You won’t have heard of Mawdesley. No one has. Even people in surrounding villages refuse to acknowledge the existence of this lifeless non-place. It’s as though even thinking of the existence of such a deadened little place causes a little part of you to die. Even wildlife seems to give the area a wide berth. It’s remarkable that someone once summoned up the energy to give Mawdesley a name. A more fitting name would be “urgh”, or perhaps a grunt, or maybe a sigh.
If you want to imagine Mawdesley, then think of the most flat and featureless landscape known to humanity. Then imagine it grey, damp and stinking of rotten cabbage. Add a few potholed backroads, a few ugly nouveau riche mansions, some 1960’s retirement bungalows and lots of late middle aged ***** scowling from behind the windows of their Range Rovers. That is Mawdesley.
When I say there is nothing in Mawdesley I mean it literally. There are no natural features. No hills, no rivers, no streams. There are no man-made things either, such as buses, trains, pavements, street lights, shops. No way out and no way in. Mawdesley is on the road to nowhere, disconnected from society and any other place. Life here is like a sort of prison. No one ever just “passes through”, and only a clinically depressed, geriatric, far-right wing bigot would be attracted to visit this non-place. Aside from a **** scowling out of a Range Rover or Merc you won’t actually see another human being in Mawdesley. It’s like a ghost village. No I take that back, that’s being unfair to ghosts.
Mawdesley is such a non-place, so featureless, so lifeless, so alienating that the human mind cannot comprehend it. The brain needs something to latch on to, some definable natural feature, some person, something. In Mawdesley your consciousness, your identity disintegrates into a barren, featureless greyness. You become grey and lifeless, existing in a zombie-like half-life. Neither living nor dead.
The surrounding towns, (all at least a perilous 30 minute drive away on potholed, ****-commuter ******** back roads) have been widely acknowledged to be some of the worse in Britain. That said a visit to these towns, such as Chorley, Wigan, Skelmersdale, Preston is a real treat when you are incarcerated in Mawdesley. Mawdesley thinks it’s a Cheshire village when in reality its an ******, featureless, scuzzy little hole in the **** end of Lancashire for scrap metal dealers and white collar fraudsters made good. In short Mawdesley is lifeless little ***********, home to some of the worse specimens of humanity.
