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:

James Wentworth Day

Wild Fowling in the Fens with James Wentworth Day

James Wentworth Day* was 'firmly of the Agrarian Right school and essentially a High Tory' notes the 'pedia that is Wiki'd - crypto-fascist others might suggest, 'impressed by Mussolini,' writes Robert Innes-Smith in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but 'persistently warned of the danger posed by German ambitions and criticized the Nazi regime'.

Noted here for his affection for East Anglia and a raft of books about its lands and peoples, with a hat tip to Mr Easterbrook for drawing our attention to the gentleman.

*Not to be confused with Wentworth's Day a short story by HP Lovecraft and August Derleth in the Cthulhu mythos.

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