Mazierska/Sounds Northern, 7. Scrap Value: Sleaford Mods, Invisible Britain and the Edge of the North

The discourse of ‘edgelands’ has become a common one in literary, cultural and geographic studies, one concretised in Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands (2011). While this often now refers to areas of scrub, common land, or simply the ‘undeveloped’ terrains at the margins of urban or suburban conurbations, the economic marginality of the ‘edgeland’ is pointed out by Farley and Symmons Roberts from the very first chapter, ‘Cars’. While ‘cars are a defining characteristic of the edgelands’, in part because you have to automobile to arrive there, this geographical zone is ‘also a graveyard for cars. […] [M]aybe we see our own demise foreshadowed in theirs, our own future, cannibalised for parts, broken open, cast aside’. The scrapyard is a place where value is reconstituted, where no-longer-utile goods are collected and returned into the system of commodity exchange. These places form part of a hidden or ‘invisible’ economy, at the margins of the legitimate economy, and are constructed by distinc