A Place You Remember
2nd September 2026
Creative Perspectives
How might the places we know today change in the future? What role can storytelling play in helping us imagine different possibilities?
As part of the Rising Issues project, Project REPAIR researcher Dr Chris Pak wrote this short speculative piece exploring themes of memory, place, and environmental change. Developed through a series of creative workshops, the story reflects REPAIR's interest in using speculative storytelling to encourage new ways of thinking about biophilic living, climate resilience and the futures we are creating.
Rather than attempting to predict what lies ahead, speculative storytelling invites us to imagine alternative possibilities, question our assumptions and reflect on how the decisions we make today may shape the places where future generations will live.
The following speculative piece was written by Dr Chris Pak as part of the Rising Issues project.
A PLACE YOU REMEMBER
Cold, even well into the summer, albeit less so than when I first walked along its promenade in my brother’s company. Cascading white unfolds along the beachline—boats lie stranded for now amongst the birds walking in formation, feeding in the distance. I watch from the newly re-developed promenade, with its monuments to the region’s history, children’s murals and milestones tracking the space toward the Irish Sea. I remember how the water is pushed with a great, body-shaking rumble that resonates deeply in your body and bones, spouts rising above your head three times as tall as you are. At night, during a quieter phase, the gentle waves ripple with phosphorescence, the river vaguely mirroring the stars in the sky and the night lights of the city. As you approach the coast that edges the sea you see great swathes of foam building upon the concrete barriers, diatoms dying and leaving a trace of their little lives that strikes you with a sense of awe. That side of the promenade has been desperately re-developed, a kind of generalised, streamlined design that cascades across cities worldwide and which covers up a dying past.
THAT PLACE IN THE FUTURE
The first thing that you notice is the smell of effluence mixing with the salt tang of seawater as its pushed further along the river. The promenade is dry now, but only a few days ago it flooded during the third severe storm of the spring. Cold now, but not nearly so cold as I remember it. I remember walking along this coast and finding the crushed bodies of fish, crustaceans, even the odd porpoise, but now there are far more bodies—some of creatures I never remembered seeing before. Now, the promenade is bulkier, heavier, as the sea wall and wavebreakers try to stem the rising waters stirred afresh by each new storm. You can see the water damage all along the buildings on the boast, the trees and vegetation dying where the salt has intruded on imprudently planted gardens, the walls browned and blackened, frames damp and rotting.
Subsidence, always a problem in the past (maybe it was just a fear of its raising its ugly head) is now a monster that no insurance will cover. Deprivation is nothing new here, but this kind of quick upheaval is unwelcome. I used to hear stories of the tightly knit communities that characterised the area and now I see that’s really all that keeps some people afloat, though they’re often gone soon after their houses are declared unfit for living.
The shape of the river and the coastline now is wrong—its boundaries travel much farther inland than it does in my mind’s eye.