Dinosaurs, dogging and death: the secret life of British car parks
(The Guardian Culture News)

In Car Park Life, Gareth E Rees looks into these unnoticed spaces for truths about humanity and pulls up more than he expectedBritain is a country of fields and country lanes, lakes and woods - and car parks. Roughly 20,000 of them(the government stopped counting in 2014). As Gareth E Rees writes in his new book Car Park Life, there is `an assumed truth that car parks are non-places without geography, nature, social history or cultural nuance` - and he wants to correct that.It starts with a late-night, post-pub stroll through Rees´s favourite car park, at the Morrisons supermarket in Hastings. Suddenly, he notices things he previously hadn´t seen; what he calls the `secret lives that hide in plain sight`. Elsewhere, his finds include a dried-up water channel built by Sir Francis Drake, now located between a B&Q and a KFC (Crownhill Retail Park in Plymouth - Rees´s second-favourite facility); neolithic standing stones; a dinosaur footprint; a long history of dogging and drug deals; a tree stump ominously covered in women´s shoes; and a dead body. Continue reading...