Rising East Online

Review: Not Coasting But Taking A New Tack

Phil Cohen

Pool Spar Marker, Thames River is taken from 350 Miles, a collaboration between the photographer Jason Orton and writer Ken Worpole. The visual essay and literary narrative capture a journey they made along the entire Essex coastline in early 2005.

The BBC series Coast was this summer’s surprise hit. The televisual tour around Britain’s coastline set out to give us a bird’s eye view of what the history, geology, archaeology and even anthropology of the nation’s shoreline and its immediate hinterland has to tell us about who we now are . The places where the series stopped off were cleverly chosen to illustrate Pope’s founding principle of anglo-centric multiculturalism. He wrote ‘where Order in variety, we see, and where , tho all differ, all agree’. In other words, the English provide the order and the Others the variety. In showing us the harmonious diversity ( both ecological and sociological) to be found around the coast the series sought to persuade the viewer that there was more to being an island than insularity, that British Islishness was after all an inclusive country of the mind , and that you didn’t need to feel bad about not being able to afford a foreign holiday again this year, there was more than enough exotic stuff to explore right here on our own doorstep. For, as the programme kept reminding us, there is nowhere in the UK that is more than fifty miles from the sea.

The programme could be seen as a trailer for the Nelson/Trafalgar celebrations which came later in the year: there were more than enough traces of Maritime Empire on display to satisfy even the most nostalgic devotee of This Sceptred Isle. In a longer term perspective, the series can be located in a well established tradition of walking, cycling , sailing, and now flying around the coast of Britain , in chimeric pursuit of what it is that unites or disunites this king (or currently queen)dom. But this particular TV series was never intended as an essay of exploration into the national psyche a la Hilaire Belloc or Jonathan Raban. Rather like Andrew Motion’s recent radio survey of the poetic landscape, it was designed to give a gloss of circumstantial evidence to the proposition that we are an old country which has continually updated itself and consequently been long at ease with the differences that new populations and cultures have brought to our shores – differences which are everywhere to be seen if you know where and how to look, and which are less than visible precisely because they blend so harmoniously into the overall mise en scene.

The Essex coast sits awkwardly in this all too littoral imagination of the nation.

There are no white cliffs to suggest a rugged island fortress, no mountains to offer sublime prospects, no picturesque pastoral, only miles of desolate mudflats and sandbanks , shifting treacherously with the tides, merging sea and landscape under enormous skies.

But as Ken Worpole suggests in the text he has written in dialogue with Jason Orton’s photographs for their brilliant little book 350 Miles: an Essex journey, it is this very amorphousness which makes the area so attractive a subject for writers and artists. Here the political challenge posed by the porous nature of the nation’s boundaries is doubled over in the aesthetic challenge of giving them a local habitation and a name. In some senses this is well-worked territory. The fact that Essex side of the Thames Estuary has come to represent the downriver retreat of popular racism courtesy of the Cockney Diaspora from the ‘old’ east End, at the same time as it has been the first and sometimes last Port of Call for economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from around the world , this fact has not been lost on cultural commentators or visual artists over the last twenty years. In terms of photographic projects, one thinks of Anthony Lam’s ‘Ports of Call’ and Sunil Gupta’s ‘Trespass’; both broke new ground in exploring the sedimented history of migrations ‘from East to East’, unsettling their visual representation en route. But in 350 Miles Orton and Worpole take a quite different and entirely original tack in mapping out their Essex journey .

The book is an act of imaginative perception on the part of a writer and a photographer who have each in their own way contributed a great deal to a re-visioning of environmentalism over the last ten years. Worpole has been involved as a consultant in numerous environmental projects, including Mile End Park, and is a distinguished commentator on East London affairs. Orton is engaged in an extensive documentation of urban regeneration in Thames Gateway , exploring the transformation of its landscape on both sides of the estuary. They first worked together on the Visionary Thurrock project , an imaginative, if somewhat socially disembedded , initiative to master plan the area according to green protocols. Here their collaboration has led them in another, and I think more fruitful, direction.

The book is unusual in at least two ways. Worpole mixes the genres of personal memoir, tour guide and political commentary to great effect, combining natural and cultural history to provide a seamless web of associations linking the people and places he talks about. As a piece of writing it is a tour de force. He is especially good on the nonconformist individuals and groups who have been such a feature of Essex life. Given that his family were early recruits to the Cockney Diaspora, moving from the East End to Essex in the 1950s, he is keen to show that this was not about ‘white flight’ but prompted by a kind of popular environmentalism. He succeeds in demonstrating that there is more to Basildon than Essex Man ( or Essex Girl) , and that Jaywick is not populated by dodgy characters out of an Iain Sinclair novel.

In fact his whole strategy represents an implicit critique of Sinclair’s gothic pedestrianism; rather than searching for bizarre discords in the figure/ ground relations thrown up by post-industrialism, Worpole uses more subtle and fleshed out means to subvert the pre-established harmonies of common sense. For example, his deft sketch of the Othona Community at Bradwell both does justice to its local connectedness and shows how its very presence unsettles our assumptions about the Dengie Peninsula. If I have a reservation about Worpole’s account, it is that as a keen cyclist, as well as bird watcher, he is perhaps better equipped for exploring the estuarial hinterlands than the swatchways themselves. For his is essentially a landlubber’s account. The Essex coast tells a very different story from the deck of a wherry or fishing smack.

Orton’s camera is also shore based, although his eye is especially alert to the shifting contours of the tideline, that liminal space between land and sea which Rachel Carson has so brilliantly described in At the Edge of the Sea. But there is another sense in which his photographs explore edginess. In stark contrast to Worpole’s dense human portraiture, there are no people in his pictures. The land and sea scapes are empty of all but birds. Even the Boatbuilding Yard at Tollesbury, normally a hive of industry, is deserted. This radical de-population is not just about an empirical fact – few people nowadays work the wetlands or the sea, for of course that ‘scape’ has now become busy with recreationalists of every kind. Their absence from the picture and the intense stillness that pervades these scenes speaks of something else, something we might describe as a coastal uncanny.

A case in point is Orton’s picture of the now decommissioned Bradwell Power Station. It is seen from a vantage point looking across the wetlands , sitting immaculate and gleaming in the sun, as if it might be an architectural drawing or ‘artist’s impression’ of something yet to be built rather than a monument to a hopefully obsolete nuclear energy policy. The building and its purpose, at one level so familiar , not only to environmentalists world wide, but to local mariners who steer by it as they enter the Blackwater, has here been rendered strange and unheimlich, a reminder, as well as a remainder of what the desire to dominate the Natural world represses in us. Other buildings in this series – the Minewatching Tower at Dengie , the now abandoned Bata Factory at East Tilbury , Nissan Huts overgrown by brambles , broken bits of pill boxes piled up on a beach – all these images refer us back to the pictorial conventions of romantic ruin sentiment in both its picturesque and sublime registers (shades of Constable and Turner). But they are photographed here in ways which put these conventions in question. Military and industrial architecture, like modernism itself, was built to weather the storms of history. Instead these buildings, made redundant by the onward march of globalisation, remain strangely untouched by time. Wind and water scoured, sun-bleached yet essentially intact, the final triumph of form over function. Orton’s eye captures the irony brilliantly as his camera poses these monoliths against sky and field, silently commanding the prospect of their obsolescence.

The images are thus no mere illustration or visual supplement to the text. They stake out their own distinctive line of engagement with the subject matter . It is this creative dialogue which constitutes the second big achievement of this little book. More about the book at www.realessex.co.uk.

Professor Phil Cohen is director of the London East Research Institute

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