On two occasions I have ascended to the uppermost level of a public car park to take photographs. On both occasions, car park staff appeared to ask me if I’m okay. It seems that part of managing a multi-story car park in twenty-first century Britain is trying to stop people from jumping off the top to their deaths.

The first time it happened, I was amused; the over-zealous safety culture in action. The second time, I was disturbed. Maybe the car park managers aren’t overzealous, maybe this is a serious problem. It is. The man who came to check on me at a car park in Worthing was about my own age, probably more at home fixing a lifting barrier than dealing with a disturbed and suicidal person. Having assured him that I was there to photograph urban sprawl and brandishing my camera as evidence, I asked him about the situation. He had worked at the car park for four years and in that time four people had jumped to their deaths.

We walked around the top deck of the car park. The pavement was six floors below. Signs from the Samaritans invited the reader to call them and talk. Hand-made signs from kindly local people reminded me that I could get through this and that I was loved. Clearly, there is something wrong here, something dark and disturbing. Something that the car park staff, the Samaritans and local people were trying to address.

For both males and females in the UK, suicide is the leading cause of death in the age group of 20 to 34 years. Intentional self-harm, in the dry language of the Office of National Statistics. Not accidents, not cancer, these people had decided that they wanted death and had got what they wanted. The oblivion of a mangled body at the bottom of a six-storey fall was preferable to life.

I have been blessed with good physical and mental health all my life. I know it is a blessing, a winning hand in the card game of life and I am grateful. I also realise that others are less fortunate, they struggle to get from one day to the next. For me, the top of a car park is a high point from which I can take strikingly different photographs. For others, it’s an emergency exit from a world of pain.

Maybe death represents certainty. Oblivion is an end of everything, but at least it’s an end. No more pain, no more uncertainty, no more hurt, no more rejection, no more hopelessness. Just eternal peace.

This is so incredibly sad. That the greatest thing we possess, existence, is too much much to bear. The unique privilege of being a sentient being has turned to poison. How desperately, terribly sad.

Abandoned

This place used to be called Killicks Farm. There is nothing to hint at that name now, I only know because I found a map from 1878 of the area. A farm on the top of a hill, at the edge of a small market town in the Sussex countryside.

Even at the end of the 19th century, the farm was bounded to the south by a railway line. The land had been broken and reshaped to allow passengers to travel from Crawley in the west to Tunbridge Wells in the east. The train whistles and the rattle of waggons would have been clearly heard by the cows on Killicks Farm and by the people who ran the farm.

Those whistles heralded the end of the farm. The land changed hands and work began to build a railway line north, towards London. Killicks Farm wasn’t needed for the mainline. A curving loop was to be built so that trains could transfer from the north-south line to the east-west line. So one day the cows were led off the farm for the last time and were replaced by teams of men with digging tools. First, the soil that contained the life and productivity of the farm was dug up and stripped away. Then they started digging into the underlying rock, going down around 10 metres, splitting the hilltop and providing a level route for trains to get from the north of the town to the station further south.

The loop isn’t just a simple cut through the earth. Roads that had been severed by the cutting had to be reinstated on top of brick-built bridges. Where the sides of the cutting were especially high and steep, elaborate retaining walls had to be built to immobilise the land. Finally, a crushed stone trackbed was created, sleepers and rails were laid and then trains could begin to use the new route. A pastoral scene was transformed into a place of broken rock, iron and steam.

In the late Victorian era and the first half of the twentieth century, the railways were how the country moved around. Passengers, freight, livestock, mail, food and supplies for war moved more reliably than ever before, freed from having to travel on poor quality, muddy roads.

The industrial ingenuity that built the railways soon moved on to new innovations. Cars, buses and lorries became more popular ways of getting around. The quality of road surfaces improved in response to the needs of these vehicles. By the 1960s, the railways were in decline and losing money. The solution was radical. Close the lines that were losing the most money and shrink the network to the profitable commuter routes.

The east-west route was closed. The route south from the town to Lewes was closed. The loop was closed. Signals, rails and sleepers were removed. Only the mainline to London remained.

The loop became quiet. It was a route that was of no use to anyone. Despite all the outrages committed upon it, nature started to occupy this place. Scrub and then trees began to grow, badgers dug setts, birds built nests. Cars, buses and lorries crossed the bridges in increasing numbers. Frequently, the bridges support traffic jams, not travel. The loop lies beneath the bridges, largely forgotten by local people.

Now, if you venture into the loop from the southern end, two impressions dominate; nature and rubbish. These are impressions at odds with each other. Nature produces no rubbish. Everything decomposes and feeds future generations. Humans produce enormous amounts of rubbish which are a problem for future generations. This dichotomy plays out in the loop. Scrub grows abundantly, providing protection for saplings. Beercans and fast-food wrappers rain down from the bridges as drinkers stumble home. Birdsong fills the air as a wheeled hospital chair faces the sunset. Delicate moss invades a ruined television. Foxes trot past a discarded propane gas bottle.

In our system of stuff, food wrapping and elderly consumer goods have no value. But a gas bottle does. When you buy gas, the price includes a deposit on the container. Return the bottle and you get your money back. It’s a good system. But someone was too lazy or in too much of a hurry to make this simple contribution to the circular economy. I will never know how this bottle got to be on the abandoned trackbed of the loop. I suspect that builders working at one of the houses that back onto the rim of the cutting, couldn’t be bothered to return the bottle and rolled it down the slope instead. But I will never know for sure.

So this bottle will continue to lie amongst the leaves and moss. Its strange dull orange colour permanently at odds with the shades of green and brown around it. It will remain a testament to our way of life. Of abandoning things that we no longer have a use for, rather than making them into something new. Nature is expert at converting dead and discarded material into new life. We humans are incredibly poor at doing this.

This is why an abandoned gas bottle lies on an abandoned trackbed at the bottom of an abandoned railway cutting. Abandoned, discarded and someone else’s problem.