V I grew up in a world not entirely dissimilar to Beaumaris. Until I was eleven, I lived in Tintern, Wales, a village that lay between the castles of Chepstow and Monmouth. Many of my childhood memories are of exploring castles, medieval jousts and nights spent reading history books. As much as I cherish these memories, and the worlds that they created, I am sceptical. Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘[in] authentic history writing the destructive impulse is just as strong as the saving impulse… The way in which it [history] is valued as heritage is every bit as insidious as its disappearance could ever be.’ No better way to kill something than to put it in a glass box – sanctification is a technique of depoliticisation. In Beaumaris, it is the commemoration of the past as a bygone era that allows that era’s perpetuation in the present. Why save any of this? Why not tear down all the castles and the museums? I think about the Brecht quote that gives this essay its title. Brecht instructs us not to turn away from the present, though it is ugly and bad, towards beautiful old things. Start from bad new things. VI In 2002, a local businessman announced to the boatmen of Gallows Point that he had purchased the land beneath their feet and he would be redeveloping the sheds: they could rent space in his identikit black and white warehouses, or they could go. After a short struggle, the boatmen accepted their loss. Over the next ten years as the businessman struggled to finance his operation, they allowed their sheds to go to ruin: why conserve what will not last? By the end, the sheds were repositories of memories and craft. Few boats were built for profit, but the boatmen went along to the sheds everyday regardless, to work on their own project or just share stories. The sheds were finally pulled down in 2013. Unbeknownst to the businessman the sheds had sat atop the town’s old rubbish dump, and as the foundations for the new warehouses were dug and the earth placed on the beach, all sorts of objects started to get washed out to sea. The clay pipes and red ink bottles might have slipped away unnoticed, into the forgetfulness of the water, if it were not for that woman, combing the beach for curiosities to use in her sculptures. That woman – Clare Calder- Marshall – and her partner, Alison Englefield, decided to curate an art exhibition, ‘Fragments of the Past: What You Can Find Out From Small Things,’ which displayed many of their finds from the beach.
Clare Calder-Marshall
Part of the exhibition is based in the work of two detectives, hunting through the material world for traces of past lives. Part of the reason the stories these objects tell seem so compelling is the particular nature of the pasts that they reveal. In one of my first essays for On Site review , I wrote about garbage collection in Juba, South Sudan. After secession from Sudan, the nascent capital’s population exploded, and so did the rubbish. Burnt plastic, coke bottles, defunct computers – a litany as recognisable in London as in Juba. The rubbish dump as Gallows Point was different. In each mark on the slip-wear and in the proud proclamations of merchants found on terrine pots there were local stories. We still have local stories today, of course, but more and more often they are expressed in a material code that an archaeologist would never be able to uncover: loves and losses are both written onto identical, mass-produced objects. Castles, given time, acquire a singularity the coke bottle will never possess. I remember wandering around them with Clare, my mother; their atmosphere lodged inside me. I remember strolling along beaches with her when I visited and marvelling at the amount of driftwood she would acquire. Clare would save everything if she could. I was more sceptical. Why, when surrounded by a surfeit of information, save anything at all? My question made me feel like the local businessman: ‘tear down the sheds, ignore the old rubbish dump. The past is past, and the future is the tourist service economy and warehouses.’ Clare and I were both more interested in the boatmen than the future. One of them, David Gallichon, asked my mother: ‘They talk about conservation, but why don’t they conserve people like us? We’re a dying breed, aren’t we? Boating all our lives, since we were children.’ I wanted to know not how to conserve them, but how their energy and knowledge could live in a world of gift shops and teenagers who wished they were elsewhere.
The old and the new sheds
53
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator