnian lamppost standing lonely in small clearings.
I visited Ardeer in April, in the company of a group of local activists who are campaigning to save the site from redevelopment. As a brownfield industrial site, it would naturally seem like an excellent candidate for construction, if one is concerned with saving green land from the bulldozer. But the reality turns out to be more interesting.
Over recent years, the environmental value of abandoned sites like Ardeer has come to be better understood and appreciated. Having often stood undisturbed for many decades, they are often home to unique and well-developed ecosystems which have grown up independently. Derelict buildings and tunnels may be co-opted as safe winter havens for hibernating moths and butterflies; abandoned London Underground tunnels in Highgate, London, are now a major bat roosting site, home to six species of bats and protected by law.
One of the best known sites of this kind is a former oil terminal on Canvey Island, Essex, which made headlines in 2003 when the conservation group Buglife identified 2000 invertebrate species on site. It was dubbed “England’s rainforest”, which must have surprised the local teens who had been whiling away their summer evenings there, smoking in the bushes, scratching out their initials on the concrete slabs, and starting fires.
Part of what makes both the Essex and Ardeer sites so valuable is the ‘open mosaic’ habitat that can be found within them. Here, tarmac and concrete expanses halt the normal process of succession (when bare ground turns to grassland, which turns to scrubland, which turns to dense forest) in places, thus allowing a densely patchworked array of miniature sub-habitats to coexist in close proximity to each other. This allows for great biodiversity, and is particularly useful to insect and amphibian species which need different habitats at different stages of their life cycle.
These ‘mosaics’ exist naturally, but are usually fleeting – for example, after a large tree falls in the forest to create a sunlit clearing, which then naturally fills in within a few months. Derelict sites too are ephemeral, but can mimic the same conditions over a longer period of time.
Buglife also took legal action in 2008 to halt the redevelopment of the former Thurrock Power Station in Essex. The power plant closed in the early 1990s, and in the years since it had become a “hidden oasis for wildlife”, one of only two sites in the country where the distinguished jumping spider might be found. A large part of the site has now been laid aside as a wildlife reserve.
Ardeer, being a vast site, contains many habitats within it. They include relatively undisturbed coastal dunes, the open mosaic habitat now established in the former car park, the disused buildings where birds nest in the eaves and the cupboards and the fuse boxes, and areas of unmanaged woodland which have lain undisturbed for several decades. But it faces a number of threats. For example: sand extraction companies are currently operating there with little oversight, thanks to a legal agreement dating back to the 1950s (when the explosives factory was a strategically important supplier to the Ministry of Defence) that allows exploitation of the site without planning permission.
The same document also prevents environmentalists from having the site listed as a special site of scientific interest – and therefore protected from future construction – a proposal from the current owners could see the entire peninsula redeveloped with housing, a leisure centre, hotel and golf course.
Ruination and decay are of great aesthetic interest, as Dr Ragnhild Ljosland has already observed on this site. But the former explosives works at Ardeer and the old Occidental oil terminal at Canvey Island demonstrate that they can be a signpost to something else too: sites where the human owners have disengaged, and allowed the land to go to seed. Which, if you like seed, can be a very good thing indeed.
Cal Flyn's book Islands of Abandonment will be published by William Collins in 2021.