Car parks are an intrinsic part of the landscape, like them or not, and if they are going to encroach on the space where our common grounds, marketplaces, municipal buildings, factories and marshlands once were, then we have a right to interrogate the space, find a way to embrace it, even learn from it.

Gareth Rees has a talent for taking the most unpromising and marginal features of modern life and using them as a lens to focus his writer’s eye on discovering the profound hidden amongst the prosaic.

In his first book, Marshland, Rees wanders the post-industrial steppes of Hackney Marshes and discovers an hallucinogenic realm of myth and imagination. His next book, The Stone Tide, finds him decamped to Hastings, one of England’s decaying seaside towns. With a lesser writer this could be a conventional psychogeographic meander, but instead he unearths the negative psychic energy of the town and presents us with a case study in entropy.

Car Park Life is, let’s be honest, not a particularly inspiring proposition. Rees sets out to write about Britain’s car parks, then further hobbles himself by excluding multi-storeys, NCPs and private car parks, and limiting himself purely to chain retail parking zones.

I first heard about this book when Gareth visited me in connection with another project and sat at my kitchen table drinking tea and riffing excitedly about a multi-storey he had just visited in town and the shamanic graffiti he found on its upper floors. Basking in the waves of creative energy the guy was giving off, I decided then that, if anyone could make something interesting from this seemingly mundane subject, then it was Gareth E Rees.

Everyone has a car park story, according to Rees. In fact we all, he suggests, have at least one car park that has played a significant part in our lives.

Car parks are not only places for cars but also thoroughfares pedestrians. Hangouts for teenagers. They’re places to rendezvous. Bump into neighbours. Exchange goods. Get some cash out. Have an argument with your partner. Make an awkward phone call. Eat a quiet lunch away from your colleagues.

I struggled to remember my significant car park, spooling back through my memory to try to focus in on the very one. Then, when I read the section where Rees quotes from William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow to embellish his description of a car park in Scotland, I got it. My significant car park is not one lodged away in the past, but one very much in the present and in the town where I live. A car park where one of my favourite walks, along a disused railway track, starts and which once put me in mind of another Williams poem. It is also a place where a Morrisons supermarket car park encroaches into that of the local hospital, as if to allegorise the stealthy private takeover of the NHS.

Retail car parks, Rees discovers, are places of violence, dodgy deals, illicit affairs, substance abuse, fast-food binging and after-hours car racing. The least interesting use of such places is using them to park a car. In fact, the best way to view a retail car park, the way most likely to jolt you out of your induced consumerist dream walk, is to approach it on foot and to explore it in its entirety, including its outer margins. It is in these edgelands, the parts of a car park where one cannot park a car, that Rees makes his most interesting discoveries.

Rees’s research, his wanderings through the car parks of Britain, takes place over a period of a couple of years or so and overlaps some of the events and personal backstory covered in The Stone Tide. It also coincides with the Brexit vote and the outbreak of our shared national psychodrama. But Car Park Life is a very different book to its predecessor, as indeed it is to Marshland. In both of Rees’s previous books his language crackles with inventiveness as it is dragged along by his flights of imagination. The writing used in Car Park Life, on the other hand, is somewhat more constrained; its tone is discursive rather than driven by a sense of narrative urgency.

But perhaps this is what the subject demands: a downbeat world needs to be described with downbeat prose. Brexit. Climate change. The rise of right-wing populism. We live in a time, Rees seems to suggest, when the end of the world as we know it is a very real possibility. We need to find our hidden sanctuaries.

Is that what I’ve been doing? Probing for hidden sanctuaries in the urban consumer landscape? Am I on a pilgrimage through retail car parks?

Rees’s pilgrimage takes us from the south coast, to the Midlands, South Wales and the West Country. Then piggy backing onto a family holiday, he explores the retail car parks of Scotland. Currys, B&Q, Asda, Boots, KFC and McDonald’s; the same names crop up wherever Rees travels, the whole nation seeming to merge into one giant retail park. But where is his place of sanctuary?

I have been seeking the magical possibilities of bland corporate space in the hope that there is a potential channel of escape from neo-liberal hegemony, even if that escape is purely psychological and subjective, a new way of seeing the urban landscape foisted upon us, and embracing it in a way that offers a possibility of a future…

Rees does not give us many answers to the meaning of life as viewed from a retail car park. But he does pose some interesting questions and, I have no doubt, he succeeds in encouraging his readers to look at their local retail car parks in a new light.

Car Park Life is published on 22 October 2019 and is available to pre-order from the publisher, Influx Press