A Breathing Space: Critical Reflections on the Rewilding of Middleton Tuberculosis Hospital 2016–2025

This article emerges from a researcher-generated longitudinal photography project conducted between 2016 and 2025 situated on the redundant site of the former Middleton Tuberculosis Hospital in North Yorkshire. The research project explored the site’s transformation through an unmanaged rewilding in the context of surrounding dairy farms within the Nidderdale ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’. The hospital site is reimagined as a bucolic ‘island’ stranded in the ideological socio-cultural notions embedded in “Nature”, the countryside, and agricultural landscape under increasing pressure to value biodiversity and nature’s restoration. Employing a reflexive lyrical critical lens informed by ‘resonance theory’, social semiotics, and expressive visual sociological practice, the article contributes to the debates surrounding landscape valorization, the contestation of the ‘countryside’ as a working, and recreational landscape. Researcher-generated photographic practice captures the duration of iterative site visits, the seasonal atmosphere and potential experience of resonance of the site, providing vivid sources for reflections, meaning-making, while proselytizing the axiom of Kress, that: ‘without frame no meaning’. The key research questions are: (1) Why is researcher-generated photography, amid AI image production, an effective epistemological method for re-presenting and understanding the significance of unmanaged landscape rewilding? (2) How do photographic re-presentations and lyrical reflexivity convey the lived resonance of being in places like the Middleton Hospital site? The text rejects illustrative photographic use in academic discourse, favoring an expressive, allusive, and lyrical interpretation of rewilding’s socio-cultural value.