The New Ruins.

The approach to Derby railway station from the west is a wonderland of faded and abandoned industrial grandeur. The preface to the scene is a decommissioned power station where smokeless cooling towers hold mute court across acre upon acre of cracked concrete, while countless giant pylons stand stripped of power lines, purpose and pride. And then the stage is revealed in earnest.

Sheds, factories, outbuildings – all crumbling wood and brick left in memoriam to the ghost of the working man. Windows gape glassless, faded paintwork peels, railings recline at improper angles, and some are missing altogether. A massive gantry crane stands immobile and probably immovable, its once proud livery of buttercup yellow now washed with the rust creeping remorselessly earthwards from flaking seams.

But there is movement in this petrified place. Old scraps of plastic sheeting and frayed fabric wave in the wind, like the drowned Ahab waving from the whale. And there are the new colonists – the elder bushes, brambles, bindweed and wild grasses. They wave in the wind, too, but they have life. They have the only life to be seen from the train window. I expect there are rats, bats, owls and urban foxes there, but they stay out of sight. One might almost imagine them to be ashamed of calling such a rotting monument home.

And there it all stands in testament to the ephemeral nature of human artifice. A little way beyond it is the newly-refurbished Derby station. Very smart, modern and functional it looks, too. But for how long, I wonder.