I Hate The Lake District by Charlie Gere

 

An alternative view of the North West of England that delves into its stranger past.
 
Please join us for an evening of conversation, insight and entertainment as we welcome Charlie Gere discussing his new book I Hate the Lake District with fellow author Jenn Ashworth.
 
 I Hate the Lake District offers a different vision of the rural environment from those found in much contemporary nature writing. Based on the author's trips around North West England, the book engages with nuclear power and nuclear war, slavery, imperialism, ghosts, love, God, cockroaches, and the sheer violence and contingency of “nature” itself—of which the human presence is merely a part. Each chapter starts with an account of a visit to a place in this remote part of England, the deep north, but digresses and wanders through multifarious themes and subjects.

Among the sites Gere visits are the defunct nuclear power station at Sellafield, home of all British nuclear waste; Lake Coniston, where Donald Campbell died trying to break the water speed record; Hadrian's Wall, furthermost reach of the Roman Empire; the mysterious and deathly Morecambe Bay; sites of slavery in the North West; places where UFOs have been sighted, avant-garde artists created work, and Islamic terrorists trained; shantytowns where the navvies who built the railways lived with their families; and even the remains of Blobbyland in Morecambe.

In I Hate the Lake District, Gere challenges the bourgeois pastoralism of popular nature writing and reveals the landscape of North West England as profoundly unnatural and strange.
 

 
'Charlie Gere has managed to find the perfect viewpoint from which to overlook who we are, what surrounds us, and how we can stop getting both these things so consistently wrong. I Hate the Lake District is significant, witty and amazingly ambitious.'
Toby Litt, author of Wrestliana, Corpsing and Patience
 
'From madness to becoming animal, from UFO sightings to telepathic empathy, Gere undoes the aesthetics and well-worn tales of the Lakes to provide a darker, stranger, and more wondrous landscape. I Hate the Lake District is a twilight of the idols for the mythic Lakes and a crafting of new sensibilities of place.'
Ron Broglio, Professor of British Literature, Arizona State University
 
 
 

 
Tickets £4  (redeemable against the price of I Hate the Lake District by Charlie Gere)
Includes a glass of wine/soft drink. 
 

About the authors:

Charlie Gere
 Charlie Gere is Professor of Media Theory and History in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. He is the author of Digital Culture; Art, Time and Technology; and Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art, and Media after the Death of God.
 

Jenn Ashworth
Jenn Ashworth was born in Preston and studied at Cambridge and Manchester. Her novels include A Kind of Intimacy and Fell. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. Her latest book, Notes Made While Falling, a memoir told in a series of essays, will also be published by Goldsmiths Press in October. She lectures in creative writing at Lancaster University