Preparing for change on the coast

2011 video from Managing Coastal Change about 'an innovative scheme to recreate salt marsh'.

Not devoid of bucolic charm

The 1594 map of John Norden

The railroad from Wickford to Burnham 
traverses a very pleasant open country, largely 
pastoral in its interests and industries, and certainly 
not devoid of bucolic charm. It carries you to 
Battlesbridge, where an iron bridge spans the 
Crouch near the old water-mill, and where, as 
tradition states, fugitive warriors crossed the river 
after the Battle of Ashingdon. Next you reach 
Woodham Ferris, where Maurice Fitz- Geoffrey 
founded a priory for Black Canons at Bycknacre, 
in the days of our second Henry ; a Transitional 
arch, standing in solitary desolation among the 
corn, was recently perhaps it yet stands the 
sole relic of that once rich foundation. The 
curious may find an illustration of this arch, and 
much interesting letterpress touching the priory, in 
Archteologia (1793). Another three miles takes you 
to Fambridge, whither we have already rambled ; 
then, looking southwards from the train window, 
you will survey a wide stretch of perfectly flat 
marshland, scribbled over with winding creeks 
and narrow dykes, spanned by many little bridges. 
Presently you will catch glimpses of the white 
sails of yachts and the masts of barges in the far 
distance, afloat upon the broader waters of the 
Crouch Estuary. Althorne is soon passed, and the 
next station is Burnham-on-Crouch the ' Burne- 
ham streete ' of John Norden's map. 

from Marsh-country Rambles (1904) by Herbert Tompkins

Under an East Coast Moon

 

William Adamson 'Under an East Coast Moon' - more Sebald contrails?According to the Gilles Peterson site:

"William Adamson, the former talisman of acid jazz pioneers Galliano and sporadic poet Earl Zinger releases his debut album on Brownswood on 18th March. Produced by heritage futurists 2 Banks Of 4, the multi-faceted Gallagher has created a topographical travelogue – a concept album in the truest sense – where the songs tell fragments of stories that have grown out of a small region in the Eastern Horn of England, with sounds more akin to recordings emanating from the Louisiana marshlands"

The Pale Horse: Silt

 

The sound piece by musicians Jimmy Cripps and Rico Borza, and sound designer Jesse T. Rybolt, commissioned to accompany the David Quentin photography exhibition Silt  (following Robert Macfarlane's Essex walk on the Broomway) has been released (download only - boo!) by Brainlove Records, under the moniker of 'The Pale Horse'.

Read full review of Silt - The Pale Horse on Boomkat.com ©

Reading RheuMatisM

More Eerie Anglia explorations, Suffolk hauntology via Mordant Music, Travelogues 11: Reading RheuMatisM. Here's Baron Mordant's description:

"Ohm vanishing land...Woodbridge via Dunwich via Hastings...hand dryer via ad-hoc car park choir via esturial mud-slapping...plenty of rheum at the reading rooms...Sebald's contrails...Eno's nose...'local mafia'...k_punk silted up for the duration..."


Read full review of Travelogues 11: Reading RheuMatisM - MORDANT MUSIC on Boomkat.com ©

The Creeksea Cliffs

With the flood defences along most of the River Crouch, there are few places where you can observe the unobstructed process of erosion. Here is one, the Creeksea Cliffs, on the north shore between Althorne and Burnham-on-Crouch. These are clay cliffs tumbling into the river, bringing trees along with them and revealing untouched flint cells to the sky. It's a fossil haunt too apparently, the source of shark teeth and Ray fangs, arrowheads and more. We beachcombed for pottery fragments and interesting shells. Near the eastern extremity lay a lamb corpse, its face eaten off.

A Study for the Estuary

A Study for the Estuary from James Price on Vimeo.

Estuarine mediations from Rachel Lichenstein and James Price charting the passage of a motley crew from Queenbrough, across the shipping channels, to Southend Pier.

The Outer Edges

More edgelands action in Essex in Kieran Evans's film The Outer Edges, a visual partner to Karl Hyde's forthcoming new album Edgeland (perhaps a sequel to Underworld's album Barking?). According to The Guardian story about it, it's a 'rather moving, artful documentary essay about the Essex borderlands, following the route of the river Roding down to the docks on the Thames estuary.

This is an edge I've got some personal history with having lived on boats in Barking Creek, the final crook of the Roding into the Thames. It was, and is, bandito country - with pirate capitalists, ex-junkies, ketamine zombies, DIY supremos, artists, suicides, thieves, prostitutes, greasemonkeys, rafts of global flotsam. When the weather was warm, and a hog was roasting riverside and a fairy light strand of bulbs hung across the sky casting magic illumination on a gathering of friends - then you valued the marginal. But in winter, when you heated snow from the roof in a pan on a gas ring to get warm water to wash with, when the wood in the shitty stove just heated the air above your barely insulated roof, when you woke in the morning and stared up at the ice rings on the nail heads in the ceiling wood above - it was a different kind of edginess. Still magickal, often, mind - but without the seasons, the place was also cursed. Shady deals, bad debts, boats stolen under contract - one man dead by drowning, one woman dead by hanging, the paedophile confessed under acid, children at risk from all sorts (lots of loco, little parentis - even from the parents), there was a hex on the place. I had the feeling, that the longer I was there, the worse the things I would see.

There was potential there - these are the types of 'no-road' places Stewart Brand speaks of in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built places where nobody cares what your doing, creative incubators, little bits of freedom. At a stretch, you could also go all Hakim Bey - at times it was a temporary autonomous zone. Too temporary though, and there were ruthless landlords (riverlords?) 'running' the place through their creepy Coco the clown agent - a curly haired scare face you could imagine waking to see stood above you with a knife to your neck. The Sausalito houseboat community of San Francisco it was not. 

Before too long we tried to make an escape, hired a licenced skipper to guide us round the coast to Maldon. We caught the cats, threw off the ropes and slid down the creek to Reiner's boat, paying cash for diesel tapped from its abundant tanks. [He would hang himself later too, down some other creek.]. The water was with us, the barrage was open - out past Creekmouth, under the tidal barrier and we were in the Thames proper heading east.

Walking Crouchside - Easter Monday

Easter Monday

The riverside walk along the flood defences, west from Althorne to North Fambridge, cold eothen wind to the back. The partly flooded Bridgemarsh Island lies to the left for most of the journey. Enclosed by a 'sea wall' by 1736, when those same defences were partly destroyed, the island was once inhabited, farmed and had a brickworks, tile-works, shop and a school. But it would be slowly abandoned to the tides, as holding back the waters became more difficult and costly.  The island was overcome in the 1953 floods with remaining parts of its defences being taken to shore up others on the mainland south shore of the Crouch.

Learn more about Bridgemarsh Island in Essex Coastline:Then and Now by Matthew Fautley and James Garon (Matthew Fautley, 2004)

Far away beyond the Crouch

" Then far away beyond the Crouch, came another striding over some stunted trees, and then yet another still farther off wading deeply through a shiny mud flat half way up between sea and sky. By midday they passed through Tillingham, which strangely enough seemed silent and deserted, save for a few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they suddenly came into sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of shipping of all sorts that it is possible to imagine."

War of the Worlds (1898), H.G. Wells 

Image:War of the Worlds Thunderchild by ~TroC--czarnyrobert