The view from the ruins: a legal psychogeography of the empty seminary

“Ruins confound the normative spacings of things, practices and people. They open up possibilities for regulated urban bodies to escape their shackles in expressive pursuits and sensual experience, foreground alternative aesthetics about where and how things should be situated…” Tim Edensor (2005) Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Berg, Oxford, p.18 Edensor’s masterful study of the meanings and materialities of contemporary industrial ruins was one of the first academic books that I read when I stepped back into University life, aged 40. Edensor’s attention to ruins both chimed and conflicted with my own occupational experience. As an environmental lawyer I’d been paid to assess such ruins as objects of possible contamination, liability and adaptive potential, peering into their operational pasts in order to make sense of their futures. Through that work I knew that people do strange things in ruins, and but I also knew that a lot of managerial time was spent by…