Now where was I?
Navigating old haunts and unearthing old memories. Ideas for locating your own place memories.
Navigating London by the light of a Lucozade bottle
When I was a kid, I was convinced my father knew the way from anywhere to everywhere. He knew every road and short cut in London, and seemingly across the country. He drove with confidence, recognising the signs of building traffic, he’d swing the car into a side street unknown by the masses—never stopping.
I thought he was magic.
The neon Lucozade bottle on the M4 route into London gave me a rare sense that I shared his super-human navigational skill.
Installed on the drinks factory building in 1953, the iconic Lucozade sign was one of the first pieces of kinetic or moving advertising in the country. Over the forty years of its existence, it gathered a quiet cult of admirers. When the factory closed down, the sign still illuminated the side wall of the building and was seen by thousands of people a day.
As a kid, I was oblivious to the history of the sign. I was uninterested in how many other people knew and loved it.
I only knew that it provided a joyful landmark and brief respite from the disappointment of a holiday’s end. The giant bottle that poured an endless stream of golden bubbles into a bottomless glass was a bright spot in the dreary sea of deteriorating 1950’s mid-rise concrete blocks. I wondered what strange trickery kept it running, its bubbles perpetually flowing, even after the building was obviously derelict.
Every time I saw it, I knew for a brief moment where I was. Between that point and the streets immediately surrounding home, I was lost again.
Now, thanks to Google, I know that the owners of Lucozade chose to keep the sign running, as a cultural icon and popular landmark for the entry to London, even after the company had moved.
Knowing this doesn’t enhance my memory. It diminishes the magic a little, turning sorcery into a corporate decision. It was only when the building was demolished that the bubbles finally stopped flowing.
How you form place memories
While you walk into and through a thousand places every week, you won’t remember the arrangement of furniture or colour of the walls if nothing significant happens there. But if it does, layout and details will be locked into your memory.
Your most enduring memories are linked to multiple stimuli—smells, people, sounds—that put that memory in context. These layers of integrated associations help you form long-term “episodic memories” of significant moments and places.
Lost sock memories
I have other place memories without context. Vivid, technicolour memories of the detail of a door handle or the pattern of wallpaper in a bedroom. But I have no context for these memories. No larger space to contain them. Detached from time and place their purpose is lost.
I refer to these as “lost sock” memories.
The first time I was stung by a bee was in a garden filled with bright red poppies. The busy flower border lay near a large stone-built house and extended away into an immaculate lawn. The family who owned the house had, in those pre-Airbnb days, rented it to us while they were on holiday themselves.
But the memory starts with poppies—a gentle sea of waving scarlet. Then the wonder of a sudden searing, stabbing pain in my heel. Followed by the sight of a sad, flat bumble bee, blundering out from under my foot and curling into itself in the manicured grass.
And my mother’s detached observation that I had never been stung by a bee before and wasn’t I lucky.
But I have no idea where in the world we actually were.
I could ask my parents. But I know the memory won’t be as vivid for my mother as it is for me. My mother’s attitude to memory is fairly abstract. She’s unconcerned with the placement of details, especially those that don’t affect her directly.
My father's memory is aided by meticulous notes and diary entries, catalogued, cross-referenced and highlighted to the point that he can extract any moment from time and place it in context. But he would’ve had to be there at that moment to know the context. He wasn’t.
Perhaps the geographical location doesn’t matter. What matters is the colour, the smells, the warm summer warmth and the first experience of that specific type of pain.
The clash between past and present
The world changes. Places in a memory never quite match the present day reality.
My partner laughs at my indigence when a favourite place isn’t quite as I left it.
“But no one asked me!”
Of course, I don’t literally want everyone to ask my permission before moving on with their own lives and projects, but there is something unsettling about visiting a place you remember a certain way and finding it's changed out of all recognition.
But sometimes, it’s these changes that prompt your memory. While you may not remember precisely what that new shop front has replaced, you know it’s different. When everything stays the same, you stop noticing what’s right in front of you. When it changes, it forces you to search your memory bank for an image of how it used to be and pinpoint the difference.
Sometimes, the greatest change is in you.
Navigating London again
Now, the M4 flyover has changed beyond all recognition. The empty Soviet-era blocks are long gone, replaced by shiny glass and steel buildings in the shape of ships and of, well, of shiny glass and steel office buildings.
When I drive that road now, I always search for exactly where the Lucozade bottle used to be. It's probably a point in space above or within a one of those new buildings. I can't be sure exactly where. But now at least I know the way home. I know enough of the side roads and short cuts to still feel a connection with that childhood version of myself who so idolised her dad’s unerring sense of place.
Unearth your own place memories
Here’re a few ideas for ways to unearth your place memories.
1. Take a memory walk around an old neighbourhood
Seeing what’s changed forces you to search your memory bank for an image of how a place used to be. Go back to old haunts. Find somewhere to sit and observe.
What’s changed?
What’s the same?
What happened in this place 5/10/20 years ago that you want to recommit to your memory?
2. Take a walk on Google Street View
If it’s not possible to revisit old places, take a virtual walk instead. Make use of the timeline feature to take a walk through time. If you’ve never used this feature before, this article shows you how.
4. Hunt down your own "lost sock" memories
Do you have stray memories that you can’t connect to a place or time? Keep your memory journal or audio recorder with you, ready to capture detached place memories that pop up as you go through your day.
How old are you in the memory?
Who might have been with you at that age? Could they fill in the gaps in your memory? (Gather as much of your own version of the memory as you can before you invite someone into that memory. Other people’s version of events will change your memory, especially if you haven’t explored it fully first.)
What other sensory clues are in the memory? What can you smell? Is the weather warm or cold? Can you remember what you were wearing?
What's your most evocative place memory? Let me know in the comments. If you’d like help unearthing your own memories, see below.
The Memory Mine
I admit I return so rarely to my home place in Sussex that I anticipate the changes before I arrive, sometimes I’m shocked because it’s as if time stood still while I’ve been galavanting the globe, on others I’m horrified that they have and I no longer recognize, for example, the woods where we used to play, the lake where we used to swim.
As if huge chunks of my childhood have been bulldozed off the face of the earth... erased from the map in some cases even and here I am thankful for strong memories !
Another lovely, thought provoking post Miranda, I remember that Lucozade bottle on the M4, every time I passed, it reminded me of childhood sickness and made me feel sick all over again. I hated Lucozade almost as much as I hated being sick ! X
Places changing: I moved back to my home valley after 26+ years away. Where I live now is relatively unchanged (not loving the housing developments sneaking into my otherwise pastoral view ... partly aesthetic, partly, dude, that is flood plain!) but the nearest big city where I lived for a year or so? Unrecognizable. Oh there are flashes of old buildings. But what I wanted to say was two visits before I moved back, I stayed with my mum for a while and realized that my feet knew how to walk the uneven ground from her house to the shops (no footpath). My feet remembered!