WISH YOU WERE WHERE?

Where would you place Place Attachment in your top ten characteristics?

This Sunday evening saw the first of two semi-annual events between the only two Premier League clubs in the same postcode Fulham v Chelsea.  As a child of SW6, born 1,000 metres from Stamford Bridge and 1,400 metres from Craven Cottage, it was history rather than geography that determined my personal choice of club. During my infrequent visits to the Bridge in the 1970’s I witnessed the notorious 'Shed’ actively generating a level of terror more akin to West Beirut than West London, and the sight of a hundred skinheads running outside my bedroom -over the roofs of moving cars- did little to dispel the impression. Okay, Chelsea had the snazzier shops, but come 5pm on match day you were given the choice of either being locked in (and security shuttered) for an hour or take your chances on the street. Not many brave souls strayed outside.

Thinking back, there were some equally scary experiences on the other side of SW6, including being pursued by armed (broken-glass) thugs (aged 11 or 12) through the churchyard of All Saints where Patrick ‘Dr Who’ Troughton got impaled on a lightning rod in The Omen.  But for some reason, my heart remains up-river at Fulham, where the Thames may still be fordable, rather than down-river at Chelsea (less fordable and affordable). Why is that?

Attachment to Place has been described as:

“the emotional bond formed by an individual to a physical site due to the meaning given to the site through interactional processes” *

But the glue cementing that 'bond' may originate from a number of sources:

‘One of the earliest works to describe processes of place attachment, is Seth Low’s (1992) chapter, where she presents six types of cultural place attachments: genealogical, links to family and places of origin; narrative, links created through storytelling and place-naming; loss and destruction, links forged through disaster and migration; economic, owning property or workplaces; celebratory cultural events, links formed through participation in cultural events like concerts, religious ceremony or sports; and cosmological, links formed through religious pilgrimage or connection to sacred religious sites. Importantly, Low argued that these processes are overlapping, that while they are distinct processes, they are occurring together in time and space and experience. **

It is now fifty years since I left that particular postcode, apart from a brief return in the 1980’s when I flat-shared a mere hundred metres from my initial point of entry to planet earth, Parsons Green.  This verdant island of gentility has survived untouched for almost 250 years, despite the encroachment of displaced immigrants from the Welsh mining valleys (my grandparents) and grubby chain-smoking film students (myself).  But while Parsons Green never changes, people do, and Dynamic Place Attachment considers how our mental maps are continuously overwritten over time, both psychologically and geographically.

I do not have the words to describe the torture I underwent when I moved, aged 16, from Fulham Road to Worcester Park, but there were scenes that would make The Omen look like Rentaghost.  Besides, the Emeryville Chapter of The Business of Pleasure has already captured that kind of displacement devastation brilliantly in Pixar/Disney’s Oscar-winning Inside Out.  Here, Riley’s sense of self is inseparable from the people and places populating her Minnesotan childhood -until she is physically separated from them when the family moves to San Francisco. A childhood trauma very close to the heart of the film’s main Director, Pete Docter, as he recalled in a 2015 interview with Terry Gross:

DOCTER: "…Yeah, we were looking for a way to represent adulthood and the passing into adulthood. And I think for me personally and a lot of folks that I work with, childhood is kind of a sacred, special kind of point in time that has a real joy and purity to it. And we sort of long on a daily basis to reach back and kind of grab onto it in some way. So this idea of moving seemed a good way to represent that metaphorically. It also is something for me personally. When I was in fifth grade – so about 11 – my folks moved to Denmark.  And not only did I have all new friends and all new surroundings, I didn’t even understand what they were talking about, which was very difficult for me and kind of started me, I think, on my path to animation. It was a lot easier to draw people than to talk and interact with them, so…’

Place Attachment as Anchoring:

Around the time Inside Out was launched, and five thousand miles from Pixar's California base, nine citizens of Salford’s Pendleton district (think Coronation Street rather than Streets of San Francisco) were interviewed at length using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to shine a light on their attachment to the area. Pendleton had witnessed tumultuous change in recent years, with the rapid regeneration of this corner of post-industrial Greater Manchester, yet the respondents managed to maintain a direct link to the past, and each other, through a cumulative sense of place that anchored them in the present.

‘...The most novel of the current findings, however, is how as the time spent dwelling in a particular location grows, individuals are granted ever-increasing means of drawing comparisons of the place through time. As experience is gained, personal circumstances change, and the physical environment slowly transforms, time serves as a constant, binding them all together. This was strongly evident in the words of the participants, who would frequently draw on experiences and descriptions of the area from the past, in seeking to articulate their perceptions of life in the present. As such, place is not simply a physical entity but a metaphysical experience…’ ***

Even though that ‘experience’ sometimes necessitates rose-tinted (or sepia-tinted) glasses:

‘…Research also shows how during recall, people are biased towards expediency, which although less cognitively demanding is less reliable in summoning accurate representations of events, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the cheap strategy bias.  This manifests in many of the participants of the current study as nostalgia, which serves to link time and space.  Participants describe the area as having declined during their time living there and display a sense of longing for the past. In describing the Pendleton of the past, participants are almost describing a form of utopian, by-gone age.  In their accounts, place appears to be connecting the past and the present, seemingly serving to influence their making sense of current events. This is largely driven by the association of physical landmarks of the area with significant, often vivid autobiographical memories. Such landmarks as pubs, picture houses, markets and an art-deco clock tower seemingly serve as vessels through which to ‘revisit’ the place’s past or, more precisely, how the place is remembered. Utilizing an idealized version of a place’s past as a reference point thus leads to negative perceptions of  the place as it is currently experienced.’

Life moves on and so does football.  Tomorrow Fulham are playing Wimbledon, where I’ve lived for the past three decades and…

DT 26 August, 2026

*  ‘Interactional Past and Potential: The Social Construction of Place Attachment,’ Melinda J. Morgan, 1998

 ** ‘Processes of Place Attachment: An Interactional Framework Jennifer Eileen Cross, 2015

 ***Imagined places of the past: the interplay of time and memory in the maintenance of place attachment Michael J. Lomas, Eunice Ayodeji, Philip Brown, 14 February, 2023