The Mythos of the Peatland Archive Part 1 Project 2024 Gordon Wu Manchester School of Architecture Manchester | UK Peer into the peat bogs, and you will find a record of memories past. Palimpsests of decomposed organic matter have consolidated into a deep, soily archive below the surface. Unjustly denigrated as ‘unproductive land’, their destruction constitutes not only an ecological disaster but the erasure of our own anthropological record. Set in a rural, soon-to-be depopulated town, The Mythos of the Peatland Archive proposes breaking apart an asphalt car park in Cleator, Cumbria to remediate a left-behind peatland and a left-behind community.Drawing on the unique mythologies and folklores surrounding the British peatland as ‘portals to an underworld’, the project is presented as a storybook diegetically written by the inhabitants of a now abandoned Cleator in 2094. Constructing a ‘Remediation Village’ from the harvested materials of a rewetted peatland, this ephemeral proposal will only exist for 60 years, biodegrading back into the landscape that birthed it. In life, the village acts as a site of production, performance and archive, facilitating wetland conservation and local rituals, intertwining to propose a model for rural degrowth and remembrance. In death, all that remains will be fields of reed and typha, dotted by remnant archives below the ground, sinking deeper into time. Tutor(s)