Brighter Later

The sea photographed from Essex - one of the images in Brian David Stevens' collection Brighter Later a series of photographs looking out to sea from every coastal county in Britain.


'Looking out to sea you truly are looking into the future, seeing the weather and the waves that will at some point arrive at the shores of this island, you predict their inevitable, unstoppable approach. You look out rather than look in.'


The book of photographs is available from tartaruga

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

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 ©

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

David Quentin: Silt

 

The 4 Windmill Street gallery in Fitzrovia (guess the address) is briefly (20 March-13 April) hosting Silt an exhibition of photos by David Quentin with accompanying text by Robert Mcfarlane. The photographs themselves are a collaboration between Quentin and Mcfarlane as photographer follows writer on his walk along the Broomway the dangerous path to Foulness over Maplin Sands. Mcfarlane describes the walk in the Silt chapter of his recent book The Old Ways (2012) and an ebook (boo!) edition of the chapter with Quentin's photos has been put out by Penguin (it was originally an essay in Granta 119: Britain, pedantic pop pickers).

Robert Mcfarlane spoke about the walk with Marco Werman on PRI’s The World programme, combining his personal experience with some of the history of the place, revelling in its spectral qualities:

The Estuary in Winter

Issue 1 of Managed Retreat print edition will include artwork by Stephen Jordan, from his recent exhibition 'The Estuary in Winter'.

'When Country Life published a guide to the English counties in 2003, and compared them they gave Essex 0 out of 10 for landscape value. This exhibition is an attempt to challenge that cruel criticism of Essex culture and landscape! Southend has given Britain a unique voice, and a language- Estuarine. Southend’s proximity both to London and to the English channel, makes it a 'borderline territory', on the edge, in which it is always wise to look to the past and to the future: to Eastend jollies, to metropolitan values as well as to utopian ideals' - Stephen Jordan

"Local's Guide to Essex"

 

Essex begins at Dedham Vale according to The Guardian in a travel article which manages to sneak into Suffolk, and runs in fear from the working-class:

"A timeless rural landscape punctuated by the steeples of centuries-old churches, where cows graze knee-deep in mist in the water meadows, it's a far cry from the industrial wastelands of the Thames estuary or the caravan parks of Clacton-on-Sea" 

Dream the Waves

Life Buoy (Circle Poem) (2006) by Alec Finlay

The moment we had weathered the angle of the Essex coast, bearing to the north, we found ourselves in another element. The waves began to enlarge, with a sullen and angry look, like sea-horses of an enormous size; insultingly they approached us, rolling one after the other with elevated crests and foaming jaws, as if they would swallow us at once. For my part I did not like it ; I could not look in any direction but these monsters presented themselves, and I grew sick at the sight. I was quite horrified, laid myself down on the deck, and shut my eyes till the next morning. A thick fog came on the next day, and bore down the turbulent waves, which was more agreeable to me.

from Music and friends: or, Pleasant recollections of a dilettante (1838) by William Gardiner.

As radioactive as an old joke

UK nuclear sites at risk of flooding

     Governments fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures,
deprived of the vampiric energy they suck off their constituents,
are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by
computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control.
Of course. Don't intend to be here when this shithouse goes up.
Nothing here now but the recordings. Shut them off, they are
as radioactive as an old joke.
     Look at the prison you are in, we are all in. This is a penal
colony that is now a Death Camp. Place of the Second and Final
Death.
     Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only
those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed
in can hope to escape.

from The Western Lands (1988) by William S. Burroughs.

Leave the Lands to the mercy of the Thames

A Prospect of the Breach in Dagenham Level as it appeared Feb. 3 1707

Having given this Account of their Prostration let
us lastly enquire into the Manner how these Trees came 
to be interred, which is a difficulty more easy to be re-
solved than the last. And this I take to be from the
gradual increase of the Mud, or Sediment, which every
Tide of the Thames left behind it. I presume those Trees
might be thrown down before the Walls or Banks were
made, that keep the Thames out of the Marshes; and
then those Trees were over-flown every Tide. And by
reason they lay thick, and near one another on the
ground, they would soon gather a great deal of the Se-
diment, and be soon covered therewith. And after the
Thames- Walls were made, every Breach in them, and
Inundation would leave great quantities of Sediment be-
hind it; as I by a troublesome Experiment found, in
going over some of the Marshes, soon after the late
preach, where I found the Mud, generally above my
Shoes,and in many places above my Knees. And it is
a practice among us (of which we have divers Instances)
that where a Breach would cost more to stop, than the
Lands over-flown will countervail, there to leave the
Lands to the mercy of the Thames; which by gradu-
ally growing higher and higher, by the Additions of
Sediment, will in time shut out the Water of the River,
all except the biggest Tides. And these Lands they call
Saltings, when covered with Grass; or else they become
Reed-ground &c.

From Observations concerning the Subterraneous Trees in Dagenham, 
and Other Marshes Bordering upon the River of Thames, in the
County of Essex. By the Revd. Mr. W. Derham, Rector of Upminster
in the Same County, and F. R. S. (January 1, 1753) published in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Impervious and quaking

An Essex Marsh by Charles Henry Baskett

"Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps."

from Walking (1863) by Henry David Thoreau

Managed Retreat

Along the eastern shore of Britain the line between sea and land has been sketched many times and any particular stroke we might consider now as definitive tells us more about our place in time than about the place’s place in space. Up and down the coast are fields re-claimed from the brine, drained, each one a little victory in a guerrilla campaign against the tide, fought for and barricaded in, fortified with bank and stone work. The war, of course, was actually lost millennia ago when climate change had worked its assault on the northern ice and a distant frozen fortification was undermined - releasing a tsunami across Doggerland, our Palaeolithic Atlantis, the fabled land bridge across which the first hominids had walked here. Since then the German Ocean, the North Sea, has provided our moat – a stretch of water separating the British archipelago from the continent to which it belongs.