POSTCARDS FROM THE HOO PENINSULA II

Anthropo(s)cenic views from the Isle of Grain, Stoke Saltings and Cliffe.

Images made on film (medium format Mamiya C330), negatives scanned digitally.

(thanks to Silverpan Bristol)

Click on any photo to start viewer

[Text below the pictures]

Between two estuaries, Medway and Thames.

I was traveling on foot and on buses over four days in August 2023.

The first three pictures (in the order they appear rather than numbering) are from the coastline around the village of Grain where the two rivers meet. 
The area is full of active connections and meshworks, and traces of past ones: ships delivering liquid gas to the power station, container shipping port, electric lines, line of the concrete sea wall, filigrees of pylons, the ford leading to the Grain Tower ( a fort dating from the 1860's ), and the two rivers of course. As for our vegetal friends and other living close relatives, they create their own networks of relationships in the spaces which are left, with all the ebullience, cunning and panache they have honed since the beginning of time. They were especially vivid and joyous on these rare sunny August days! This is more obvious in the series of colour images from the same trip.

It is not a surprise that wherever one points a lens to within this landscape, it ends up opening a metaphor or several. On the Isle of Grain, for many reasons, the intensity of encounter is so strong between the forces at play that wherever one looks, tensions past and present are there to be felt in all the reflections of light, over pretty much 360 degrees. There is no abstraction to take refuge in, it is all meaning. Making choices of course, yet I suspect that a rotating CCTV camera would give plenty to see and feel (something to try perhaps..) .

The next pictures (4 to 10) are of Stoke Saltings, the area of tidal marshes on the south of the Peninsula. There is a boatyard which is active and is clearly enjoyed: part knackersyard, part convalescence unit, part mooring facility. 

Going on track record, in time, silt wins.

Bee Ness Jetty is a well documented industrial relic (see https://beyondthepoint.co.uk/bee-ness-jetty/)

This is a good time to say something of what's not photographed. I didn’t take photos on my walk back to Grain that day. The stretch of road is tough: busy with lorries, dusty, footpaths inexistent for part of the way, and the guarded and fenced off power plants, storage units and port facilities are forbidding and forbidden. In retrospect, I have images on my mind of that road, the comfort of plentiful delicious (dusty) blackberries, and I wish I had recorded something which might account for the fish-out-of-water quality of the experience.

Also no photographs from Grain or Cliffe. I can’t quite do urban photography. Too much free floating guilt perhaps.

Grain I liked especially, conversations had, walks in the beautifully thought-out park area between village and sea.

Pictures 10 to 17 were taken on a walk from the village of Cliffe. This is the land and sea scape Dickens wrote of, where prison hulks would have been moored.

17 is one view of Brett aggregate plant, which stretches linearly over water and land from its very own quay on the estuary to the edge of the village of Cliffe, where lorries are loaded with pavers of all shapes which will eventually seem like patterned drapery over many supermarket parking lots and street pavements.

Standing up, looking. Making landscape pictures in this way does resonate almost automatically with certain conventions. There is a canon, a well chartered territory (so to speak!), which one relates to, even if obliquely. The extent to which this is in itself a vehicle for ideology, and what it might be, is a question which is active in my mind.   

There is a piece of writing about this part of the Hoo peninsula by the artist Anna Falcini https://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-10/hoo-peninsula which a friend Sarah Bowden mentioned when I met her at Gravesend at the end of the trip. The last pic is at Tilbury, across the ferry from Gravesend.