The Plashing Vole: 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.