inhabitants, whose specific cultural habits or environmental sensibility – their intangible culture – is often as interesting as what remains of the built environment.10 Sometime towards the end of the 20th century, scholars began to talk about places in new ways, suggesting that they could be seen as almost text-like in their qualities, displaying on their surfaces – their streets and buildings – marks and symbols of time and history that made them ‘unconscious’ repositories of a kind of cultural memory. This urban unconscious was to be found in the traces that remained unchanged throughout time and in relics dug out from places that had been hidden or subdued in the process of change. The search for evidence of the past of a place is something that contemporary culture has become more attuned to, and is one important way of recognising the power of this image of an ‘urban palimpsest’. The idea that places preserve traces in such a manner refers back to the ancient parchment-like documents – palimpsests – that were used, erased and written over repeatedly, but which allowed The peripheral the trace of older texts or messages to location of these show through. Within the context of towns may account understanding how places negotiated the in part for the line between the past and the present, that fact that what idea became a means of coming to terms was historically with how places unfolded in time.11 In Whitehaven, while each new era characteristic left its mark on the town as it spread out about them wasn’t swept aside in a and grew beyond the historic core and up and over the steep hills that surround wholesale manner. the town – the landscape that made it an obvious harbour location – it is in the centre that the ‘present past’ can really be seen in a small, contained space. This, perhaps, has much to do with the fact that in its original design and layout – dating from the 1640s and employing the orthogonal grid that is ‘ubiquitous’ in the history of urban settlements – it was really intended, like most grid systems in history, to be expanded outwards from its core.12 It just so happens that
»
88