Fictional town of belbury

A fictional English town from the C.S. Lewis book That Hideous Strength. Revived by Belbury Poly band.

The CD booklet of The Owl’s Map by Belbury Poly, their second album, contains a Field Guide to British Towns and Villages. It depicts Belbury as a border town (very liminal). The town contains or contained:

• medieval town center (mostly ruined by a 1940 air raid)
• the “quaint Manor Hall”
• the “reputedly haunted Baroque Folly”
• “some notable modernist architecture including the Polytechnic College, Public Library and the striking Community Fellowship Church.”
• an Iron Age for on Belbury Hill
• Neolithic stone circle at Thornwood Ring

the liner notes say “some feel that Belbury is an uneasy mixture of ancient and modern”

Pattie describes Belbury as a palimpsest, a combo of things from different eras. He said that’s similar-ish to [[ C.S. Lewis ]]’ version. Only in [[ That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis ]], modernity is encroaching on old, conservative England, whereas in Belbury Poly band’s version, the present slips into the past and “the past infects the present.”

Of course, Stone Tape Theory comes in here, as well: “According to a scientific report helpfully included in Pye Corner Audio’s Sleep Games, Kneale’s The Stone Tape (which follows the attempts of a group of scientists to study and exploit the echoes of past violence, trapped in the walls of the old mansion that they occupy) is being replayed in Belbury—but this time it is in the town’s discos, and the traumatic echoes of the past are caught in concrete.”

From Chapter 21 Stone Tapes-Ghost Box, Nostalgia, and Postwar Britain by David Pattie

Belbury is located in border country; it used to have a medieval town center, which was badly damaged by “an opportune air-raid in 1940.” Now, it is an odd hybrid of the ancient and the new: the “quaint Manor Hall” and the “reputedly haunted Baroque Folly” coexisting with “some notable modernist architecture including the Polytechnic College, Public Library and the striking Community Fellowship Church.” In the surrounding area, there are, as the Guide points out, features “of interest to the antiquarian”: an Iron Age fort on Belbury Hill, and a Neolithic stone circle at Thornwood Ring. No wonder that “some feel that Belbury is an uneasy mixture of ancient and modern_” (Sleevenotes, Belbury Poly, _The Owl’s Map¸ Ghost Box 2006); this fictional town is a palimpsest—a clashing collage, in which the history and the prehistory of Britain tangle together. In this, Ghost Box’s Belbury is not that different from its previous fictional incarnation, in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength: in that novel, Belbury is the place where the forces of modernity exert what for Lewis was a baleful influence on an older, more conservative England (in Ghost Box’s version of the town, however, the past infects the present as much as the present threatens the past).

[[ hauntology ]] nostalgia