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. Gordon Wu Tutor(s) Richard Morton