From Essex to Kent (over the Dartford Bridge)

Day two of the site visit was spent in Kent. After leaving my wonderful B&B (Beeby's in Rochester) I went to Cliffe to meetup with Rick. I found Rick in the car park by the Church and we decided to go in my car down the long track that leaves the village, towards the marshes.

It is a long rutted track that is tortuous and can only be attempted at about 5MPH. As we drove down past the beginning by Court Sole Farm which is a Georgian farmhouse that has been there for years, we passed points of interest such as the clay pools and the half house/half barn. The RSPB had erected signs and benches where birds could be sited and the whole place looked a lot tidier than when I first came down here over 10 years ago. In some ways I am pleas

ed because it means that the site is more secur

e than before from development with a big organisation like RSPB involved. On the other hand, I liked the more rambling and confused nature of the place where it was hard to discern between public footpaths and industrial motifs.

We parked the car up in sight of the sea wall and then continued on foot. As we came up to the seawall we came across an old door with a metal pier behind it. The door was locked with a heavy padlock but when I came here 5 years ago, the door was o

pen and you could walk out on to the pier which was magical. Underneath the pier is a thick pipe and on the door is a label for a dredging company so I presume the pipe is something to do with dredging?

We walked on around the sea wall following the edges of the land. The wall is set up

high so you have to walk either on the shoreline, on the wall itself (precariously) or along the marsh. We walked on the marsh

with short diversions up to the seawall every now and again.

It was interesting to swap roles; Rick became the one who was looking out intently to Essex from the seawall, eyes scanning details, whereas I relived past sitings and points of interest. Things were so familiar, yet also there was evidence of transition and change. Buildings

crumbling, the locked door of the pier, more birdsong then I remembered. We wound our way to the group of old buildings which were part of the Munitions Factory at Cliffe whose production peaked during WW1. It seems so ironic that here was the manufacture of such violent objects and yet it is one of the most tranquil places I've experienced. As we approached the scattered buildings, a big ditch of water lay in between us and the buildings. I had miscalculated the crossing of it and so we searched for a point to cross. Eventually we found a ramshackle piece of wood that was slung across thesmall channel. I had forgotten the need to navigate your way through these ditches and small channels of water that criss cross the land. Early visits to this place had often resulted in hours of trying to find points to cross these barricades.

The buildings were more derelict, a roof caved in on a Victorian single storey building.

I still found the series of round brick built structures intriguing. Grassy banks of earth surround the exterior but you can walk through the doorways into the centre.

Apparently they were where the explosives were made. At the centre of each one is a water pipe, to dampen any explosions.

These round structures are dotted around the marsh, humps of earth with muted trees

atop them lie in between like prehistoric

tombs. Some of these irregular shapes were I think, to stop explosions spreading.

Here I began experimenting with the camera and a piece of blue fabric across the lens. I have been thinking of filters, handmade ones, so I wanted to try out some ideas. I liked the

blue fabric as it reminded me of those Cynotope

images from early photography. I also tried out a crotcheted scarf. The image was more fragmented but nonetheless still has potential.

Hannah Collins

http://www.hannahcollins.net/home.html

This is an artist whom I find interesting. I like her approach to photographing scenes. The Ghosts series is good too which has taken old black and white photographs from Russia - '...where the 'dead' images of historic portrait photography come(s) to life.'

(Finding, Transmitting, Receiving; Hannah Collins 

Black Dog Publishing 2007

Through the Dartford Tunnel to Essex

Last Tuesday (26th April) I travelled to Essex to meet up with Rick for a site visit to the locations of the project in Stanford Le Hope (Essex) and Cliffe (Kent). The idea was to preview the locations which will help us to frame the collaboration. At the moment, it is fair to say that we have some work to do on how we want to progress with the project.

I was fascinated in advance, about how the Essex site would look in comparison to the Kent site. I have become so familiar with the marshes at

Cliffe and have looked across to Essex on many occasions. After crossing the river at Dartford, through the tunnel and into Essex, I met up with Rick to check the map and have a quick cup of tea at his Dad's. We walked from there, leaving the post war housing and roads, to venture in to a country lane that was part farmland and part receptacle for discarded objects. Amongst crops we found vagrant lumps of concrete that looked like they had been flung from trunk road improvement schemes and somehow become contemporary monolithic stones worshipped by

the jogger and P reg mercedes that ventured down such obsure lanes. Above us were

lines of electricity cabling, held aloft by numerous pylons, crackling softly. It was at once comforting and disturbing, reminding both Rick and I of the presence of these in our childhoods. (These very pylons for Rick, one solitary one in a field by the canal in Surrey for me). In one

of the pylons, men were suspended on cables whilst they painted the structure; their van parked at a distance broadcasting the latest events on Radio Essex. As we walked, there were constant connections to the human existence, whether through cars passing, dogs be

ing walked or through the shrine to a mother on the roadside. Pre-scripted verse and epithets to a mother were clustered and huddled against the noise of everyday activity. Somehow this intervention in our journey resonated with Rick and I for very different reasons. For me it somehow underpinned human sadness that I have often discovered around the marshes of Cliffe and its surrounding area. Back to the prison ships which were moored out in the Estuary in Dicken's times, to the explosions from the Munitions Factory at Cliffe that killed workers.

Walking on we passed familiar places to Rick, where he had played as a child. They had remained intact but as we looked out to the river, there were large areas of land being developed, with clouds of dust flying up into the skies. This is the Thames Gateway project in full swing. The extension of London. The sweep of government brooms to clear swathes of unique land to accomodate the continuous swelling of the South East of the UK. Where will the children of the future play?

The road petered out and became a rutted dirt track. I was glad of the track, of compressed plastic bottles and rubbish embedded in its layers. This was what always greeted me when I went to Cliffe. It seemed like an imminent sign of the marshland. A huge steel barricade lay ahead, to halt any motor vehicles lest they head unwittingly into the seawall. There the track narrowed and we crossed a huge pipe (oil or sewage?). One side contained a substation, a hub of the pylon. Ahead we could see the seawall, its concrete barricade a perch for endless gazing at the Thames. A branch railway line was directly in front of the wall which seemed to fit into the scenario like a glove.

As we hunched over the seawall, the familiar outline of St

Helen's Church at Cliffe was visible across the water. The atmosphere was slightly hazy which softened the colours and sharpness of the image. I regretted not having a watercolour paintbox and paper, to record the muted greys and greens. I had to rely instead on the mechanics of the camera.