Charlie Gere hates the Lakes

The Hedgehog and the Fox

My guest today is Charlie Gere, who hates the Lake District; so much so, in fact, that his new book is unambiguously entitled I Hate the Lake District. But it’s not a diatribe against fudge shops and coach tours. He writes in his introduction:

‘I love the North West of England, but hate the “Lake District”, and the way it’s fetishized and sacralized as some kind of “unspoilt” paradise, a consolatory Eden to which those battered by contemporary life can retreat. ‘I also love it, guiltily, for the very reasons that I hate it. I am overwhelmed, for example, by the experience of the mountains of the North Lakes in the autumn light, and uneasy that the pleasure I feel is a false appeal to “nature” as redemptive.’

View from Kirkby Lonsdale

So Charlie’s attitude to the Lakes and the sort of post-Romantic, anti-modernist, mystical, almost Tolkienesque attitude to nature that they are often made to embody is complex, often ambivalent. He wants to see beyond the tourist vistas in golden autumn hues and reintroduce some chiaroscuro into the landscape, let in a bit of shade and darkness. So the stories he pursues are of the people and places normally omitted from the tourist guides: of nuclear catastrophe barely averted, eccentric artists, bodies in lakes, UFOs, even a failed theme park devoted to the nightmarish children’s character Mr Blobby. It’s a view of the North West that lets the uncanny back in.

[There is a] largely unacknowledged uncanniness of the Lake District, the sense that underneath the tourist veneer there lies something far stranger and discomforting, something apocalyptic.

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