Neil Cossons

There is a growing passion for ruins. This voguish new obsession extends beyond the debate on the picturesque and the sublime into a more granular rapture - with abandoned places, urban decay and toxic industrial sites. It is a gritty fetish with an emergent following - of explorers seeking the inaccessible and the treacherous.

In this lecture Neil Cossons explores the dilemmas of landscapes where the powerful texture of decomposition is the attraction. Beyond any conventional means of conservation, the notion of places that attract precisely because they challenge the conventions of accessibility and regeneration offers intriguing possibilities.