The path that runs behind the Publix Supermarket in South End, Charlotte, is ridiculous. For the past few weeks, I’ve been with my wife in Charlotte, North Carolina, scouting out where we plan to move to in the near future. We’re now back in England, and I have had a little time to reflect on the trip. In circumstances I assume common to most, for the past couple of years I have been living a somewhat monastic life of solitary contemplation, until this trip, which has been an explosive return to the real world, complete with actual human interaction, new senses, new tastes, and new places. A plethora of experience. My head, now thoroughly filled with all things Charlotte, has to get something down on paper. So, let’s begin with South End.

South End is the trendy, young, affluent area just south of the downtown area (which in Charlotte is called ‘Uptown’). It is an area experiencing rapid growth, namely of stylish apartment blocks (where we hope to live), restaurants, boutique stores, and a thriving brewery industry. There are tons of breweries throughout South End, more breweries than anything else, and they’re all NEW. This premium brewing industry has only just erupted into existence over the last decade. It is evident that all this has completely transformed the character of South End, a change prompted by the Blue Line, a light rail which opened in 2007. Today it runs from the university in the north, down through NoDa, through Uptown, through South End, and then further south still, ending not that far from the North/South Carolina boarder. There are plans though, for the light rail to be expanded in every direction throughout Charlotte. ‘Newness’ is my overriding sense of things.

Before all this change, South End was an industrial area, with a large textile industry. And before that in the first few years of the 1800s, it was the epicentre for the Carolina Gold Rush, this being America’s original gold rush which preceded the California Gold Rush by a few decades. This was a landscape then, dotted with gold mines, dotted with individuals all hoping to literally strike gold. Dreaming under the Carolina blue of making a quick buck. It is this that characterises South End, and Charlotte at large: opportunity, enterprise, make-or-break, exploitation, and superficiality. ‘Newness’ and ‘superficiality’ go hand-in-hand; this is what I intuit more than anything else, a kind of psychic silence. It is very unlike here, there is no throng of ancestral noise, there is no landscape crying to be heard. It is largely silent. Or at least I do not have ears, as yet, to hear it.

There have of course been people living on that land for thousands of years, but there is little to no sign of that. It feels as if everything has been placed upon the land, as if all buildings, and public spaces, have been designed not with the landscape and the history of place in mind, but rather it is as if every project has begun with nothing but a designer and a blank piece of paper. There is no continuity, and no iteration, no sense that one is being constrained by the psychic flow of space. This is particularly evident when one walks the city as I have done over the past few weeks. Paths in this city act in such peculiar ways. They meander when there is no cause to do so, they jut unevenly from the ground (particularly in poorer areas where they have not been corrected), along some roads they are absent entirely, and perhaps most peculiar of all, they sometimes just stop. There is a particularly egregious example of this behind the Publix Supermarket in South End - the path runs alongside the Blue Line on the eastern side heading west, and then suddenly nothing, the concrete just stops. It is evident from the scar of dirt proceeding however, that some enterprising souls have taken matters into their own hands and walked along the thin strip of land between the train line and the adjoining property line. It pains me to say, I was not so brave. I turned back.

Even though turning back felt so intuitively wrong in the moment, I couldn’t fully appreciate why that was until I did some further reading. Charlotte is unusual as a new American city in that it does not follow a standard north to south grid pattern. Rather, Uptown runs roughly from north/east to south/west, and north/west to south/east, and the reason for this has to do with the Native American population. So, they did leave some sign. Charlotte was originally a Native-American trading post, the cross section of which was in the very centre of Charlotte, at what is called Independence Square. It was here at the angled cross section that the original wooden Mecklenburg County Courthouse was built in 1766. It was also here that the citizens of Mecklenburg County supposedly signed their declaration of independence in 1775. Although, I share in Thomas Jefferson’s scepticism as to whether such a document actually ever existed. Show us some proof! But I’m sure something of that anti-royalist sentiment was rife amongst the populous of Mecklenburg at that time nonetheless.

Anyway, look at a map. If one follows the intuitive psychic line in all four directions, or pertinently to us the one running south/west, it goes right along the blue line, and right over where that concrete comes to an abrupt end! I wonder if those enterprising souls know just how much more in tune with the land they’re being.