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.