Docklands History Group are advertising their annual symposium on Thames Shipbuilding for 9th May. The programme is on their web site at:
http://www.docklandshistorygroup.org.uk/
there are still no instructions as to how you can book though (will be devastated if I miss it!)
The programme includes Chris Ellmers on the Dudman dockyard, Ian Friel on Royal Shipbuilding on the Thames, Richard Edsor on Charles II on Shipbuilding, Andrew Lambert on the Aaron Manby, Alex Werner on an Indian shipwright in London, Des Pawson on tools for sailmaking, Stuart Rankin and Roger Owen on the King and Queen Foundry, Brendan O'Farrell on Dudgeons, and Roy Fenton on SS Robin.
See you all there.
http://www.docklandshistorygroup.org.uk/
there are still no instructions as to how you can book though (will be devastated if I miss it!)
The programme includes Chris Ellmers on the Dudman dockyard, Ian Friel on Royal Shipbuilding on the Thames, Richard Edsor on Charles II on Shipbuilding, Andrew Lambert on the Aaron Manby, Alex Werner on an Indian shipwright in London, Des Pawson on tools for sailmaking, Stuart Rankin and Roger Owen on the King and Queen Foundry, Brendan O'Farrell on Dudgeons, and Roy Fenton on SS Robin.
See you all there.
------------------------------
Peter Luck writes about the Swanscombe Project
THE SWANSCOMBE PROJECT: A LANDSCAPE
Exhibition at Blake Gallery, Gravesend
13 photographers: one post-industrial landscape.
10th - 22nd February 2015
9.00am 5.00pm Monday to Saturday; 10.00am 2.00pm Sunday
Swanscombe marshes comprise a rough triangle of land bounded on two sides by the Thames and on the third, south, side by low hills cut into by quarrying for chalk for the cement industry.
Now that this industry is closed down and the cement works are gone, the quarry sites have been occupied by industries which have formed a barrier to the marshes and allow the area as a whole to be spoken of as an unattractive waste land.
This is not quite the truth. The area has certainly been formed in large part by its industrial past and bears the traces, some enigmatic, but it is now a landscape of very varied form and biological diversity, often of quiet beauty and it is a zone of leisure free of both charge and regulation. For these reasons it is a zone of the imagination and enquiry. Capturing this has been a main part of our purpose in nearly two years of photography on the marshes.
The proposals for the Paramount London Entertainment Resort, occupying the central landward parts of the marsh are now well known. At the edges some marsh areas will remain open including the Black Duck Marsh, the Botany Marsh, still used as summer grazing, and the foreland, were shipping sight-lines cross the bend in the river. This much is known but not yet details of land-modelling, architecture and the means to preserve industrial remains and ecological diversity, or the quiet which we have found valued by those who know the marshes,
Alongside our photography, we present a brief statement of the history of the marshes how this edgeland is also the site of a rich and significant industrial history. Swanscombe marshes can be read as a document of our recent past, one which has survived through neglect. Will it continue to be readable through the future developments? And will the unregulated imagination still have a territory?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Photographers: Lesley Brew, Chris Burke, Trevor Crone, Keith Ellis, Denis Galvin,
John Levett, Peter Luck, Ingrid Newton, Anthony Palmer, Jennifer Roberts, Mike Seaborne,
Sabes Sugunasabesan, John Whitfield.
The group is formed from members and associates of Crossing Lines, a photo-forum based at Goldsmiths, University of London.