Daily photos no. 42: Going Back In Time

One of the strangest places you might ever visit is the Land of Lost Content (a Housman reference) in Craven Arms. It's essentially a massive warehouse full of discarded household detritus - the ephemera that rarely get preserved by the institutions that look after High Culture. Old packaging, adverts, board games, popular decorative items, cheap underwear, perfume bottles, TVs, a telephone exchange, badges from every campaign going, local radio presenters' signed photographs, eiderdown covers and anything else you might think of. It's a curious place, fascinating and revealing, half in museum culture and half in the art world: there was even a deal with Wayne Hemingway of Red or Dead fashion to produce clothes referencing its holdings at one point. There's a section dedicated to racist memorabilia: Robinson's Marmalade golliwogs, 'mammy' and 'sambo' postcards and the like - a horrifying and yet necessary reminder of the centrality of racism to British culture. And yet on one visit I found this cabinet labelled 'Black History Month', which felt flippant at best and itself racist at worst. This stuff was never Black history: it was white history.

I've been a few times, always with a group of students doing a cultural studies module (RIP), to get them to consider lived experience - some really get it, some don't.

These are from my first visit, in 2011.

Smoke yn Gymraeg! 

Don't have nightmares…

As seen in every 1950s aspirational household

As seen on Justin Trudeau

Hilda Ogden lives