Behind the Pages (Part 1: The Unscanned Trilogy)

Location, location, Location! - by Tracy Todd

This post starts with a confession - that my books and my life are connected, even when I thought they weren’t. The first piece I wrote was about beliefs that crept into my writing without asking permission. This one is about the places that did the same. The locations in the Unscanned Trilogy were not totally made up. They came from memory, from childhood, from a compound in Saudi Arabia, stables in Egypt and a coastline I’ve known since forever. I didn’t always realise I was writing about these places, but reading back, I recognise them.

I’m sure all writers do this. For me, a location would sometimes arrive fully formed, a cliff edge, a cave mouth, a warehouse swallowed by shadow, a street I’d walked or a building I’d passed. In reality, the places in the Unscanned trilogy didn’t come from nowhere. They came from a myriad of locations I’d visited, been to or spent time at. Sometimes, those locations are singular, sometimes I just throw them all together.

The World Below

The premise of Unscanned is simple and brutal: in a future Britain, every citizen is scanned by the age of ten. To be unscanned is to be invisible, uncounted, unprotected, expendable, but it also can mean you are free. Free to choose, free to be yourself and free of the constraints of an oppressive government. However, with that freedom, if you’re caught, you’re a criminal. When I built the Unscanned world, I needed landscapes. I didn’t have to look far.

Grimsby gave me most of it.

Post-industrial, post-fishing, post-whatever-came-next, Grimsby is a town that understands what it means to be looked through rather than looked at. It was once the largest port in the world. At its peak in the 1950’s it was landing 500 tonnes of fish a day and provided the UK with 20% of its fish. But, since the 1970’s it has been in decline.

Its warehouse districts and dock edges now carry a particular atmosphere of places that once mattered enormously and have been quietly set aside. Although as I speak, they are now being reconsidered for regeneration projects, including a film studio.

However, when I wrote the Unscanned series, and in my memory, I see the world that was, not yet the world Grimsby might become. And it fit with the Unscanned community - a place hiding in plain sight. Grimsby’s edgelands, the fields, the industrial margins, the spaces between what the town used to be and what it no longer was.

Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

(A very good place to start! 😊)

The house! The one Adam is hiding in front of. His first mission alone. These are represented by the houses around a public park in Grimsby, called Peoples’ Park. These are the Edwardian homes built for merchants in a town that was prospering. There used to be gates that sealed the entry on one side, to keep out the hoards of the lesser folk. I have a couple of images. One was taken on Friday August 17, 1883 when the Duke and Duchess of Connaught came to town to open People’s Park.

(photo taken from Grimsby Live article 26/6/2017)

The image below is a typical example of the type of houses surrounding the park and gives you an idea of the house Adam was assigned on his first mission.

(original photo: Tracy Todd)

The Field Behind the School

There is a field the characters escape across in all three books. This field leads to the Downers, the mineshaft and it shows us the solar panels they find Ash under. It also takes us to the adult compound.

These scenes are from my childhood memories. We had a place of absolute freedom behind our school. No adults, just kids! We’d jump over the school gates, run through the playground and cross the playing fields, before crawling through trees to reach a wild area. This is where the River Freshney is today. We’d take nets and fish for tiddlers, (sticklebacks), use electricity pylon towers as our personal climbing frames, (Yes, it was dangerous but we didn’t even think about it then), and just while away the day. The fields seemed to go on forever.

In Unscanned, it expanded outward, becoming the wider Freshney River area, but the muscle memory of that original space is in there, and is also seen as part of the kids’ escape to the train in the first book - the way it feels to charge across a field.

The Warehouse District

The warehouse district in Book One draws directly from Grimsby’s docks. A specific quality of decay that isn’t romantic, isn’t picturesque, is simply the evidence of something ending.

(original photo: Tracy Todd with some editing using AI to take out cars/scaffolding)

The old decrepit warehouse where the characters later escape their trackers is a building I walked past not far from Grimsby’s Town Centre. It is an old Coal, Salt and Tanning Factory, built around 1883.

(original photo: Tracy Todd, with some editing using AI to take out cars)

Grimsby Docks does double duty in The Upsider too. The station where the kids arrive is the Grimsby Docks Train Station, leading to the Warehouse District (Grimsby docks), where the action plays out.

(original photo: Tracy Todd with some editing using AI to take out station signs etc)

The Children’s Home

The children’s home in Unscanned is based on a real building, an old Victorian workhouse in Grimsby. I knew what I was doing with this one. The workhouse as a model for institutional control felt exactly right. These were buildings designed to make people disappear into function, to strip identity in exchange for survival. Put children in that architecture and you don’t need to explain very much about the world they’re living in. The building does the work. There is also a scene in the laundry room. This was partially imagined and partially taken from research. Imagine the laundry room of The Magdalene Sisters (film 2002). I also had access in one of my jobs to a laundry room in a hotel. The long sheet rollers and presses are taken from there.

(photo provided by N.E. Lincs Archives)

The Cliff

I placed the home on top of Boulby Cliff in Staithes, a real cliff on the North Yorkshire coast that I know well. Rising 203 metres (666 feet) above the North Sea, it is the highest cliff on the east coast of England. In my younger years, Staithes was a place I always retuned to. I climbed that cliff. Watched the sun set and rise from it. It is high and exposed and the village below is picturesque and so out of this time. (Well worth a visit!)

(original photo: Jonny Lawson)

Perching the children’s home on top of Boulby Cliff felt instinctive. Isolation. Elevation. The sense that whatever happens inside that building, the world either doesn’t know or cannot afford to care. But I also created a series of tunnels and a cave underneath, an escape for the children, hope for them to find a safe place.

The cover image of The Collector is a real photograph from a friend and one-time resident of Staithes – Jonny Lawson, who graciously permitted me to use it even though I switched it to be on the right side instead of the left.

The Ghost Village

The beach, the steps they climb, the road above the beach and the village near the children’s home, abandoned, half-reclaimed, eerie, is based on Staithes itself. I want to be clear that I love Staithes. But there is something about its geography, its tucked-away-ness, the way it sits below the cliff and huddles against the sea, that lent itself to the idea of a place that could simply cease to be known about. A village that the world stopped visiting. In the novel, it becomes a ghost village, and as I wrote the scene, in my mind, I was walking Staithes streets. I just imagined them deserted. Staithes is actually a bustling tourist village in the summer.

(original photo: Jonny Lawson)

The Cave Below

The smuggler’s cave in the first two books - the escape route - sits below Boulby Cliff. Staithes does have caves. Locals call them hob holes I just re-imagined them. They became smugglers’ caves, purposely carved out for illicit dealings.

The Mineshaft

The mineshaft in Unscanned came from two things. Visiting the caves in Castleton, the Peak District. They gave me the sense and feeling of what it is like to be underground, but I also researched mineshafts. I read about actual places, their dimensions, their darkness, their particular claustrophobic logic. Research is its own kind of place. You go somewhere in your imagination and it becomes as real as anywhere you’ve stood. I knew that shaft and the intricacies of the lost passages.

The Fitties

The Fitties is a stretch of coastline near Cleethorpes. Chalets, sea, saltmarshes, a particular flatness that feels exposed and watchful. In The Upsider, the opening scene reveals the main characters spying on this coastline. It’s the right landscape for surveillance: open, with long sight lines, and long coasts leading to the north sea. Nowhere obvious to hide and yet full of small concealments. I still visit this coastline and this year will stay in one of the chalets.

(original photo: Tracy Todd)

In my imagination, this is where Adam hides when he sees three people coming to shore on a boat.

A Saudi Compound

This is where the geography of Unscanned becomes surprising, even to me.

The adult compound in The Upsider, ordered, enclosed, under surveillance, a world within a world, is based on an expat compound I lived in in Saudi Arabia in 2003. Back then, those compounds were, and probably still are, extraordinary places. Everything provided, everything contained, the outside world held at a careful distance. They are simultaneously comfortable and controlled in a way that is very difficult to explain unless you have lived inside one.

(photo from google search, Sharbatly Village: not named)

It was surrounded by a high white wall with guards at the gates. When I needed a space that felt like belonging and confinement at the same time, my subconscious went straight there. We used to call it a pretty prison. I didn’t realise as I wrote, but reading the story back, I knew exactly where my imagination had strayed.

The Horse Stables

The horse stables in The Upsider are based on stables I visited in Giza behind the Great Pyramids in Egypt. I lived and worked in Egypt for over 10 years. I still remember the first ride across the dunes of the Sahara, watching the sun set behind the pyramids. Hot, dusty, ecstatic at the beauty! I probably idealise it a little, but it became the basis for the scene in which Ash finds his father – a stable hand, after months of them being separated.

The image is one taken from a stables in Giza online, although I seem to remember there were many more stables there, some not as well-kept of clean!

(photo taken from: www.kfbstables.net)

When deep in my writing, I don’t always know where the words come from or what is behind the images. Sometimes, my characters wonder in a direction I haven’t even planned and I have to drag them back to the plot. I think it’s the same with locations. My brain digs them up and repurposes them for use. And thank goodness it does!

Is there a place from your own life, a street, a building, a landscape, which keeps showing up in your work or your thinking, even when you didn’t invite it? I’d love to know where your ‘Unscanned’ images are from.