peter chasseaud artist & writer

ALAN SILLITOE MEMORIAL EVENT, BRITISH LIBRARY

2011-04-24T05:04:00.000-07:00

ALAN SILLITOE, 1928-2010

I wrote the text below as my contribution to 'Every Day of the Week', A Celebration of the Life and Work of Alan Sillitoe, held at the British Library Conference Centre, London, on Wednesday 20th April 2011.

The speakers were: Richard Bradford (chair), Peter Chasseaud, Tansy Davies, Margaret Drabble, Elaine Feinstein, Alan Jenkins, Miranda Seymour and D. J. Taylor.

HIS HEAD WAS A MAP

Dr Peter Chasseaud

Alan was my beloved and generous mentor in the world of maps, and wrote forewords for two of my books. It is an honour and a privilege to be asked to make a contribution to his Memorial Event at the British Library. Unlike the explorer who believes he has discovered some terra previously incognita, only to find that another has preceded him, I was always aware that Alan had discovered the route and blazed the trail, and was more than content to sit at the feet of the master. Like Alan, I have continually to try to answer the question, ‘Why Maps?’ Here I use Alan’s words, and my own.

In 1975, Alan wrote:

‘In the beginning was the map. . . We are all born into the world with a sense of place, simply because a certain part of our senses are rooted forever to the locality in which – as an old-fashioned novelist might put it - we first saw light. We don’t see it straight away, however – though we can smell it, hear it, and touch it. Little by little it emerges greyly, flattish, without the latitude and longitude of social guidelines; and then as the senses develop and the years grow in us, we see it in our profile, contour and full colour.’ (‘A Sense of Place’, Geography, August 1975, 685-9, p.685).

A reluctant man-of-action (while he was accepted for pilot training in the Fleet Air Arm, his real love was aerial navigation), Alan, like Ulysses in Troilus & Cressida, was more interested in ‘the bed-work, mapp’ry, closet-war’ of staff work and the back-room, and in understanding and setting out the geographical and other coordinates of our human stage. He not only literally grounded himself and his characters in this way but, through his understanding of aerial navigation (derived from his teenage wartime years in the Air Training Corps and his national service as a RAF radio-operator), soared like Ariel above the surface of the earth he described so well in all its topographical complexities, and bounced his wireless waves off the heaviside layer. To his generation, well educated in school geography lessons in Mercator’s projection, map-reading and the technicalities of contours, hachures, spot-heights, conventional signs, magnetic, true and grid north, magnetic variation and even rhumb lines and loxodromes, such geographical language was not totally forbidding to publishers and public, and could be used and read without fear. Meridians and parallels became the warp and weft of his texts.

He related maps to people, and to human dramas, fixing the co-ordianates of his characters in the landscape. He listened to old men’s tales of the front, and found trench maps in cardboard boxes in second-hand bookshops. He heard stories about the Jewish Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe and sought out maps that showed the towns and villages that pogrom, war and worse had visited and destroyed.

Alan also loved the material culture of all this (quite apart from his pipe and leather waistcoat!) – the linen-backed maps, the compass and other surveying instruments such as the theodolite and the Abney level, his morse key and his bomber wireless set, both of which he was skilled at using. And of course he extended this love of the material to the typewriter and the book. (But there was a technological stop-line: metal keys on inked ribbon were OK, but the word processor and computer were a no-go area.) In his study, he not only pored over his amazing collection of topographical maps, many acquired as duplicates from the Royal Geographical Society, of which he was a Fellow, but naturally relished the materiality of his Baedekers and Murray’s Guides, books on topography and travel (including the wartime Naval Intelligence Division series), fortifications, military history and of course the city and environs of his dear Nottingham. Speaking of military history, he was a member of the Royal United Services Institute, and typically consulted the gunner Brigadier Shelford Bidwell when he wanted to get artillery matters right in The Widower’s Son.

He not only studied maps, but drew them. He was a cartographer in his own right, as readers of certain of his books will be aware, and he also drew them for pleasure – for example his ‘Map-Poem’ named Astronautical Research Area. His maps are accurate – they obey the logic of the terrain he created. They could be used on the ground. As Alan noted:

‘Joseph Conrad drew charts of Costaguana for his novel Nostromo, and in Victory and Lord Jim one feels he was using them in these books also, a re-drawing perhaps of the Admiralty Charts with which he had been so familiar. It is safe to assume that James Joyce kept a street plan of Dublin close to his desk, on which to work out one or two permutations in Ulysses.

Either you have the maps inside your own brain or, to bring to life the imaginative bit of country you see only dimly at first, you draw it clearly on a sheet of paper so that you make no mistakes at least in the geography of your tale. I did this for my novels The General and Travels in Nihilon, though in these cases it is understandable because both took place in countries which do not exist, and had therefore to be given some form of rudimentary cartography.

For my Nottingham novels and stories, which account for the greater part of my writing, I have always had near me a street plan, as well as a one-inch map of the area to the west and north of the city. These last two items are not essential for my writings about this piece of territory, because I know every nook and cranny, every hole and corner of it, and always will, but still it is good to be correct.

Another function of such maps is that, when searching for the surname of a character (and one has to be careful to get one that fits) I pore over the sheet of a one-inch map (not necessarily of the area where the character is supposed to have been born) and choose one from that of a hamlet or farmhouse, stream or hilltop, or some other such noticeable feature. This might appear to match the person to the region he or she lives in, but the place-names of England are so homogeneous that I tend to mate the names more for the onomatopoeic sound of the thing than to give any geographical clue to the person concerned. Above all, it is important to know what you are doing: to comprehend, to be accurate, clear and economical – as one would be in actually making a map.’ (Ibid, p.687).

Alan continually speculated as to why he developed a passion for making topographical maps, and concluded: ‘It is a great honour to be born into the world with all the makings of an engineer or geographer, but a greater mystery immediately becomes apparent if I wonder why I turned into a writer.’ (Ibid, p.689).

FINIS.

Off With Their Heads; Works on Paper Fair 2011 and others

2011-01-29T13:53:00.000-08:00

Carolyn and I had a very enjoyable evening this week showing our work to Brighton Illustrators Group. I focussed on the Tom Paine Printing Press and my letterpress work, and only briefly mentioned my poetic photobooks.

Here's some quick info about where I'm showing my work (Altazimuth Press, poetic photobooks, and Tom Paine Printing Press, creative letterpress) this year (2011; accurate dates to follow):

Works on Paper Fair, Science Museum, South Kensington, London, 2-7 Feb

Here Gallery, Bristol, March

Bristol Artists Book Event (BABE), April/May

Antiquarian Book Fair, Olympia, June

[Whitechapel Art Book Fair, September?]

Oxford Fine Press Book Fair, November

Recent Important Events

2010-12-12T13:33:00.000-08:00

Chanctonbury Ring (after the Hurricane), oil on canvas

A Happy Dada Christmas / Winter Festival to Everyone.

Since the Whitechapel Art Book Fair in September 2010, I've been asked to exhibit my creative typography at the Here Gallery in Bristol, and my poetic photobooks Thames - The London River and The East London Line - An Elegaic Meta-landscape have been bought by the National Art Library at the V&A and the University of the Creative Arts respectively. I've also had a lot of creative-typography commissions.

My projects for 2011 include a poetic photobook about the Borough Market in Southwark, completing my Isaac Rosenberg artist's book which has been in preparation for a long time, and mounting an exhibition of my paintings in Lewes.

The East London Line; poetic-photobook text

2010-11-27T13:06:00.000-08:00

[Here is the text of my new poetic photobook, The East London Line - An Elegaic Meta-landscape, which I launched at the Whtiechapel Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery at the end of September 2010. I've used the prefix 'meta' to mean change or transformation, as in 'metamorphosis'. And yes, I know that 'elegaic' is not normally spelled like that; it's just that I prefer the spelling I've used as being closer to the sound of the spoken word.]

The

East London Line

An Elegaic Meta-landscape

PETER CHASSEAUD

ALTAZIMUTH PRESS

2010

The East London Line - An Elegaic Meta-landscape

Serving and gripped by the tidal river,

rain-fed, moon-sucked, wind-rammed waters piling up from the estuary,

flood and ebb, flood and ebb, flood and ebb . . .

Rotherhithe and Wapping lock their mutual gaze.

The Angel, The Grapes, The Red Cow, The Spread Eagle, The Devil’s Tavern,

in the broad Lower Pool, where Limehouse Reach swings south

past Millwall, the Surrey Commercial Docks, the Isle of Dogs,

the West India Docks, then north to Blackwall and the East Indias,

waiting to be locked in, barges, tugs and lighters cluster

by the Shadwell Entrance and the Wapping Entrance,

for Wapping Basin and the London Docks,

and opposite The Prospect of Whitby

they gather by the Surrey Entrance.

Wharves and cranes call across the beached, bleached lighters,

the draggled barge tiers,

cables, blocks and sprits creak and groan, rocked by tides, breeze, and wash.

Sun-baked, salt-crusted mud, rain and ice bound;

gulls scream, wheel and swoop, cormorants skim and dive.

Green-willowed ditches and creeks, seething in spring, quivering quick, drain to the river,

black hulls, inbound on the flood, down on the ebb, ride the tide;

sprits’l barges surge and heel, skippers spin the wheel,

leeboards bite, fore, main, top and mizzen catch the airs.

On the Mill Wall and the Black Wall,

mill sails turn on the river’s earth walls, mist damps sea-coal’s smoke,

pastures turn to brick and stone: streets, sewers, timber ponds, locks and docks.

London spews its sewage, stews plague, cholera, typhoid; ordure fills the river.

People and rats, dogs and cats, rats, pigeons and sparrows

scamper, rut, endure, die,

under rain and drizzle, sleet, snow and ice, fog, soot and smoke, summer sun.

Weeds and flowers, London Pride, sprout in gardens, window-boxes, pots.

Marc, Isambard, navvies, came, saw and conquered,

with will, skill, gold, sweat and blood.

In the tunnel the hero navvies, fuelled with beef, beer, tobacco and tea,

pick and kick their grafting tools through blue clay,

jack and drive, close-bricking behind, their massive iron shield,

force their years through sand and gravel, mud and water,

the twin advancing arches.

Paddies battle with tars in Redriff, and along the Ratcliff Highway

by Wapping and Shadwell’s whores, gin and crimping joints.

Gas, sulphurous, fire-damp, hisses from the mud and burns, explodes into fire

as tide-pressed water jets in.

Men fight the irrupting river’s weight, feverish with pumps;

a stinking brown flood fills panic lungs,

drowns the workings, the sleeping, the injured, the laggards . . .

Plugged with clay above and brick below, the tunnel is made.

After the banquets and bands, the tutu’d tightrope walker,

the underground printing press, the royal visits,

the railway occupies their tunnel, ties Rotherhithe to Wapping

with iron and steel, fire, water and steam:

cuts across the urban grain, sections its gradient profile: down, under and up.

In the shafts and cuttings cast-iron beams take the strain,

a cosmic man resisting the close-compressing walls.

Rooters, terrier tank engines, plunge below, condense their exhausts,

pound sulphurous smoke from flaring coke and coal,

shoot sparks and cinders through the streaming tunnel,

chase the ratty conduits with carriages and wagons, passengers and freight -

the Metropolitan and District, the Brighton, the South Eastern, the Great Eastern.

A soft haze of dust motes sifts in the shafts’ slanting sun;

drizzle drifts down to clag the sooty moss,

snow settles on the tracks.

The District electric trains begin, but the freight’s still steam:

Stratford engines, drivers and firemen,

running into Liverpool Street and reversing.

Johnston’s alphabet incises their UndergrounD names in the inverted Y:

SHOREDITCH

WHITECHAPEL

SHADWELL

WAPPING

[River]

ROTHERHITHE

SURREY DOCKS

[SURREY CANAL]

NEW CROSS NEW CROSS GATE

North and south of the river, to each its hinterland,

casting its arc east of London Bridge,

over sweet green meads, cow-pastures and gardens.

South of the River

The Surrey Side and Kent

Rotherhithe’s masts and yards, Turner’s broken Temeraire,

the salt- and smoke-stained funnelled, Baltic traders,

the Surrey Commercial Docks: whalers in Howland Great Dock,

Cunarders in Greenland Dock,

square-riggers in Canada Dock, Russia Dock, Stave Dock,

deal porters and stevedores, trams, buses and bikes,

the pre-dawn cafés and pubs, the char and fags,

the morning scramble for the call-on.

The Surreys ablaze in the Blitz; incendiary and high explosive fire the timber,

scare away the ducks and herons,

make nonsense of Lavender Pond and Cicely Fox Smith.

Government, planners and developers systematically wiped out Rotherhithe,

destroyed its peoples’ fabric with roads and blocks, in whose shadow the pubs die.

Southwark, Dock Head, trams along Lower Road, outside and above Surrey Docks Station.

Rotherhithe’s Bobby Abel cricketing in the park, Seven Islands, Plough Lane, The Blue Anchor.

The Elephant’s screaming trams, the Pearlies,

Costers’ barrers, cock sparrers, knock ’em in the Old Kent Road

by The World Turned Upside Down.

Rotherhithe New Road (China Barn Lane), Redriff, Bermondsey,

Deptford’s Naval yards and Foreign Cattle Market, the Royal Victualling Yard,

John Evelyn, Sayes Court and Tsar Peter.

New Cross, Charleston, street and pub names map the Empire;

Battle of the Nile Street, The Nelson, Alma, Sebastopol;

wooden walls, admirals, rope-walks, cables, hemp, tar and timber.

Woolwich with its gunners and sappers, its Royal Military Academy and Arsenal,

its Free Ferry to North Woolwich and the Royals, Gallions Reach, Beckton.

Kent brings its bricks, lime and cement,

its market gardens, honey’d orchards and hops to the Borough High Street,

fruit and veg to the Borough Market’s crystal palace,

costers’ barrows under the railway arches and girders, by St Saviour’s,

hops from Kent’s kilns to the pungent Hop Exchange, to the river’s breweries, to the pubs – The Market Porter, the George, the Tabard, the Globe, the Rose, the Bear Gardens;

Chaucer and Shakespeare, Marlowe, Henslowe, Alleyn.

To Kent, London returns its manure.

The railway cuts south, climbing from the river, deep past the Surrey Docks,

to the market gardens, Lee Terrace footbridge and Deptford Road Junction

(where the East London Up joins, and the South London link)

under the Greenwich viaduct, the East Kent, the South Eastern,

to the great, grubby green New Cross Tangle:

lines, sidings, factories:

Mazawattee Tea, Rhubarb Siding, Klondike Siding, Ballarat Siding;

viaducts, bridges, cuttings, grass, allotments, nettles and slinking foxes,

Surrey Canal Junction;

crosses the Canal at Cold Blow Farm, where the Croydon Canal branched off

before the railway sunk it, turned its 18 locks

into the long, slogging gradient of the New Cross Bank.

The view north: masts and cranes wither as Canary Wharf’s towers loom,

dwarf the dead West India Dock, the Isle of Dogs;

‘here I am, the inevitable triumph of capital’,

London’s arrogant twin towers pleading ‘fuck me’ to Bin Laden’s boys.

The South London line on its brick arches,

strides past Old Kent Road Junction,

west to Peckham Rye, Denmark Hill, Clapham and Battersea

past slattern grey roofs, smoking chimney pots once red and yellow,

houses and pubs, Watneys and Charringtons, streets and shops,

Woodbines and Players Navy Cut,

past the tracks running down to the carriage sidings, loco works and shed,

the smoke, steam and clanging buffers, granite setts and stables

of Bricklayers Arms and Willow Walk,

past Millwall’s Den and the New Cross greyhounds,

by the scrapyards, the gasworks, Hatcham Ironworks;

Old Kent Road Junction where the Deptford Wharf Branch swings east;

across the Surrey Canal (lighters and timber yards all the way to Walworth and Camberwell)

to join the main lines:

New Cross for Dickensian Dover, the continong, Gay Paree,

Over Cold Blow Lane for New Cross Gate,

its railway works and loco sheds (one blew down in a storm!),

(change for the Crystal Palace,

for royal and saucy, salty Brighton, the Skylark, fish and chips.

HERE IS THE RIVER

North of the River

East of the City, the hamlets east of the Tower;

St Katherine’s, London Docks, Wapping and Shadwell Basins,

wharves and warehouses, pubs and barge yards by Wapping Wall.

Shadwell, Whitechapel and Shoreditch, Stepney, Poplar, Bow and Stratford,

and east across the Lea, Bow and Barking Creek, into Essex.

East of Houndsditch, the Minories, Aldgate Pump, the East End began.

Life’s daily sorrows and joys;

the quick-spirit banter and bustle of the street markets –

Petticoat Lane, Brick Lane, Cheshire Street and Sclater Street.

Truman’s Brewery, The Frying Pan, The Jolly Butchers,

The Seven Stars, The Carpenters’ Arms, The Archers.

But also a poor, vicious, grimy, sad and tearful terrain

of drunken bad temper, knuckle-dusters and bicycle chains,

flick-knives, drugs, meths and hopeless crime,

Krays, Bethnal Green skinheads, Doc Martins, hoodies.

Now the money’s toad stink seeps east from Aldgate, north from Wapping,

bulldozing centuries.

The railway rises from Wapping, pounds level under London Docks,

the Eastern Dock, by Shadwell Basin.

Coffer dams drain half the dock, hold back the water

while navvies cut-and-cover the twin brick tunnels; then the other half;

mining under the dock and warehouse walls, underpinning;

tons of iron, wood, and freighted water, the ships, the black freighters,

ramming down the dock floor against the railway’s vaulted roofs.

Then rising north, under Cable Street, where Mosley’s Blackshirt thugs thrust,

to Shadwell Station

and the brick-arched Blackwall Railway from the Minories,

past Stepney Junction and Limehouse

to the West Indias to Poplar and the East India Docks,

(the Tilbury arches – shelter from Blitz bombs; the DLR),

the Commercial Road, Whitechapel High Street,

connects with the Metropolitan and District by the St Mary’s Curve and Aldgate,

(the Ripper’s grim terrain; Houndsditch murders and Russian anarchists in Sidney Street)

rises, under and past Spitalfields goods and coal depots,

horse wagons and drays, granite setts, iron tyres and dung,

past tall, close-packed slums, Booth’s poverty map,

East End streets, the sour-sweating, unwashed:

poverty knocks, families’ compressed flesh, ten to a room, a cellar,

sharing the tap in the yard, the outside lavatory.

The refugees: Spitalfields Huguenot weavers,

Russian ghetto, escapees from the fear,

Tsar’s savage pogroms in the Pale:

Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine . . .

Rosenberg, Epstein, Gertler . . .

the Whitechapel Library, the Whitechapel Gallery;

the beacons of the Board Schools, the London Hospital,

the human waves . . . the French, English, the Irish, the Russian Jews, the Asians . . .

The Whitechapel Gallery is now, like the V&A, a nice restaurant and café,

with a no-longer-relevant, not-for-the people, art gallery attached,

preaching the cutting edge to the new arty types from Spitalfields, Hoxton and Hackney.

It’s colonised the Whitechapel Library;

upstairs are the token ‘Whitechapel Boys’ - Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler, Jacob Epstein. . .

They'd turn in their graves if they could see it now.

Bud Flanagan wouldn’t recognise the place;

he was Chaim Reuven Weintrop, born in Hanbury Street; his parents Polish Jews,

he went to school in Petticoat Lane.

In Spitalfields and Brick Lane,

Tracy, art students and media types, tourists and restaurants;

the two nations - these and the others:

Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Afghans,

bringing the religion, clothes, the frontier, to Shadwell and Whitechapel,

envy or despise the bankers and the others,

wait to inherit.

The Huguenot chapel became the synagogue, then the mosque;

up goes the minaret, hijab arches are mooted, burkas sweep past.

Locomotives’ sulphurous exhaust echoing, booming up past the synagogues,

Brady Street, the stacked skeletons (‘I am here, praise the Lord’)

of the Jewish Burial Ground,

an interment a century to foil developers.

The rails swing west in their deep cutting to Shoreditch Station,

in its grimy, brick-arched cutting by Pedley Street and Code Street,

below the high black gloom of Bishopsgate Goods Depot,

(the Eastern Counties’ Shoreditch terminus, by the foul Old Nichol),

sooty brick, granite setts, iron bollards, steel girders,

draught horses, motor lorries, wagon hoists,

Passing under Brick Lane, they join the Great Eastern

(hammering through Bishopsgate Low Level, up Bethnal Green bank,

out of the City clay, rising on brick arch corrugations,

dipped home and distant giving the road to Cambridge, Colchester, Norwich . . .)

run into Liverpool Street’s smoky echo,

beneath the North London’s Broad Street cliff,

its iron and glass cathedral.

I liked the old Shoreditch Station, with its human scale, texture and detail,

but hate the new station - a giant, elevated, concrete box

made to be engulfed in steel and glass boxes.

They change the street names – it’s their way of saying ‘we don’t care’.

It wasn’t only Hitler’s bombs that wrecked the East End;

government, councils, planners, architects

destroyed brick terraces, made wastelands, ghettos,

thinned the population, shifted them out, killed the jobs and pubs,

dumped the people in welfare towers.

Look what the bastards did to Rotherhithe,

ripped out its heart.

in Wapping, Shadwell, Limehouse, Rotherhithe,

‘Planning’, ‘Development’, ‘Regeneration’

wrecked their life and fabric.

Thatcher’s DDC stole the docks;

Canary Wharf, Wall Street’s outpost.

Toad’s greed, its blight and bile, digests us.

I saw cranes and ships, docks working behind high, dark walls,

sad, blasted, bomb sites, decaying terraces and shops,

Blooms restaurant and the last of the black-coated, broad-brimmed Jews.

Along the Hackney Road, Bethnal Green Road, Commercial Road, Cable Street,

every street, the pubs die.

The Olympics wipe out the Lea Valley,

and Crossrail creates vast bombsites to the west,

Underground becomes Overground,

London crumbles away.

This poetic photobook was designed, written and produced by Peter Chasseaud between 2008 and 2010

and digitally printed in 18 point Edward Johnston’s London Underground sans serif typeface

Technical assistance by Peter Flanagan

Aerial photographs ©English Heritage.NMR Aerofilms Collection

except bomber over docks by kind permission of the Imperial War Museum

Photograph of tram at Surrey Docks Station in 1951 by kind permission of Dewi Williams

Other photographs ©Peter Chasseaud 2010 or his collection

Text ©Peter Chasseaud 2010

Edition limited to 100 copies

This is number . . . . . . .

[Author's note: I've been walking, and taking photos of, the streets, railways, docks and industrial areas of London since the late 1950s. I've always been interested in the vestiges of the past - the grass-grown sidings, the granite setts of the warehouse-streets and stable yards, the remains of tram lines set in the Kingsway tramway tunnel, old gas lamps and cast-iron signs, the overgrown ack-ack site on Mitcham Common, the derelict wharves and rusting cranes along the Thames. I caught the last years of Croydon Airport, of the steam days of the great railway termini with their attendant locomotive sheds (greasy-dark, dangerous, noisy and fascinating, with their back corners occupied by surpisingly old engines), and also the last couple of decades of the working London River. Then there was Fleet Street and 'the print', with its vast noisy spaces full of compositors and linotypes, machine minders and their web presses. Exploring London in those days was a wonderful experience. The Science Museum was full then of real things - our material culture. London was changing all the time, as bombsites and National Service disappeared to be replaced by Swinging London and Carnaby Street . . . ]

East London Line & The Whitechapel

2010-09-03T12:56:00.001-07:00

Here is a limited edition typographical print which I've been producing to launch my new poetic photobook The East London Line at the Whitechapel Art Book Fair at the end of September (last weekend: Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th). The large-format softback book, under my imprint Altazimuth Press, will be in a limited edition of 100.

I've been producing the print on my wooden 'common press', a replica of an 18th century press (see my Tom Paine Printing Press blog and website), and as the press is a two-pull press and therefore has a small platen I have to pull and wind on two or three times to obtain one print.

The print is composed in metal type and wood letter on the stone bed of the press. I will have some for sale at the Whitechapel, along with the book, and also a few copies of my limited edition typographical map, printed in black, red and blue, also entitled the East London Line. An image of this map is on my Tom Paine Printing Press blog.

East London Line - Shoreditch

2010-04-01T12:07:00.001-07:00

From my East London Line poetic photobook: Spitalfields Goods Depot, Shoreditch, 10 December 2008.

New letterpress and artist's book work

2010-03-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

I've been working hard at the Tom Paine Printing Press with some new wood and metal type which I've recently acquired, and I'll be posting images here within the next few days. Just sorting and cleaning the type takes ages, and of course the typeseeting, locking up the forme, and printing on the hand press is a slow business.

New images of Lewes Railway Land, and a painting

2010-03-31T13:23:00.000-07:00

A new version of an oil painting I did in 1986. It's interesting that many of the preoccupations of my recent poetic photobooks (Kings Cross, The Euston Arch, Thames - The London River, The East London Line, etc.) are demonstrated here - the landscape and skyscape, the mixture os urban and rural, the impact of the railway, the steam locomotive as image, my own memories, etc. This scene has long been submerged under new housing developments. I actually travelled on a steam train from Uckfield to Lewes (they used to run from London Victoria to Brighton using this route - a great alternative to the Brighton main line), through this landscape, in 1962.

The photo at the top is one I took leaning out of the train window as it approaches Lewes Station, in 1962, having just crossed the River Ouse (by the Phoenix Iron Works, or East Sussex Engineering as I think it was known by then) and the western end of Cliffe High Street, and run down from the viaduct over the railway land.

The middle image is one of a series of photos I took in the winter of 1985-6 to form a 90-degree panorama of the Railway Land.

The East London Line: Artist's Book 2010

2010-02-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

Above: Shoreditch Station and Brick Lane, October 2008.

Watch this space for the developing story of my new East London Line artist's book. This has been in gestation for a year or two, but it's getting there!

Isaac Rosenberg & More Creative Typography

2010-02-11T10:29:00.001-08:00

Here are more images of recent work I've been doing on my wooden hand press (Common Press). The second is Variations on a Capital 'E' (including one lower case 'e'), using my own hand-cut 17th Century character (4.5 inches high) taken from Moxon. Red was frequently used for titling in early printed books.

The first and third are the wood block and first progress proof respectively of a woodcut I'm doing for my Rosenberg book (Isaac Rosenberg, the artist and poet). This block, which I cut and proofed today, is about 12 x 18 inches and is thin plywood so I will have to build it up to type-height if I print it with a page of text.

New & Other; Creative Typography

2010-02-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

Two photos of type-cutting, typesetting and printing work I've just done at my Tom Paine Printing Press in Lewes High Street. Printing was done on the wooden 'common press' which I use all the time. The Valentine is printed using wood type on Khadi hand-made paper from India, and is about a foot (i.e. 30cm) square. The large capital 'E' print is from a woodcut which I'm in process of working on. I traced a large 17th Century capital 'E' (mine is about 4.5 inches high; or approx. 324 point, or 27-line pica) from Moxon's book, transferred this tracing to the wooden block, and cut out the character using a Stanley knife and wood-carving tools (gouges and chisels). It's very soft and grainy plywood, and clearly I'd get a much better result from a typographic point of view by using fruit wood. The three smaller 'E's (two caps and one l/c) above it are from different founts; the caps show very distinct differences from Moxon's, particularly in the serifs.

Altazimuth Press at the Oxford Fine Press Book Fair

2009-11-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

My Altazimuth Press and Tom Paine Printing Press will be showing their products at the Oxford Fine Press Book Fair next weekend (7th/8th November) at Oxford Brooks University. Altazimuth Press products include Kings Cross, Thames - The London River, Afghanistan - A Journey, The Euston Arch, and Ypres Willows. I'll also be showing some semi-abstract typographical posters which I've printed on the wooden 'common press' (see below).

What a hectic summer it's been! The Tom Paine Festival in July, printing Paine's 'Case of the Officers of Excise' (limted edition of 30 copies) in August, Lewes's Artwave Festival in September and more printing in October (including Paine and Lewes Bonfire broadsides).

The opportunity has come up to move the Tom Paine Printing Press to a shop in Lewes High Street - No.151, opposite the Bull House where Paine used to live and work, and the Westgate Chapel (Unitarian) where he was married. I'm therefore moving the Press from the Market Tower (with grateful thanks to Lewes District Council for providing the space there since the end of June). It will take me several weeks to complete the move, as I have to dismantle the wooden 'common press' very carefully, and re-erect it in the new premises.

The High Street shop will be called 'PRESS', and will also act as a retail outlet for the Press's products, and also for prints and artists' books by local and other artists and printmakers.

I was very fortunate to be given a printer's 'random' or cabinet for typecases, by Graham Moss of the Incline Press, along with some type and other equipment. I also obtained some more type - metal and wooden - from the now-closed Printing House museum in Cockermouth (north end of the Lake District). I'm still very short of the 18th Century 'Caslon Old Face' type, so if anyone out there has any to dispose of . . . ? Or indeed any metal or wooden type.

Artwave, artist's books nearing completion - Rosenberg & East London Line

2009-08-26T12:06:00.000-07:00

Isaac Rosenberg - see Rosenberg artist's book below

Whitechapel UndergrounD Station - see East London Line artist's book below

I'm demonstrating the printing press (the wooden common press) in the Market Tower, Lewes, during Lewes's Artwave Festival every afternoon from Friday 28 August to Friday 4 September inclusive.

As well as the Tom Paine material, I'm also using the press to print the text and blocks of some of my own artist's poem & image books, including Rosenberg (the Whitechapel poet and artist, who was killed in the First World War), and The East London Line (inspired by the current redevelopment of the old East London Railway from Shoreditch through (or rather under) Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, Rotherhithe and Surrey Docks to New Cross and New Cross Gate).

A S Byatt, The Children's Book, Trench Names and Rats Alley

2009-05-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

Antonia (A.S.) Byatt has not only read my Rats Alley book about trench names, but has used it (and acknowledged it) in her research for her new novel The Children's Book, published by Chatto & Windus. She also has one of her characters write a poem about these names - this poem was also published recently in the New Yorker. Her book will be launched in London in mid-May, and she will be speaking at the Charleston Festival on Sunday 17th May at 2.30pm. See below for some of my poems, from my Willow/Wilg/Weide/Saule (Ypres Willows) book. I'll post a poem I wrote in 2005-6 (while I was writing Rats Alley)about trench names when I've found it!

I'm still working on my poetic photobook on The East London Line. Apropos this, I was at the reopened and refurbished (rebuilt? extended?) Whitechapel Galley last Thursday, and was shocked to see that just inside the entrance to what used to be the Whitechapel Library (now part of the Gallery) are two posh restaurants. Upstairs is a small exhibition dedicated to the life and work of 'The Whitechapel Boys' - Isaac Rosenberg, mark Gertler, Jacob Epstein, etc. They'd be turning in their graves if they could see the place now!

Willows Poems

Shock of Recognition, Pilckem Ridge

Blood-dark, stark against the sky
are war’s images we carry from photograph’s still grain,
the film’s foolery of the eye, a painting’s pigment,
the landscape sweep of panoramas . . .
Their shapes jolt vision, shake sense, dislocate;
these fields were, are.

Tree-fans of high explosive smoke erupt from fields
where willow rods now claim the sky.
Spring’s lanyard jerks at the breech,
a green fuze triggers spurting sap’s gaine;
willow fingers start their splaying trajectory.

We are in the killing zone, once quick with death’s dawn timetable,
its tide marks of cartographic plots:
the field guns’ creeping and standing barrages,
the machine gun barrage,
the bombardment by trench mortars,
by medium and heavy artillery.

Here men flounder over fractured earth,
through nets of wire,
through air roaringly reticulated;
flayed by a burning sleet of lead,
scouring shrapnel balls’ fiery hail,
a steel scourge of splinters.

Napoleon’s Fifth Element, Passchendaele

Earth, rooted;
Air, breathing and dancing;
Fire, all around;
Water, the life blood;
Mud.

The Line of March, Messines

Static sentinels,
or stalking figures, up the track, along the hedge;
then in open order,
shaking out into line
or artillery formation.

Unharvested,
their rods
explode into the sky.

Ancient Pollards, Ploegsteert
(‘Old willow boles, rarely sound and falling about untidily,
continue to shoot vigorously’)

Spiky, hoary polls -
shock-headed,
gnarl-faced,
whorled,
limbless;
the old sweats, who once fired
fifteen rounds rapid.

Rotting, raddled corpses,
And survivors, old wounds healed
around shell splinters, steel rods, concrete,
screw pickets, wire barbs.

White Willows, Cross Roads Farm

Some white willows are weeping,
their lashes stroking the moat’s breast,
dropping tears.

Bat and Ball; drawing a blank

The backs of the leaves flicker white in the wind
as a ghost, or an angel, passes;
the felled tree’s flesh glimmers with the pallor of a shroud.
Sawn straight from it, the undressed white willow slab, square cut,
like the round which will not kill
is called a blank (not ball).

Reading the Runes, St Yvon

How to read the brown hare,
lored with wicca and moon,
breaking in February’s sunshine over the plough,
along no man’s land, from the trees around the flooded mine crater,
from the wired brushwood by the concrete pillbox sherds?

Trees as text
or as signs, symbols;
conventional signs on the map –
the dots penning the flowing beke,
shoring the still dyke or pool?

Read their linearity, their punctuation,
their studding, their scatter in the landscape.
What information do they yield, these willow patterns?
Some deep, ancient pattern of cultivation, of mulch and tilth,
of gabion, wattle and revetment against the rushing water,
the drilling rain, crumbling bank.

That here Flemish farmers fought the rheumy clay
to work their root crops and pastures,
seed their land,
plant their rods, harvest the osier crop
along the ditch, around the teeming pool and moat.

They line the cultivation, mark the gutter,
form field boundaries, divide lush pasture from clay plough.

Or that here was a battle
leaving a hecatomb of corpses?

The Quick and the Dead
(with acknowledgements to Robert Graves)

A tree of enchantment,
the moon’s willow is the fifth tree,
one of the seven wise pillars, with their planets, days and letters,
one of the seven noble, sacred, trees of the grove.
Its branches waving at the fifth month
start May Day’s orgiastic revels, spring magic dew,
urge the season of the renewed sun.

Helicë, the willow sacred to poets,
names Helicon, home of the Nine Muses,
wanton priestesses of the Moon-goddess.
Mount Helicon’s willow fairy, Heliconian the Muse (the White Goddess),
waves her willow-wand,
starts the wind whispering inspiration in the willows,
puts poets’ minds under a strange and potent influence.
Mystically eloquent, Orpheus received his gift
by touching willows in Persephone’s grove;
outside the Dictean Cave the Orphic willow grew.

Water-loving willow, goddess of wells and springs;
witches went to sea in willow basket-sieves, sailed in riddles,
the liknos, used for winnowing corn, telling the future.
Poseidon, to whom a Helicean Grove was sacred,
led the Muses, guarded the Delphic Oracle, before Apollo.

Belili, Sumerian White Goddess, was a willow-goddess of wells and springs.
Beli, her divinatory son, a Sea-god, tutelary deity of Britain - his ‘honey-isle’.
A god must commands its waters –
the grey Narrow Seas, green Western Approaches, blue High Seas –
before he can rule an island.

Weep, willow, for your lost lover;
wear green willows in your hat as a sign;
and as a charm against the jealousy
of the Moon-goddess.

White Moon-wood, dove, barn owl;
Willow’s landscape is the terrain of death, of the White Goddess,
whose prime orgiastic bird – the wryneck, snake-bird, cuckoo’s mate,
spring migrant hissing like a snake,
nests in willows.

Europë on coins from Cretan Gortyna,
sits in a willow tree, osier basket in hand, made love to by an eagle;
is Eur-ope, of the broad face, the Full Moon,
and Eu-rope, of the flourishing withies, Helice, sister of Amalthea.

The ancient word for willow
yields witch, wicked, wicca, wicker;
at Fricourt, by no strange transposition,
Wicket Corner became Wicked Corner.

Druids offer human sacrifice
in wicker baskets
at the full moon.
Rods sprout from willows’ polls, make baskets ensnaring the moon.
Flints knapped to willow-leaves,
inscribed with crescent moons,
are funery.

Willow is sacred to Hecate, Circe, Hera and Persephone,
the Triple Moon-goddess’s witch-worshipped death faces;
so you haven’t got a chance, boys, in the willow landscape.

Willow service

Trussed with rust-barbed wire,
they stand
as fence posts,
supports for notice boards,
field boundaries;
revet the stream banks,
yield rods, poles, firewood,
nests for birds,
lashed cross-branches skied crows’ nests,
cross-trees for storks, kites;
hiding places for children in their crowns,
for owls in their hollow skulls,
a little shelter against rain’s lashing,
shade for picnics and lovers.

Peter Chasseaud at Arnolfini, Euston Arch, Erotic Cabinet, etc

2009-04-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm showing my poetic photobooks at the Arnolfini in Bristol this weekend - Sat 4th and Sun 5th April 2009. This is part of BABE09 (Bristol Artists Book Event), organised by Sarah Bodman at the University of the West of England. The images above I took while doing fieldwork at Camden for my Euston Arch book. Also the one below:

I produced this book in 2008, after which I started The East London Line, based around the Shoreditch - Whitechapel - Shadwell - Wapping - Rotherhithe - New Cross area. This is still in the pipeline (!). I'm still working on other projects, including the Erotic Cabinet:

I've been very busy so far this year getting my Tom Paine Printing Press up and running, and also recently (March 2009) doing landscape work in Belgium with archaeologists on the site at St Yvon, near Ploegsteert:

This shows a huge lump of concrete and steel reinforcing rods, the remains of a pill-box probably dating from 1917-18 in the old British front line at St Yvon.

The Art of Lost Words at the German Gymnasium, Kings Cross

2009-03-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Talking to Rebecca Pohancenik, the curator of the inspiring 'The Art of Lost Words' exhibition, at the PV at the German Gymnasium, Kings Cross, on 6th March. 'An exhibition of new design and illustration inspired by language's forgotten words.' Rebecca asked each of 46 artists to produce a visual response to a lost word. See the Text/Gallery website: http://www.textgallery.info/.

I was in London showing my Kings Cross poetic photobook to galleries, and took this opportunity to revisit the railway land redevelopment area. The landscape has changed since my last visit - as always. But this time the big shock was the absence of Culross Buildings (see photos below), which have been completely demploished. Culross was such a feature of that railway landscape that, apart from one of the StanleyBuildings and the German Gym, there is nothing left in that once-fsacinating space between Kings Cross and St Pancras. Argent, the developers, have a huge model of the railway land on the ground floor of the German Gym, and this shows which of the old railway buildings on the Kings Cross goods depot site will be preserved - luckily quite a lot.

A photo I took in 1967, looking from Kings Cross across the suburban and Metropolitan platforms towards St Pancras, with the German Gymnasium and Stanley Buildings in the middle distance, and Culross on the far right of the photo.

This is a photo I took in 2004, from York Way (old York Road, and before that Maiden Lane), looking across the Kings Cross station area to Culross Buildings. I made a film of Culross Buildings, and the streets around Kings Cross, shortly afterwards.

Tom Paine's Birthday, Use and Take Care

2009-01-30T07:44:00.001-08:00

29th January was Tom Paine's birthday (he was born in 1737), so I arranged for Andy Gammon, the artist and designer, to ring Gabriel, the town bell, to commemorate the event, and also mark the bicentenary of Paine's death in 1809. Thanks to John Crawford, Chief Executive of Lewes District Council, for making this event possible.

The Market Tower in Lewes, during the bell-ringing

Andy Gammon preparing the medieval bell, Gabriel, for the bell-ringing

Inside 'Use and Take Care', a wonderful shop run by artists and designers in the Needlemakers, Lewes, on the corner of Market Street and Market Lane
http://www.useandtakecare.com/

Chiara Bianchi in her 'Shop of the Artists', 'Use and Take Care'

Some of Chiara Bianchi's beautiful products

Peter Chasseaud's poetic photobooks at the Works on Paper Fair, Covent Garden

2009-01-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

I'll be showing my poetic photobooks in the 'Covered' (artists' books) section of the Watercolours and Drawings and Modern Works on Paper Fair in the Old Flower Cellars (formerly the Theatre Museum) at Covent Garden from 4th to 8th February 2009. Opening times are:

Wed 4th 3-9
Thurs 5th 11-9
Fri 6th 11-8
Sat 7th 11-8
Sun 8th 11-5.30

Books on show: Kings Cross, The Euston Arch, Thames - The London River, Afghanistan - A Journey, Willow/Wilg/Weide/Saule (Ypres Willows)

Cable Street, Hand & Eye Press, Shadwell & Wapping

2009-01-26T09:11:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, 23rd January, I visited Phil Abel at Hand & Eye Press under an old railway arch at Pincin Street, just north of Cable Street. There are some images below. I walked along Cable Street to Shadwell, past the sadly derelict Crown & Dolphin and Britannia pubs, as far as Shadwell Station on the East London Line, and then turned south following the line of the East London Railway running deep below (the route is marked by a road and a wide public footpath, studded with huge brick ventilation shafts which, up to the 1960s, helped the steam and smoke of the locomotives to escape). After crossing under the old Radcliffe Highway, the railway then passes under the bed (now dry - a park) of the Eastern Dock of the old London Docks) on its way to Wapping, Brunel's Thames Tunnel, Rotherhithe, Surrey Docks and New Cross/New Cross Gate. After fish and chips and a pint of London Pride at the Prospect of Whitby (which I first visited about 1964) on Wapping Wall, I retraced my steps to Shadwell, and then followed the East London route further north as far as Whitechapel.

The London Hospital, opposite Whitechapel Station

The magnificent Albion Brewery building in Whitechapel Road (27 Jan 2009)

The old East London Railway Shadwell Station building (27 Jan 2009)

Brick ventilation shaft just south of the newer Shadwell Station (in the distance)

In the Eastern Dock, London Docks

The Crown & Dolphin, Cable Street

Phil Abel, at Hand & Eye Press, operating one of his two Heidelburg letterpress machines

Hand & Eye Press publicity poster

Lewes Bowling Green, Tom Paine and the Minotaur

2009-01-17T08:24:00.000-08:00

Lewes Bowling Green and its Pavilion, with the Norman castle looming above

Just emerging from hibernation after some freezing weeks, flu, etc. It's been a lovely bright, sunny and relatively warm morning here in Lewes. I spent two hours as a guest of the very friendly Lewes Bowling Green Society playing bowls on the beautiful green in the Castle grounds. Tom Paine used to play bowls here in the 18th Century. The woods, made of lignum vitae (a very heavy, dark, hard wood) have an inbuilt bias, and you have to learn by experience how to bowl using this bias, curving the wood up or down hill, and towards the jack, from an initial line which is to left or right of the jack. The green, which looks deceptively level, in fact slopes in several directions simultaneously and, with its rises and dips, is a treacherous and irregular terrain. This is probably the most beautiful and magical part of Lewes, so it probably won't be long before the planners allow it to be ruined with some totally inappropriate development (as is happening with the Gun Garden, owned by the Sussex Archaeological Society).

After this I had fish and chips for lunch, and a couple of hours at the Kings Head with the Headstrong Club irregulars drinking excellent Harvey's bitter, which is brewed here in Lewes. Then to the secondhand bookshops in the High Street (Bow Windows and Cummings), in one of which I found a nice copy of Michael Ayrton's Minotaur book for (Sir) John Tomlinson (one of the irregulars), who created the part of the Minotaur in the Birtwistle/Harsent opera premiered at the Royal Opera House. This year John will be singing Michaelangelo's poems, set to music by Shostakovich, Baron Ochs (Hamburg), Fafner, Hagen and Hunding in The Ring at the Met (New York), and lots of other stuff.

East London Line and the surveillance society: Paranoid and fragile state of England

2008-12-15T14:27:00.000-08:00

Looking south towards Whitechapel Station; the new track being laid

Looking north-west towards Shoreditch Station, from Vallance Road; the new track being laid towards the bridge over the Liverpool Street main line at the site of Bishopsgate Station

I was reminded of the current Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library when I was taking these photos on 12th December 2008 (and earlier photos for this artist's book / poetic photobook project). I have now been stopped and questioned twice by police for taking photos quite openly in public streets during fieldwork for my East London Line photobook - once at New Cross, and the second time at Whitechapel while taking these photos. At New Cross I was suspected of being a possible terrorist for taking photos near a railway station, and at Whitechapel of being a possible child molester for taking photos near a school. There's a strange disproportionate element about these police reactions to such public behaviour. I have heard recently of an artist who was told that he couldn't draw at Kings Cross station. This is the sort of police reaction to normal behaviour that we used to associate with totalitarian regimes. Writers and artists are now viewed with suspicion merely because they want to look at things! Are we now all to go around with averted gaze?

More to follow.

East London Line (almost); South Bermondsey

2008-12-09T12:01:00.000-08:00

Railway Arch on Rotherhithe New Road, 8 December 2008

The Golden Lion, Rotherhithe New Road, 8 December 2008. An infinitely sad, and all-too-common, sight in Britain's towns and Cities. Why has life been closed down and boarded up? Or has it just moved on?

South Bermondsey Station, looking north 8 December 2008

Rotherhithe New Road S.E., 8 December 2008

Yesterday (8 December) I was doing some fieldwork for my East London Line artist's book project. I took the South London Line from Victoria to South Bermondsey - a wonderful journey above the rooftops of Battersea, Brixton and Peckham Rye, and passing through the impressive Victorian brick and timberwork of Denmark Hill Station. I was going to explore the fascinating tangle of roads, railway arches, housing and industrial estates that lies in the area between Rotherhithe (Surrey Docks), South Bermondsey and New Cross Gate. Above are some of the photos I took.

Taking Liberties at the British Library; Tom Paine Printing Press

2008-12-01T02:20:00.000-08:00

The Tom Paine Printing Press approaches completion

Last week I went to see the wonderful exhibition Taking Liberties - The Struggle for Britain's Freedoms and Rights - at the British Library (www.bl.uk/takingliberties). This is on until 1st March 2009, and includes iconic documents from the BL's collections - from Magna Carta, through the Declaration of Right, Colonel Rainborough's Leveller statement during the Putney Debates, Tom Paine's The Rights of Man, Mary Wolstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, the Bill of Rights, the Chartists, and the Suffragettes, to the Civil Rights Movement in America, the Counter-Culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Gay Lib, and the Human Rights Act of 1998. The exhibition includes a great deal of original printed material - books, documents, posters, etc. - which gives an insight into a wide range of letterpress and relief printing.

Last Friday I went to see the Tom Paine Printing Press (an 18th-century-style common press - a 'two-pull' press) as it nears completion at Alan May's home near Stafford - see the link to my Tom Paine Printing Press blog (http://tompainepress.blogspot.com/), on which I've posted a lot of my photos. Alan May built the 'Gutenberg one-pull press' for Stephen Fry's recent TV programme 'The Machine that Made Us'. One of my photos is at the top of this post.

Advance warning.

I shall be showing my artist's books (poetic photobooks) at the Watercolours, Drawings and Works on Paper Fair at Covent Garden (the old flower cellars) at the end of Jan/start of Feb 2009. Maybe I can get my new East London Line book done by then? (or Borough Market? a wgreat place for Christmas shopping, and a pint or two of Harveys bitter at the Market Porter or one of the other good pubs nearby. Harveys of Lewes had and have a strong connection with the Kentish hop fields, hence this connection - the Hop Exchange and various hop factors were nearby).

Phoenix Open and Brick Lane

2008-10-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Walking south down Brick Lane, Sept 2008. One of my current projects is built around the East London Line (now being reconstructed), from New Cross Gate past Surrey Docks, Rotherhithe, under the Thames to Wapping, Shadwell, and Whitechapel and Shoreditch, then under Brick Lane (bridge shown above) to Liverpool Street. The high structure on the extreme right of the photo is the remains of the overbridge which used to carry the Great Eastern Railway into Bishopsgate Station (later Bishopsgate Goods Station). Bishopgate Station's earliest name was Shoreditch Station.

I'm showing my work (paintings, prints, artist's books) in my studio (3S3) at Phoenix Brighton this coming Saturday 11th Oct and Sunday 12th Oct, from 11am to 5pm. I'm up on the third floor.

My artist's books (poetic photobooks) include Kings Cross, Thames - The London River, Afghanistan - A Journey, Willow, Wilg, Weide, Saule (Ypres Willows) and The Euston Arch.

I'll also be showing at The Small Publishers Fair at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, at the end of October (Fri 23 - Sat 24).

Peter Chasseaud and Altazimuth Press at the Small Publishers' Fair

2008-09-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

I'll be showing all my artist's books and poetic photobooks at the Small Publishers' Fair on 24th/25th October 2008, including:

Kings Cross
Thames - The London River
Afghanistan - A Journey
Willow/Wilg/Weide/Saule (Ypres Willows)
The Euston Arch

Small Publishers Fair 24th and 25th October:
London - Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL
Free admission to Fair and all events, open 11.00am -7.00pm
Full details at: www.rgap.co.uk/spf.php

“The book as art form….”
the international event in London celebrating books by contemporary artists, poets, writers, composers, book designers, and their publishers

This year the Fair will be featuring more publishers than ever before –over fifty - with a truly international field -, two publishers from New York – Cuneiform Press and Vanitas and Libellum books; Chax press from Tucson, Arizona; Perro Verlag from Vancouver; Antic-Ham of Korea; and with publishers and presses from France, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and throughout the UK.

The Small Publishers Fair has announced this year's readings and events programme which takes place alongside the Fair. In a varied schedule, highlights include readings from Vincent Katz and Kyle Schlesinger, both poets, editors and publishers from New York, and the launch of the much acclaimed Reality Street Editions’ Book of Sonnets, to be introduced by its editor Jeff Hilson. Bill Griffiths’ The Lion Man and Others will be launched by readers from Veer Books, and for West House books, David Annwn will launch his largest collection to date, Bela Fawr's Cabaret.

The Fair brings together international artists, poets, writers, composers , book designers and publishers to celebrate contemporary artist publishing. Now in its 7th year, the Fair has attracted widespread interest, and praise for the quality of the events, and the immense variety of work on display.

More than 50 publishers are showing work , and all the books and editions are for sale, - an opportunity to buy work at an affordable price. With free admission, there's something for everyone – from top class writing, beautifully printed artists’ editions, multiples, and zines, to inexpensive pamphlets and artists cards. Several young artists’ collectives will be showing their work for the first time.

Organiser Martin Rogers of RGAP said
'The Fair has established itself as the national forum for the many small presses and
independent publishers actively promoting contemporary work. A number of the books and editions on display are special; and may not find their way into conventional bookshops, or sit on regular bookshelves.'

Programme details:-

Friday 24th October
Fair open 11.00 am – 7.00pm

6.00pm Press Preview with drinks

Saturday 13th October

Fair open 11.00 am – 7.00pm

1.30 – 6.00pm Performance, readings and booklaunches in the Brockway Room at the Conway Hall as follows:

1.30
Royal Holloway MA Poetic Practice:
Readings
2.00
Cluster Arts Magazine - Act Two
Selected performances and readings
2.30
Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press
3.00
Launch: The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, introduced by Jeff Hilson
4.00
Vincent Katz reads ‘Barge’,
a collaboration with Jim Dine
4.30
West House
David Annwn and Martin Corless-Smith
5.00
Les Coleman
The Cat Talked in Latin with Greek
5.30
Veer Books launch Bill Griffiths’
The Lion Man, and readings by
Sean Bonney, Johan de Wit and others

Admission free to all events
Check: www.rgap.co.uk for any updates

Peter Chasseaud at Plugstreet, August 2008

2008-08-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

Part I. Drawings. All copyright Peter Chasseaud 2008. NB: These were done in the rain, using soft pencil on thin layout paper, so they were wet and crinkly. They look very grey here because I've had to manipulate the images for them to show up sufficiently. Still, it gives a good impression of some of the weather conditions!

Part II. Photographs. All copyrighht Peter Chasseaud 2008 unless otherwise attributed.

Dawn at Ultimo Trench, German front line, 7th August, after the first thunderstorm. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Willows and pond west of Prowse Point. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Farm dated 1921 (date inscribed on stone below bricked-up window), behind British front lines west of Anton's Farm. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Old photo of the windmill at Spanbroekmolen (now the site of a huge water-filled mine crater, blown on 7th June 1917). This site is south-west of Wytschaete. The photo is being used as part of an interpretation panel at the site. Source of photo unknown.

Contemporary trench art 1? Installation by Peter Chasseaud. Barbed-wire screw picket inserted in a cleft in a tree, Ultimo Crater, St Yvon. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Contemporary trench art 2? Rat on a culvert at Le Gheer, just east of Ploegsteert Wood and south of Le Pelerin and the Birdcage. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Willow tree at Bunhill Row, north side of Ploegsteert Wood. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Contemporary trench art 3? The goggle-eyed booger with the tit. Fence post near Bunhill Row, north side of Ploegsteert Wood. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Peter Chasseaud at dawn at Ultimo Trench, on the German front line of 1914-1917, near the spot where the remains of an Australian soldier (presumably a casualty of the attack on 7th June 1917) were found. Three of us were on site (relieving two others) during the night (and what a thunderstorm - luckily the remaining 1917 mines nearby at the Birdcage didn't go off!) to guard the remains until they could be properly recorded and excavated). The red glow in the sky at the left of the picture is the sunrise over Warneton, to the east. Photo courtesy of Henry Daniels.

As last year, my landscape (and phenomenology) work during the week (3rd to 9th August) was divided between the terrain of the wider context and that of the immediate site of the dig being conducted by the No Man's Land group of archaeologists, led by Martin Brown and Richard Osgood of Defence Estates, MOD.

My work consisted of field-walking, drawing, photography and writing, and I will be producing more artwork and writing over the next few weeks. I will be posting some of the results here.

I made two wider walks:

1) along the old German front line and its mining sites and craters from Wytschaete southward past Messines to Ploegsteert Wood, Le Pelerin and Le Gheer, taking in Maedelstede Farm, Peckham, Spanbroekmolen, Kruisstraat, Ontario Farm, La Petite Douve Farm, Trench 127, Trench 122 (Ultimo Trench and Factory Farm, sites of the dig), and The Birdcage.

2) a circumnavigation of the dark continent of Ploegsteert Wood, with forays into the interior (there are few public paths, and none that goes right through from east to west.

I saw a huge amount of wildlife - notably herons, hares, rats, partridges, moorhens and geese - and, following on from my project of last year, a large number of willow trees - particularly pollards.

More to follow.

Peter Chasseaud and Altazimuth Press at Phoenix Open and Small Publishers Fair

2008-07-26T02:24:00.000-07:00

Kings Cross artist's book (poetic photobook)

Cricket at Firle (oil on canvas, 48x48 inches), one of many paintings on show in my studio at Phoenix Brighton.

The Green Lion (oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches). This one won't be at Phoenix Open.

I'll be showing my artist's books / poetic photobooks in October 2008 at:

The Phoenix Open (Brighton) on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th October 2008, where I'll be opening my studio (Studio 3S3, on the Third Floor), so my paintings, prints and drawings will also be on view (and for sale),

and also at the Small Publishers Fair at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square (London) on Friday 24th and Sunday 25th October 2008.

Borough Market artist's book

2008-06-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

June was a bad month for me, with a long bout of unseasonal flu. I hope I'm back on course now, working on a large-format version of my Euston Arch (2008) poetic photobook book (see previous post) and a new artist's book inspired by the Borough Market in Southwark, London, where I have been doing fieldwork for a couple of years. I touched on this area, near London Bridge, in my Thames - The London River artist's book (2005), but now I'm going to give it my full attention, including nipping into the great Market Porter pub tomorrow for a pint of Harveys bitter. Strange how almost everywhere I work I seem to find a pub which serves Harveys (though the Lock Tavern in Chalk Farm Road doesn't - I had to go all the way to the Holly Bush at Hampstead!).

The Euston Arch - new artist's book - some page images and complete text (poetic photobook) by Peter Chasseaud

2008-05-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

The front cover of the Brighton Festival special edition of my new Euston Arch poetic photobook, which I will be showing, along with my other artist's books, at the Press and Release artist's book fair at Phoenix Brighton on Saturday 24th May 2008. This image does not show the red title, and I'll replace it with a better one soon.

Other pages below (also to be replaced), and complete text below those:

Stop Press Thursday 22nd May 2008: I've just collected the 50 copies from the printer (One Digital, Brighton, who do an excellent and speedy service), so they're now available, and will be on sale at the Press & Release artists' book fair at Phoenix Brighton on Saturday 24th May. Next thing is to get started on the heavyweight edition, which will be completely different!

My notebooks, camera (SLR only, as I took this photo with the digital camera I use), mug of tea and printout of the text of the Euston Book. Other stuff I use during fieldwork are a shoulder bag for lugging the stuff around in, a video camera, and jacket, cap, scarf and umbrella (depending on the weather). I write the text in my notebook along with all sorts of other notes and drawings, and work it up in the pub, on the train and at home. I then type it all into the computer so that I have a file that I can keep modifying, and I print it out every so often so that I can see what it looks like on the page (the shape of text on a page is very important) and make changes in manuscript. I then modify the text accordingly on the computer, and go though the process again. I therefore have several printed states of the text, and in between those there are even more unrecorded states on the computer. I have to decide when the text is 'finished', and sign it off, as it were, so that I can then lay out the book design with the images. Even then I can tweak the text and overall appearance up to the last moment until I'm ready to print.

With this Euston Arch book, I did all the design layout in one day and put it on a CD, got a digital printout as a proof, made some changes, made a new CD, and took it to the printer. The book was then printed within 24 hours. This whole process took only a few working days, although I have been working on the concept, text and photographs for years, intensifying this year. Some of the photos I took in 1960, and others in 2008.

Here's the complete text of the new Brighton Festival special edition (but no doubt this will be a mutatory text, as I continue to work on it):

The Euston Arch
Peter Chasseaud
Altazimuth Press 2008

The Euston Arch - A fieldwalking, streetwalking, photographing, writing, pub-visiting project carried out between 1956 and 2008 (mostly in 2007-8), inspired by my memory of, and the possibility of the reconstruction of, Hardwick’s great Euston Doric Arch or Propylaeum.

This special 2008 Brighton Festival limited edition is a provisional edition of a larger and more solid work which I hope to produce over the next year.

It is dedicated to the Lock Tavern (formerly the Wellington Arms and the Railway Tavern) in Chalk Farm Road, to the Hawley Arms (may it soon be rebuilt and reopened after the fire), to Dan Cruickshank and the Euston Arch Trust, and the Camden Railway Heritage Trust (not forgetting the Kings Cross Railway Land Group). Also to the memory of Alison and Peter Smithson, who were so outraged by the destruction of the Euston Arch that they produced a great book about it, published by Thames & Hudson in 1968.

May Camden Council learn, sooner rather than later, to respect London’s great industrial and domestic buildings, and preserve what is left of the fabric and texture of this historic and wonderful city.

Peter Chasseaud, May 2008

The Euston Arch

To Rainer Maria Rilke

Our Dinge - things -
The stuff of life – our reference points.
Expressing human life through our human construction –
landscape – the human in terms of the non-human.

Age of Gold
Age of Silver
Age of Iron
Pasture to brickfields,
ashes and dust?

Euston Grove, Euston Square.
The Euston Arch – the Doric Propylaeum – the temple entrance
(but which way are you coming from?)
at the end of the Sacred Way,
soaring from heavy roots in London clay,
to the London and Birmingham Railway’s amazing labour
of earth, water, air, fire.

Read the augurs, decode the signs in the things,
roam the labyrinth,
bring the map of Camden alive,
its Eros and Thanatos.

Hardwick’s shining Academy image
hovers in the sky, shimmers sublime in the sun,
floating out of joint stock’s genie, pounds sterling,
into Platonic ether.

Enter, go straight ahead, ascend or descend
to love and death,
then and now,
classical Arch,
new gothic Camden.

Some thing was but is not
but is dreams and desires.
wished to be again.

Bramley Fall stone
Yorkshire millstone grit
via the Leeds and Liverpool Canal
solid, vanished.
Build a monument to permanence
with human flesh and bone, blood and sinew, hair.
No longer knowing how to pray,
forget it is the temple’s entrance,
sweep it away.
Between Hardwick’s Lodges,
under his Arch
transmuted by a century’s damp soot
from a pale gold glow in the evening sun,
a white goddess glowering in moonlight,
to the colour of coal.

What if there are no mysteries?
Take it for granted there are mysteries, poetry, religion.
Work through the details,
prepare to encounter things as they are,
play on the blue guitar.

Pay attention, be aware,
reveal the mystery, history,
wonder in the face of the world (and of reason?),
will to seize its meaning as it comes into being.

Under long, close scrutiny, gaze,
the physical becomes the metaphysical;
stone’s grey grains gain the hypnotic intensity
of Kapoor’s piles of pure pigment.
Time becomes timeless.

Mother came down from Liverpool’s war –
Blitz, muddy Mersey,
Western Approaches, Johnie Walker’s corvettes –
to Euston in 1945 to marry Dad
who’d just flown back from Oflag in Bavaria: St James’s, Spanish Place.
My visit to family in Crosby in the mid-1950s –
the Euston departure platform, the simmering engine,
sliding wooden corridor doors, the shaking corridor connections.
Pierhead, Liver building, ferry to Birkenhead,
the Overhead Railway crossing the docks, Herculaneum.

Meccano, tin-plate trains,
centre-page spreads in the Eagle –
cut-away locomotives:
Coronation, Royal Scot.
My first electric train set in 1958 – the green Princess Elizabeth.

Sputnik to Cuba Crisis, London on the cusp.
68 bus from Upper Norwood to Euston and Chalk Farm,
or the 109 from Thornton Heath Pond to the Oval,
the musty, frightening Northern Line tube,
the green suburban train to Victoria,
the red, slow Circle Line to a still, empty, sun-baked Euston Square
where the Metropolitan and District
condensing steam engines,
steam and smoke sifting through fog, rain, particled sunlight,
beat through the cut-and cover’s light chasm, dark tunnel –
a piano keyboard –
through London’s gravel and clay
under the Euston Road.

An uncertain walk to grey pavilions, offices, hotel
(time’s photos show that foreign land -
growlers, hansoms, horse-buses, taxis)
before passing under the dark-grained Arch,
through the Great Hall.
George Stephenson in death’s cold marble,
below the boardroom’s double staircase sweep,
models in glass cases – engines, carriages, ships;
steel and glass arches of the arrival side,
the departure side,
electric trains, parcels, mailbags, milk churns.
Coronations and Princesses,
Patriots, Royal Scots on expresses,
tank engines shunt vans and empty stock,
the disaster of demolition.

The old station’s chaos of platforms and structures,
main lines and local, arrival and departure.
At the curving steel-and-glass-arched,
glass-screened, arrival platforms
an engine sizzles by the buffers.

On the departure side
all is more urgent.
Fireman sands the rail as his engine backs down,
riddles the fire, turns on the blower to roar it white;
boilers and injectors hum, safety valves sing, erupt.
The driver leaves his cab, goes back to confer with the man on the bank engine.

The guard flags green;
steel tyres grip and grind the sand
on the steel rails.
Shuddering from zero
the two locomotives lift the train
under Wriothesley Road, the Hampstead Road,
up Camden Bank’s 1 in 70, 1 in 100,
banker pounding behind,
pressing up the incline
watched by Sickert, peering over the blue-grey wall of engineering brick
into that sooty chasm by Mornington Crescent,
from whose house Gore paints the black saddle-tank ,
the station pilot down below on empty stock,
where the down and up main cross the backing-out road
along which empty trains are backed out
to the carriage sidings and sheds.

Bourne’s quite perfect drawings.
George Scharf, artist and lithographer from Bavaria,
draws on the stone with greasy ink,
alchemises an image of topography and sweat,
with Wellington’s army from Flanders to Paris;
sits and draws the excavations, the clay-hewers,
the wheels, gins, barrows, retaining walls, bridges, the Primrose Hill tunnel,
from Euston to Chalk Farm.
The cable ascent of Camden Bank.
The four tracks rise,
to grow the grime-coral accretion of north London’s water and soot,
along the mile-and-a-quarter,
sheer-gouged and grey-bricked, iron-arched.

Church spire dwindles into fog.
Why am I walking, or sitting on the top of the bus,
along Hampstead Road, up Camden High Street,
waiting on the tube station,
watching the rat on platform 4,
in the lift, on the escalator;
looking at the punk-goth debris
the shops and stalls under the arches
by the Hawley Arms and Camden Lock?

Arguing against the trend, the evidence of continual renewal,
looking for Dinge - things, reference points,
corners of stability, cultural co-ordinates,
before greed’s flood sweeps them all away –
shop and pub names, street lamps and signs,
black brick walls, stone copings, granite blocks, horse troughs, drinking fountains,
rough stone sleepers chiselled to seat the rails’ iron chairs,
holes bore to take wooden plug
for iron spikes to grip;
iron bridges, bollards, posts, public conveniences.
Costermongers’ barrows in the Inverness Street market,
(with their makers’ and owners’ names
so beautifully (except for the most recent) carved and painted
with skill, pride and love
into their solid timber).

1809: Tom Paine’s death and Talavera,
Pitt grinds our radicals and revolutionaries,
our combinations, corresponding societies,
our Blake, Byron and Shelley,
Nosey (Sir Arthur) grinds Boney’s men in the Peninsula.

Iron wrist- and hammer-wrought,
blast furnace white-molten poured, pig-cast,
hammer-forged,
rolled, lathe- and mill-machined.
Cylinders cast and bored, connecting rods forged,
crank pins, eccentrics, journals turned.

Fire forces water to steam
in the wrought-iron boiler of Richard Trevithick’s locomotive,
piston, connecting rod, crank,
trundles people
on a circus ring of track
at Euston Grove.

A decade after Waterloo.
The Stockton and Darlington,
the Liverpool and Manchester:
Rainhill; Sir William Huskisson
loses his leg to a locomotive,
and is whisked to hospital at railway speed.
Wellington fears democracy, turbulent crowds,
the terrifying lower classes, using the trains to get to London,
to destroy property, foment revolution
in a Reform Bill fervour,
they smashed his windows at Apsley House.

After the Great Reform Act,
the London and Birmingham Railway,
capital’s great triumph.

Walking the terrain, eye and brain seeking, worrying out the trace,
fixing the sight-line
with level, theodolite, chain:
Francis Giles, George and Robert Stephenson, engineer the railway,
follow the canals,
through the new-enclosed and turnpiked landscape,
guide the formation, embankment and cutting,
skew bridge and tunnel,
earth, brick, iron and stone.

The London and Birmingham
the Chester and Holyhead
the Manchester and Huddersfield
Joseph Locke, engineer to the Grand Junction,
the Lancaster and Carlisle.

Committees, Acts of Parliament,
compulsory purchase: lawyers deal parcels of land;
navvies switch
from canal navigations to the iron road,
bivouac, rant and roar, roast beef and swill beer,
occupy the route:

In eighteen hundred and forty one
My corduroy breeches I put on
My corduroy breeches I put on
To work upon the railway, the railway
I’m weary of the railway
Poor Paddy worked on the railway . . .

Poor Paddy, potato famine, absentee landlord and free trade victim.
Irish and English riot by the Round House.
Great Exhibition excursions steam to Euston from the North
to view the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,
a heliograph flashing in the sun,
prime beacon of the empire.

Elements
Iron road, steel rails, copper firebox,
coal, fire, water, steam, sand, oil,
clay, brick, stone, timber.

Earth
The clay of London’s farms and fields – dug for brick-earth, fired on site:
Brill Farm, Somers Town, Agar Town, Kentish Town.
North of the New Road, houses batter back the hedges and fields.
Brill Farm and Brick Field,
Upper Brick Field and Lower Brick Field,
Tile Kiln Field,
St James’s Burying Ground.

Trams and trains batter across
Old Twelve Acres, Old Barn Field,
Britannia Field, Shoulder of Mutton Field,
Upper Pitt Field, Lower Pitt Field,
Further Field,
The Kiln Field,
Chalk Field.

Water
Sadlers Wells, St Pancras Wells, cattle ponds, pastures and liers;
on either side of the slow Fleet river,
Pond Field, Brewers Field; water for the breweries:
the watering holes of the Southampton Arms,
Adam and Eve, the Oxford Arms, Parr’s Head,
Devonshire Arms (now the Hobgoblin),
the Queen’s, the Princess of Wales, the Albert, the Victoria,
Pembroke Castle, The Engineer, the Delancey,
Elephant and Castle, Old Mother Red Cap, Mother Black Cap,
The World’s End, The Lock Tavern.

Water for the winding engines,
for the locomotive boilers, tanks, cranes and troughs,
for the horses and houses, for the barges
whose tow-ropes groove the parapet,
the Regent’s Canal for the Docks and the River,
for the sodden curs in Dead Dog Hole,
for the people’s typhoid pumps, the cholera.

Air
Constable’s Hampstead skies, flashing blue, grey, white,
above the fog and coal smoke stink;
wind turning the mills’ sails, heaving at the sprits of barges on the cut,
forced air feeding the furnaces’ burning coal.

Fire
Clay ground rises reeking, burning,
Cruickshank’s apocalyptic battleground of a million bricks,
volcanoes of flame, smoke and ash:
the locomotives’ fires, seething spark serpents, spent cinders, roaring skyward,
winding-engine furnaces blazing
beyond the canal at Camden Bank’s brow,
burning the goods depot, the Collards’ pianos,
Gilbey’s warehouse, spirits,
burning, burning, burning;
the Camden Lock fire, the Hawley Arms.
Up from the stinking tideway, where sweet swan sprit sails glide
above the Thames valley gravel
(bronze swords and axes, mammoth bones, Roman leather).
Elemental Euston, Camden, Chalk Farm.

North of the Regent’s Park the land swells green,
to the yielding flesh horizontales of Park Village, St John’s Wood, Maida Vale,
yellow brick and stucco shine,
streets thin to villas, market gardens,
lone houses straggle up the road,
to the Wellington Arms and the Chalk Farm Tavern.

Navvies carving the cutting’s clay,
under roads, bridging the canal with brick, stone and iron,
boring through Primrose Hill to the north of Shakespeare’s Oak,
swerving to the west around Haverstock Hill and Hampstead.
Topping the bank, over the canal,
by Camden’s railway goods depot, Pickford’s,
the canal interchange for Limehouse, Brentford, the docks.

Hay, water and steaming dung,
shovelled by the ton for market gardens,
mingling with tea-leaves for Camden’s roses:
a heavy brigade of horses,
more than charged at Quatre Bras, Waterloo, Balaclava,
shunt the high sidings above Vauban-brick-buttressed walls,
built to drop down the goods to horsed road wagons,
horse-stables, stock-brick arches, vaults and tunnels, coal drops,
catacombs, canal basin grotto.
Iron shoes ring, skid, slip and spark on steel,
on rail lines sunk in granite setts, tramlines;
the horse hospital.
Horse-drivers and shunters,
some veterans of the Peninsula, of Inkerman, the Redan,
wet their whistles across the road (the wet canteen)
under the smoke-yellow lincrusta ceilings.
The Wellington Arms (the Good Old Duke) becomes the Railway Tavern,
becomes the Lock Tavern.

The one-inch map engraved, fine hachure lines caress the hills;
capital letters stride the shires; burins now plough the new railway lines
into the copper plates.
At Chalk Farm and Camden,
Colonel Bayley, Royal Engineers,
supervises the survey for the large-scale plans,
triangulating, chaining, levelling;
every line, siding, wall,
the Round House, the Goods Station, the Interchange, the Coaling Shed,
fixing every signal post and horse trough . . .
every detail
(but what has he missed in the gaps in between?).

Air photos into map,
field-walk on the ground, prop up the bar,
decode the things, the stuff, to find the culture;
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

North west of the canal, under the tracks,
twin winding engines lie buried in vaults.
On the prevailing sou-westerlies,
sky-scraping chimneys lift their smoke over tree’d, poetic, democratic Hampstead –
Keats Grove and Flask Walk,
the glowing grate of the Holly Bush,
the Heath,
the clapboards of Jack Straw’s Castle,
the Spaniards,
‘Appy ‘Ampstead’s green turf.

Camden

Camden High Street:
Halfway Houses: Red Cap, Black Cap.
The Crescent pub, the Camden Theatre,
Mornington House, the Cobden Arms.

Dark side of Camden:
the Euston Murder; Camden Road (Crippen’s wife),
his telegraphic ocean arrest.
The Hampstead Road: Camden High Street, Chalk Farm Road.
Mornington Crescent south end.
Sickert (the ripper?) paints ennui,
north London contre-jour, demi-monde;
his scumbled and impasto models, clothed and unclothed,
renamed The Camden Town Murder.
A dining car attendant on the Midland
out of St Pancras is falsely accused, acquitted.

Inside dark music halls, gaslight and limes’ smoky glare;
the flickering monochrome western on the screen,
Minnie Cunningham, all in red, sings at the Old Bedford;
the Gods sway and jeer,
lust after the elegantly straining caryatids’
underlit breasts and thighs.

George Robey, Vesta Tilley, Marie Lloyd.
Westerns flicker, time jumps, frame by frame,
Moy’s cinematograph cameras film the Western Front.
Life’s slow gravity salami-sliced into spasm, shudder, twitch;
the smile for the camera, immortality,
the brief moment of banal, futile fame.

Shining tramlines score the black street;
at No. 257, Tom Sayers, Pugilist, died.
The butcher’s cleaned up, shut up shop,
the fried fish shop’s open,
damp newspaper, salt and vinegar, gets the saliva going.
Wet, dim-lit pavements -
London and Irish, blood and drunk in the gutter
under the crash of smoke and noise,
the public bar’s roaring, beery, sawdust floor,
brass, cut-glass, bright gaslight in the polite saloon.

Mornington Crescent station, shining dark red-brown,
white glazed tiles and paint.
Egyptian cats and art deco: Carreras building occupies the Gardens.
Mornington Terrace: the Victoria pub , facing the railway.
Outside the Camden Theatre, Cobden, free-market spokesman
(subscription-list headed by Napoleon III),
turns his back on the High Street wrecked by his free market;
the pigeons shit on him.

Dylan Thomas writes in his caravan off Delancey Road.
Alan Bennett writes. They like the beer.

Factories and shops go one by one, piano factory, timberyard, foundry,
the butcher, baker, candlestick maker, fishmonger, ironmonger, hairdresser, toy shop,
stationer, furniture shop, chemist, electrical goods,
newsagent, sweet shop, comics,
Mars Bars, Sherbert Fountains, Tizer,
as globalisation and supermarkets wash them away;
in move the charity shops.

Capital’s hot lava powers on,
suborning politicians:
Thatcher, Major,
Blair, Brown,
Ken, Boris . . .
spinning, privatising,
PFI cons,
power to the centre,
crushing community -
market-fodder -
pushed by tacit conspiracies
of rentiers, developers,
councils and government,
destroying post offices, pubs,
schools, hospitals.
In Highgate Cemetery, Marx,
who lived in Camden,
spins in his grave
(has he seen what they’ve done to his Reading Room?).
Property is theft! Freedom is a good horse, but to ride somewhere! I am a citizen of the world! Keep your head down! You can’t fool all of the people all of the time! Who said that?

Road traffic and motorways destroy railway freight,
Camden goods depot closes.
Dereliction becomes tribal chaos:
burlesque, corsets, tops, skirts.
A strange fantasy stalks the streets -
Gothic, Lolita and Punk -
occupies the wasteland
vaults, stables, girders, arches, shops.

Demi-monde.
Not a golem or vampire. So what?
A mythical figure – some nocturnal transformation?
Nosferatu? Bela Lugosi?
The purple and black sex-death associations.
The Velvet Underground, Jim Morrison and The Doors,
Bauhaus, Ian Curtis, The Cure,
Siouxsie and the Banshees,
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds . . .

Chalk Farm

Roaring up from Euston, bearing left-handed;
London and North Western Railway’s nervous system:
signal boxes and signals,
levers, points, rods and cables;
pine poles chop the passing view, copper wires swoop and loop,
telegraph and telephone.
Warning rings and beats: Train entering section . . .
Thunder over the dark and echoing canal, drop the banker,
pass the goods depot’s brick pile, stables and capstans,
breast the summit by the tunnel for the local lines,
past Camden Loco Shed, rattling coal, raking clinker;
smouldering engine on the turntable, more over the ash pits,
smoke eclipsing sun, darkening houses,
under the coaling plant, on the inspection roads;
fitters and cleaners drink in the Lansdowne by the shed entrance,
drivers and firemen, come off duty, sink pints, wash down the dust.

Cornwall and Columbine, Bloomers, Jumbos, Problems, Precedents and Precursors,
Hardwicke, elegant single-wheeler Lady of the Lake, DX Goods, Cauliflowers,
Webb compounds, George the Fifths,
giant six-coupled Claughtons galloping fifteen heavy corridors,
taking Shap in their stride;
glossy blackberry, shining names sunk in brass:
Champion, Niagara, Daphne, Tamerlane, Vampire,
Jeannie Deans, Thunderer, Titan, Dreadnought,
Charles Dickens, Greater Britain, Thunderbolt,
Sirocco, Vesuvius, Sir Richard Moon.

Glimpse Chalk Farm Station and the Round House
as the line swings west.

Roundhouse, mathom-house of memory, by the coal yard:
goods engine shed, gin store,
Centre 42 - Wesker’s Kultur-Haus;
where the goods yard’s buffers’ eternal percussion
and clanging diminuendo,
engines coughing, whistles shrieking,
scored the smoky landscape’s staves,
music throbs into the Chalk Farm Road:
Pink Floyd, The Who, Country Joe, the RSC.

Engines for north-bound trains, coupled together,
slip off the shed,
wait for the down express to pass,
cross the down fast into the neck, the locomotive spur,
at Camden Junction below Adelaide Road,
wait for the board to go off, clear down the bank to Euston,
by the twisted, tangled skein of tracks at the tunnel mouths;
fly over, dive under,
beneath the steel plates and girders
of the Regents Park Road bridge,
through the worm-like bores of Primrose Hill.

Drumming past Kilburn High Road, Kensal Green Cemetery,
each station’s platform with its chocolate-block pavers,
steaming hard through Willesden Junction – dark under the Low Level awnings,
dim glass-cased staircases from the screened High Level,
Willesden Junction Hotel looms over the coal offices;
under Old Oak Lane - a railway terrain:
tall iron and glass street lamps, cast-iron name plates:
Stephenson Street, Crewe Place, Webb Place, Stoke Place, Railway Cottages.
past Willesden shed yard crammed with goods engines, the freight yard.

Bushey troughs, Watford Junction, and Tunnel, Berkhamstead,
Tring Cutting, Cheddington, Leighton Buzzard,
Bletchley (Station X), junction for the Oxford and Cambridge line,
Wolverton station and works, Roade Cutting,
Blisworth, Weedon, Welton, Kilsby Tunnel,
Rugby (the Great Central passes over) and its massive signal gantry,
Brinklow, Shilton, Nuneaton,
Tamworth, Lichfield, Stafford . . .

Rattle down Madeley Bank
(three miles of 1 in 177 out of Crewe,
difficult for heavy up expresses with engines starting cold from Crewe),
Crewe South Shed, Station, the North Shed, the Spider Bridge,
Crewe Works,
steelworks, goods line underpasses.

The Chester and Holyhead line swinging west,
taking the Irish Mail to the Dee crossing,
Chester, Conway Bridge,
Abergele’s dreadful smash,
Penmaenmawr’s tunnel, viaduct, avalanche shelter,
pushing across the Menai Straits in Telford’s tubes,
racing over druids’ Anglesea,
for the Admiralty Pier at Holyhead, the Dublin packets.

Pounding northward out of Crewe,
on the west coast line,
clatter over the Manchester Ship Canal,
the Liverpool and Manchester Railway,
across the Lancashire of commerce, king cotton, king coal:
Warrington, Wigan, Farington,
Preston’s double-headed smash, taking the curve too quickly,

Mail bags and TPOs, The West Coast Postal, The Night Mail;
GPO Film Unit, gritty, gutsy Grierson of Granton Trawler and Drifters, Auden and Britten,
filmed from the air, breathlessly bound for the border.

Running fast on the level, slicing water from the long trough,
the fireman sets the injectors to keep the water over the firebox crown,
turns, slides his shovel under the coal,
swings, lunges, shoots it under the brick arch
to the white furnace, piles it on, again and again and again.

Coal detonates; heat passes to water through firebox walls;
dragged by the blastpipe,
fiery gases rush through boiler tubes,
carry char up the chimney and away,
to clatter on carriage roofs and singe grey wethers on the moor.

Garstang, Lancaster, Carnforth, Oxenholme,
water fizzes to steam, superheats,
builds pressure to ram the pistons,
drive connecting rods, wrench cranks, swing driving wheels round,
fighting gravity and friction, on and up slowing Grayrigg,
dip and speed again,
Low Gill, Wild Boar Fell growling to the east,
to meet, climb, breast Shap Fell’s blasted grind;
Tebay (poor steaming, side wind, slippery rail? pick up the banker?),
the driver lengthens his cut-off
to get every slogging bit of work out of his expanding steam
on Shap bank, four heaving miles at 1 in 75.
Gradually quickening exhaust-beat as the lessening gradient’s calculus
works incrementally in his favour,
he tops the bank, Shap Summit Box,
coasting fast down to Penrith, Carlisle.

On by Caledonian to Glasgow,
past Gretna munitions works,
Quintinshill, where a signalman’s error caused the Royal Scots,
bound for the furnace of Loos,
to roast in the train’s wreckage.

Races to the North – the ’88 and ’95,
wartime Jellicoe Specials for the Fleet at Scapa,
royal trains setting north for Balmoral, to stalk the stag.
The iron road is a hard road . . .

Special Brighton Festival Edition 2008

Limited to 50 signed and numbered copies.
Text and most images © Peter Chasseaud 2008
Designed and made by Peter Chasseaud

Altazimuth Press, Lewes, May 2008

Camden Council Vandalism by the Canal

2008-05-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

This was the view yesterday from Oval Road on the canal bank at Camden. The building was a fine warehouse built by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMSR). I've been visiting this Camden-Chalk Farm area regularly while working on my forthcoming Euston artist's book, but I wasn't prepared for this. I naiively thought that the surviving railway warehouses and other historic industrial buildings along the canl were safe. How wrong I was! What is Camden Council thinking of to give permission for such vandalism? It doesn't seem to have any respect for the historic built environment at all. And I have just heard that it has allowed Stanley Buildings north block, between Kings Cross and St Pancras stations (see my Kings Cross artist's book 2004 elsewhere in this blog) to be demolished. Again, I had thought it was safe. There are good people fighting to save the best of our industrial and architectural heritage, and no end of good uses to which they could be put with thoughtful conversion, but against stupidity even the gods fight in vain.

Peter Chasseaud at Press and Release, Phoenix Brighton

2008-05-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

Here was fire: behind the Hawley Arms, Camden, 1 May 2008; phenomenological phenomenon (fieldwork for Euston Arch artist's book). Meanwhile, visit the brilliant Lock Tavern in Chalk Farm Road.

I'm taking part in the'PRESS & RELEASE' artists' book exhibition at Phoenix Brighton, and also in the one-day artists' book fair there on Sat 24th May, so you will be able to see my Kings Cross, Afghanistan - A Journey, and Thames - The London River books there.

If you want to see my other work-in-progress - e.g. Rosenberg or Erotic Cabinet - or talk about my current Euston Arch artist's book project, you should email me via this blog to make an appointment, or contact me at Studio 3S3, Phoenix Arts Association, 10-14 Waterloo Place, Brighton, BN2 9NB.

Exhibition: 26 Apr – 7 Jun, 2008
Artists' Book Fair: Sat 24 May

'PRESS & RELEASE' is celebration of artists' books and independent publishing, showcasing an intriguing selection of UK and international artists, with work ranging from the profane to sublime. The exhibition provides an opportunity to encounter a range of visions arising out of the world of artists’ books within an imaginative, improvised space dedicated to revealing the artist’s book in a new light. Sculptor Ben Thomson has completely transformed the gallery space into an environment housing the work of individual artists and publishers, presenting books and related ephemera outside the conventional glass case. The show includes over 30 individual artists and groups, with an emphasis on limited edition, hand-made work that stretches the parameters of printmaking, mixed media and other approaches, to arrive at highly original and inventive permutations of the book format. Ranging from underground comics to journals, pop-ups, posters, web-based pieces, installations and gate crashers, the work provides a glimpse into the dense and multifaceted world of self-publishing.

And a brief political rant:

I'm reminded (after the clobbering the government and Ken got in last week's local government elections) of what I wrote about the Lewes Arms / Harveys beer / Greene King business last year: 'Greene King's attempt to ignore the locals has gone very flat; a faceless corporation has beaten an ignominious retreat.' Perhaps New Labour will now become less arrogant, and treat its locals with more respect. And as for local government in Lewes - we have three councils (county, district and town), and the really important one (town) only has the power of a parish council - i.e. none! All the important decisions over planning, parking, and so on, are made by the other two councils. So the town population is essentially disenfranchised. It's time we had relevant decisions made at the local level - i.e. at town level. Let's shift power from the centre and the big councils, and have some real devolution and local democracy. This means a big reform of the local government structure. And while we're at it, let's keep our post offices, our pubs, our small shops, our village schools, our local hospitals, all so important for community. I hope you're listening, Gordon Brown.

Euston Arch, new artist's book by Peter Chasseaud, update

2008-04-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm trying hard to knock my poetic text of Euston Arch into shape, and I'll post a version here as soon as I can. Thanks to The Lock Tavern in Chalk Farm Road and pints of Peroni for rest and recuperation, and the inspiration of their music listings. Meanwhile, a pint of Harveys bitter at the Lewes Arms this evening, I think. Not too much ale tonight, though, as tomorrow it's the dress rehearsal of the Minotaur at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, from that brilliant team Harrison Birtwistle, Sir John Tomlinson David Harsent, etc.

Peter Chasseaud at Press & Release, Phoenix, Brighton

2008-04-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

I'm taking part in the
'PRESS & RELEASE' artists' book exhibition at the Phoenix Arts Association in Brighton, and also in the accompanying one-day artists' book fair on Sat 24th May, so you will be able to see my Kings Cross, Afghanistan and Thames books there. If you want to see my other work-in-progress - e.g. Rosenberg or Erotic Cabinet - you should email me via this blog to make an appointment, or contact me at Studio 3S3, Phoenix Arts Association, 10-14 Waterloo Place, Brighton, BN2 9NB.

Exhibition: 26 Apr – 7 Jun, 2008 PREVIEW: Fri 25 Apr 6–8 pm
Artists' Book Fair: Sat 24 May

'PRESS & RELEASE' is celebration of artists' books and independent publishing, showcasing an intriguing selection of UK and international artists, with work ranging from the profane to sublime. The exhibition provides an opportunity to encounter a range of visions arising out of the world of artists’ books within an imaginative, improvised space dedicated to revealing the artist’s book in a new light. Sculptor Ben Thomson has completely transformed the gallery space into an environment housing the work of individual artists and publishers, presenting books and related ephemera outside the conventional glass case. The show includes over 30 individual artists and groups, with an emphasis on limited edition, hand-made work that stretches the parameters of printmaking, mixed media and other approaches, to arrive at highly original and inventive permutations of the book format. Ranging from underground comics to journals, pop-ups, posters, web-based pieces, installations and gate crashers, the work provides a glimpse into the dense and multifaceted world of self-publishing.Highlights includes John Dilnot’s cabinet of curiosities, hand-cut pages from Kaho Kojima and Chisato Tamabayashi, Batool Showghis’ family albums, Paul Clarke’s gothic childerns’ stories, Mayan women’s collective Taller Leñateros, and installations by Nicola Dale, found sound duo reassemble, and collaborative trio Borbonesa. In the south gallery, Alasdair Willis scours cyberspace for self-publishing pioneers and rogues, and fills the walls with his discoveries. Books and other publications are for sale in the exhibition through the Permanent Gallery Bookshop.Special guests include Le Dernier Cri, an artists’ publishing house in Marseille that generates beautiful and intense, often disturbing limited-edition books, prints, and animations from European, American, Japanese and South American artists. They are joined by Knust, an artists’ collective from Nijmegen, Netherlands which employs a unique stencil (mimeograph) printing process and champions some inventive ways of producing books, posters, cd’s and wallpaper.

Fieldwork between Mornington Crescent and the Roundhouse

2008-04-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

Georgian houses north of the NLR near Camden Road Station;
view from Kentish Town Road

Another good day doing fieldwork between Mornington Crescent and the Roundhouse. I took lots more photos and filled up more of my notebook with ideas for my Euston artist's book. It was sunny and warm, with occasional clouds - perfect conditions for walking, photographing and notemaking (and for a jar in the Lock Tavern, as well as a peep into the Misty Moon, also on Chalk Farm Road).

Gothic, Lolita & Punk in the Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road

Posters in the window of The Lock Tavern, Chalk Farm Road.

I love the names - witty and poetic. This is a brilliant pub.

Steaming to Paris, 1968 (for John May); Music, Rock Festivals and Cars 1967 to 1971

2008-04-07T06:36:00.001-07:00

Steaming to Paris, 1968. Amiens station. I seem to remember that 1968 was a busy year, what with being at University (Sheffield), anti-Vietnam War demos, LSE, pop festivals and Paris. There were also John Mayall, Ravi Shankar, A J P Taylor, The Incredible String Band and The Pentangle at the City Hall, and visits to Oxford, Amsterdam, Maldon (for sprits'l barges), Cultybraggan OTC Camp, the Brown Bayley Steelworks, Hull fish dock (St Andrew's Dock), etc.

1969 was also a good year for music at Sheffield (and elsewhere) - see the ENTS schedule below:

And then there were also Pink Floyd at Plumpton, Dylan at the Isle of Wight, as well as more anti-Vietnam demos . . . And I've still got this giant matchbox from the Dylan festival:

Below: me in July 1969

Biba was fun . . .

And so was The Prince Consort on the sea front in Ryde (1971-2, before I did the Afghanistan trip, where I used to drink with Anthony Minghella (I taught him A-level history), Clare, Georgina, Frank, Martin, Debbie and the rest of the Sandown High School contingent. The Minghella Ice Cream Parlour was fun too:

This was my yellow Series I Land Rover 'Gandalf', which I had from 1968 to 1970 (after I had to sell my 1932 Rover Nizam 2-seater sports tourer), taken in the winter of 1969-70 somewhere near Farthing Down while I was on the Foundation Course at Croydon Colege of Art. I used to drive in this to the Sculpture Annexe at Norwood, giving a lift to most of Group 5. Bruce McLean took us for 3-D studies on Fridays - great days. Lunch was a baked potato with baked beans - wonderful grub. I was paying my way through art college by washing the floor at Littlewoods supermarket in the evenings. A shame I can't find a photo of the whole group - there area a few of them in the back of Gandalf (Mick Shillaker is the one with the specs). I also drove Gandalf to the Blues Festival at Plumpton in 1968, Pink Floyd festival at Plumpton 1969, Isle of Wight Festival 1969 (Dylan) and Bath Festival 1970. He got around the Derbyshire hills all right in my last year at Sheffield (1968-9), but broke something serious on Abbotsbury Hill in Dorset. Apart from the name painted in gothic black letter script on each door, he also had a black and red anarchist flag painted on the front mudguard. No heating of course. I froze right to the bone.

Below is my 1932 Rover Nizam 2-seater sports tourer, outside my digs in Sheffield in November 1967. The water pump never worked, so I had to keep stoping at garages and elsewhere to top it up with water when it boiled over. I bought it for £40 in 1966, and drove it up the M1, which was gradually being extended northward at the time, from Thornton Heath to Sheffield (the M1 at the time ran from Hendon to south of Chesterfield, I think). No heating of course. I froze right to the bone. In the end I couldn't afford to restore and keep this splendid car, which had a wooden body frame with metal over plywood panels, going, so I had to sell it (again for £40). I hope it's still running somewhere.

Below is the poster I designed for the event on 18 November 1969 when David Bowie came to play accoustic guitar and sing Space Oddity (and other stuff) at the Gun Tavern in Croydon. I was part of something called Croydon Arts Lab at the time, but we somehow shortened that to Egg, hence the shape of the image.

The one below is self-explanatory:

And so is ths one:

Bath Festival 1970. What a line-up!:

I went up from London to the Lincoln Folk Festival in July 1971 on the wing of an open Mini-Moke, with my Canadian friend Frank (who I travelled with to Afghanistan and India in 1972) and his friends. There were 7 of us in and on this Moke. I don't think this would be allowed now! I was living in Muswell Hill at the time, kitchen-portering at John Lewes in Oxford Street as a summer job before going to teach for a year on the Isle of Wight:

My art college portfolio, 1969-70

2008-04-07T06:16:00.001-07:00

I've just found this old b/w print of the cover of my art college portfolio (Croydon College of Art, foundation course, 1969-70). A montage of images which I'd collected over the previous few years. I wish I could identify the sources. I think a lot came from Sunday colour supplements. There's Castro, Trotsky, Dylan, Verushka (?), etc. Can anyone identify any more? Is that Karl Marx in the little drawing right in the middle? Pity it's not in colour. Revolution as style, or a fashion gesture?

Camden Lock, Chalk Farm, The Lock Tavern

2008-04-04T04:19:00.000-07:00

The Lock Tavern, Chalk Farm Road

The Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road

On Tuesday (1st April) and yesterday (3rd April) I was doing a lot more fieldwork in the Euston - Camden - Chalk Farm area for my Euston Arch artist's book / poetic text project, and I've been regularly dropping in to The Lock Tavern (formerly the Wellington Arms and the Railway Tavern) for a pint of Peroni after a lot of footslogging. A pity about the price of beer these days, but apart from that The Lock Tavern's a great pub with a fantastic music scene. Across the road is the Stables Market in the old railway goods depot - visually brilliant with all sorts of Punk - Goth - Lolita - Burlesque outfits. I took some photos with my old 35mm camera as my digital camera malfunctioned last week (also here at Chalk Farm while I was taking photos of the remaining early 19th century houses on Chalk Farm Road), and when I've had them processed I'll scan them and put some images on the blog.

Like everywhere, the greed of property owners and developers is wrecking the subtle fabric and texture of much of our towns and cities, and I fear this is happening at Camden Market as well. I was also aware of it around the Whitechapel Gallery yesterday evening, where I went to a talk by Jean Moorcroft-Wilson about her new biography of Isaac Rosenberg (see elsewhere in this blog for images of my developing Rosenberg project). Along the main roads in Whitechapel the old buildings are disappearing at a rapid rate, and the sense of place and community is being lost. Even Tracy Emin, who's bought an old weaver's house in Spitalfields, is complaining about the havoc being created by over-development. My Kings Cross and Thames books were both very much concerned with the human scale and visual and material texture of urban landscape (Rilke said that we find out about ourselves from things we create - our landscape), and if our recent inhuman creations are anything to go by, we have a hell of a problem!

Out of control? Where is local democracy? And even then, local authorities are conspiring with developers to privatise public spaces. Whole areas of city centres being sold off and effectively lost to the people at large. Public streets being turned into gated commercial communities, with private security guards. I hear that parts of Liverpool and London's Chinatown and Camberwell have suffered, or are suffering, in this way (see The Guardian last Saturday). Tom Paine would have had something to say about all this, I'm sure. What unholy deal has 'New Labour' done with the big money? Too late to reclaim the streets?

The Euston Arch - Peter Chasseaud's new artist's book (work in progress)

2008-03-05T15:21:00.001-08:00

As well as my Rosenberg and Erotic Cabinet artist's books (see elsewhere in this blog) I'm currently working on a new book about the Euston - Camden Town - Chalk Farm area, taking as its starting point the Euston Arch (or Propylaeum), so stupidly destroyed in 1961 (there is currently a scheme to rebuild the arch as part of the planned reconstruction of Euston Station. Fingers crossed!

My text and images to some extent follow the pattern set by my Kings Cross and Thames books. Ill be moving (a contrast of classical and romantic, Eros and Thanatos) from the doric classicism of Euston to the contemporary punk-goth-burlesque of Camden High Street and Camden Lock, and as far as Chalk Farm's Roundhouse, taking in Sickert, the Old Bedford and the Camden Town Grouop and the way. Rilke took the view that humanity could be explored through things (landscape), and by exploring the human constructions of this part of London (and doing a lot of fieldwork in the streets and pubs - I can recommend The Lock Tavern, previously The Railway Tavern). By their works we know them? We'll see. The past is a foreign land. But losing what remains of it appears to be some sort of cultural suicide. I was impressed by what the Smithsons wrote in their 1968 book about the Euston Arch. Alison Smithson said a lot of things about the significance of arches, stones and things which I agree with.

When I've completed my text, I'll post it here. And some images. Or perhaps it'll be a fluid text, continually changing, which I can adjust from time to time.

Here are some Camden High Street and Chalk Farm Road images:

Tom Paine Printing Press

2008-03-05T15:07:00.001-08:00

The pic shows a typical wooden 'common press' of the 18th century - the type (!) on which Tom Paine's writings were printed. In Lewes, William Lee, a local bookseller and publisher of the Lewes Journal, had a print-shop in the High Street at the time in the 17760s and 1770s that Paine was in Lewes (before Paine went to the American Colonies and took up the cause of the Colonists against the oppressive Brirtish government of George III.

Watch this space for information about the Tom Paine Printing Press which I'm setting up this year for the Tom Paine Festival in Lewes in the summer of 2009, to commemorate the bicentenary of Tom Paine's death in 1809. On the press I'll be printing some of Tom's key writings, including The Amerian Crisis No.1, Common Sense, and The Rights of Man, plus some of my own work and also some contemporary radical stuff. The press will be set up somewhere in central Lewes, but the location has not yet been decided. The overblown state of the British housing market over the past decade has meant that artists studios and workshops have been squeezed out as every available property gets converted into housing units (how many second homes are there in the UK?). Time for a good rant about private ownership, greed and government policy? I'll leave that for my own crisis papers . . .

Peter Chasseaud's Isaac Rosenberg artist's book, work in progress

2008-02-10T04:54:00.000-08:00

I'm going to post images of work-in-progress on the Rosenberg book as they develop. Here is a jumble of cut stencils and printed test pages. The white shapes lying on the Dead Man's Dump page (top left) are the remnants of a trees stencil I was cutting; I left them lying on the page by accident, and I thought they looked good just like this! See also below.

This image utilises two stencils: the grey-green background one of the trees, and the dark red foreground one of the two soldiers. I'll probably use others to create a more layered image.

Peter Chasseaud at Modern Works on Paper Fair, Royal Academy

2008-02-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all those wonderful visitors to the Modern Works on Paper Fair at the Royal Academy (30 Jan - 3 Feb 2008) who shared their memories of, and thoughts of, London (Kings Cross, St Pancras, Euston, the River, the Docks), Afghanistan, Isaac Rosenberg and many other topics of conversation during the five days of the Fair. I hope you will use this blog to continue to share ideas. In this way my artist's books become truly interactive, inclusive and accessible.

Euston Arch
I took a photo of the Doric Arch at Euston around 1960, but have lost both it and the negative. Does anyone have one that I could use (acknowledgement given, of course) in a forthcoming artist's book?

Peter Chasseaud at Modern Works on Paper Fair, Royal Academy, 30 Jan to 3 Feb 2008

2008-01-24T13:21:00.000-08:00

I am showing my artist's books in the 'Covered' section of the Modern Works on Paper Fair at The Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, on the following dates:

Wednesday 30 Jan 3pm - 9.30 pm (Preview, by invitation only)
Thursday 31 Jan 11 am - 9 pm
Friday 1 Feb 11 am - 8.30 pm
Saturday 2 Feb 11 am - 6 pm
Sunday 3 Feb 11 am - 5.30 pm

My artist's books will include:
Kings Cross
Thames - The London River
Afghanistan - A Journey
Rosenberg (work in progress, inspired by Isaac Rosenberg's 1914-18 poems)

Thames - The London River, poem for artist's book by Peter Chasseaud

2008-01-24T12:29:00.000-08:00

Here is the full text (copyright Peter Chasseaud 2005) of my artist's book Thames - The London River, dedicated to John Berger. I'll post some images soon:

Thames - The London River

Peter Chasseaud
Lewes

2005

London River

I. Estuary to The Pool

Dogger, Smith’s Knoll, Thames, Dover . . .
Off the North Foreland grey North Sea rollers meet the steep Channel chop,
piled up by wind and tide;
great ships, drawn by London’s lode, converge on deeps and channels.
Thames, like Poseidon, is cruel, capricious, but with a thousand beauties,
untrustworthy, but full of promise,
ungenerous, but bearing gifts,
shifty, sky’s multi-faceted mirror, through which we darkly look,
in perpetual motion, metamorphosis, dissolving and reforming,
driven by the wind, and drawn by the moon (slave of Aphrodite),
of unsleeping power, deliverance from which
demands votive ships to hang in the hulls of churches along Mary’s river,
and libations to be sunk in dockside pubs.

Pitching barges beat up the estuary,
low black sheer, no freeboard, shipping it green;
sienna sails strain against sprit,
hulls lean hard against leeboards,
bows slam into seas, compass card shivers,
wind rips across tide, choppy waters shoal yellow.
skipper watches the bob, judges the luff, spins the wheel,
snaps onto the other tack; in the dark, the fog,
he navigates by the colour of water, by smell, by the lead.

Ships wait for the tide, pick up pilots, thread the deeps.
gulls swoop, shriek, whirl on the foam, white on white,
grey herons perch and peer on piles,
black cormorants swoop, sluice beneath the swell.
Green-brown river slips past brickfields and oyster beds, wreck buoys.
Leigh bawleys, ships and barges,
paddle steamers to Gravesend and Margate,
pleasure boats run down by steamers - drowned legions for the eels;
fish and chips, beer and tea, stroll on the pier
at Southend.

Dirty British coaster . . . salt-caked smoke stack . . .
Shuttles of an Empire’s loom . . . London’s reason.
Gulls wheel and shriek,
ships slip over Spitway’s scant fathoms,
up Swin, slide past shoals,
white water boils on the Maplins,
grey coast beyond.

Dirty weather looms,
barges, Whitstable oyster boats, run for cover;
eastward towards Margate, beyond the Mouse and Shingles
the Deutschland breaks on the Kentish Knock.

Estuary spindrift and spume –
wind presses chine to leeboard,
sprit strains to leeward, weather vang taut,
diagonals the wind’s parallelogram,
thrashes past tossing lightship’s giant N O R E, white on red;
southward, Sheerness and Medway; Chatham and Rochester.
The Dutch stand off the Nore,
burn the fleet in the Medway, cut out The Royal Charles,
Tromp’s broom at masthead.
Richard Parker leads the Nore mutiny, the Floating Republic,
blockades the Thames, hangs at the yardarm.
Turner conjures Off the Nore: Wind and Water.

The lightship roars astern;
tear past Sea Reach No.1 buoy;
the PLA area, the tideway to Teddington Lock.
Isle of Grain, London Stone, Yantlet Flats on the port beam,
crash into Sea Reach on the flood
past Leigh bawleys, the Chapman light, Blyth sands.
On board the yawl Nellie, Conrad waits for the tide,
ponders Thames ships and men: Drake and Franklin,
Golden Hind, Erebus and Terror,
England, where men and sea interpenetrate,
and the mournful gloom over London – its heart of darkness.

Wreck Hall, Deadmen’s Point, Hole Haven to starboard;
brave wide waters, sparkling between Essex and Kent
where Trigonometrical Survey men plot for the one-inch map.
Allhallows, Hoo, Cliffe to port, Dickens watches the sails across the marshes,
past tide marks, leading marks, buoys and gibbet, shoal-lighthouse on timber piles.
Joe and Pip drink in the Three Jolly Bargemen, Magwich lurks,
convicts fill ballast lighters, rot in the hulks.
Narrowing, shoaling, the dredged channel.
Into the London River – wind rips across tide,
short river lop hits sea swell, deck heaves against helmsman’s feet,
tiller hard to starboard, bow swings round to bite
the southerly swing of sheltered water
as she opens the Lower Hope.

Hope Point battery, Mucking, East Tilbury,
bear west to fetch Gravesend Reach.
Tilbury Marshes; by Tilbury Fort
glittering Gloriana reviews her troops as Armada threatens.
Stanfield paints Tilbury Fort, Wind Against Tide –
swim-headed stackie, steam tug, redcoats.
Tilbury Docks, nemesis of the upper river;
ocean liner pier; river cargo jetty.
Gravesend, where Pocohontas died,
tilt boats arrive – the long ferry,
river pilots take over from Channel pilots.
Customs launches, bawleys and lobster boats;
sprits’l barges sail up river to the docks, threading among steamships;
nor-west by north up Northfleet Hope,
round Broadness, sou-west into St Clement’s reach
to make lime-white Greenhithe.

Everard’s yard. In the dark tideway
skipper, mate, third hand, muster for the tide, grasp winch handles;
hunger and sweat break out the anchor,
set mains’l, stays’l, tops’l and mizzen,
sheet them in and bear away on the flood,
past cement works, Grays, Thurrock, up Long Reach nor-west by west
for Blackwall, Limehouse – the Docks.

From Dartford’s soaring bridge, Canary Wharf’s towers loom.
Purfleet, Darent, round the point into Erith Rands;
Cold Harbour Point, Erith barge roads,
nor-nor-west up Erith Reach past Rainham’s one-eyed idol,
into Halfway Reach,
Dagenham marshes’ Dutch dykes to starboard:
Ford motor works: foundry and pier.

Crossness, Horse Shoe Corner, Barking Point, Creek, Power Station;
fishing smack, Saucy Jack, cutter rig,
fast carrier Ranger, one of Hewitt’s eighteen, carries fish in ice
from the North Sea fleet to Billingsgate.

II. London

Beckton reeks and smokes – Gas Light and Coke’s Inferno;
colliers unload at iron piers, coal bakes in hellish retorts
for London’s lights and fires, tar for her roads.
Upriver, safety valves jet steam,
tugs hoot, nudge and fuss, take charge of dumb lighters.
Sou-west into Gallions Reach; barges and lighters gather
for locking in to the Royals:
bridges open, hold up buses, as ships tug out on the flood.

Plumstead Marshes,
west into Woolwich Reach; Depression, barge roads, sails flutter in rags,
an Afghan graveyard at the starvation buoys.
A mile below Woolwich, returning up river, Princess Alice paddle steamer
turns under the bow of the steam collier Bywell Castle and is run down;
the river spews a hecatomb.

Woolwich Naval Dockyard builds ships of the line;
HMS Royal Albert, 121 guns, converted to steam.
Arsenal, Gunners, Royal Regiment, Shooters Hill, Rotunda, The Shop, Ubique;
powder burns, canister sprays, shot whines, shell bursts.

The Free Ferry’s twin funnels pour smoke where the trolleybuses stop;
the river swirls a murky, milky, green-brown, and
this boy catches a strong living Thames smell: work, rot, salt and sludge
bearing ships, tugs and lighters.

North Woolwich station, pier, docks;
steam train to Stratford rumbles over Connaught Bridge –
sudden sweep of ships and lighters in the Royals:
Victoria, Albert, George V, before the City Airport.
Graving docks, red oxide hulls, skied Plimsoll marks.
Crane legs stalk; cabins, jibs, funnels, masts, derricks,
soar over Silvertown, etch the skyline. Coal and oil bunker ship.
By the Connaught dockers and stevedores wait for the morning call.
Custom House, Canning Town, wagons on the Silvertown Tramway,
sugar and chemicals – Brunner Mond explodes.
The Barrier bares its teeth.

Now the great river’s horseshoes bend: beat north with the tide
up Bugsby’s Reach, Bugsby’s and Greenwich Marshes to port.
Peterboats, wells quick with fish, work the river for whitebait;
gasworks and Dome; power station for the trams; Blackwall Tunnel.
Victoria Dock entrance, Tidal Basin, Trinity House Quay, buoys and lighthouse;
Bow Creek and the River Lea: Izaac Walton’s Compleat Angler
enjoys his contemplative recreation.
The Thames Ironworks: forty drowned at the launch of HMS Albion.
Stratford marshes wait for the Olympics; developers rub their hands.

Gybe round Blackwall Point, block crashing on traveller across the main horse,
mizzen boom thumping the shrouds. The river’s great centrifuge
piling water against the outer bank, eddies pulling and swirling.
Citizen paddle steamers built by Ditchburn and Mare, Blackwall and West Ham,
thrash from London Bridge to Kew, Gravesend.
Blackwall Yard Dock: East India Company, Blackwall Frigates.
The Blackwall Railway strides from the City
to East India Docks (dug through fossil forest)
on brick arches; now they carry the DLR.

Rounding the Isle of Dogs, run south into Blackwall Reach,
under the astronomers’ Polaris alignments,
a quiverful of zero longitudes cut the river’s snaking umbilical
down the west side of the Greenwich peninsula, west into Greenwich Reach,
close-hauled again, beat northward, past Deptford, Millwall and Rotherhithe
into Limehouse Reach.

Isle of Dogs
Hemy paints Blackwall Reach and shipyards, with a paddle tug,
and a sailing barge, skipper’s wife at the tiller, sailing downstream.
Isle of Dogs: home of the archbishop’s hounds;
West India Docks, Canary Wharf, the Rum Quay.
Millwall Dock’s bulk trade and grain: square-riggers, steamships, barges at granaries.
Cubitt Town’s Mudchute and brickfields, Yarrow’s yard, hulls and upper works;
steel square rigger, bowsprit and figurehead, loom over Manchester Road.
Blackwall Railway branches south to North Greenwich, Island Gardens;
foot tunnel; the DLR pushes under the river.
Millwall’s windmills grind on the river’s earth wall,
Hogarth’s gibbet awaits the Idle Prentice.
John Scott Russell’s yard builds the Great Eastern, plate by iron plate,
red-hot rivets, screws and paddles, on the hard, side-on to river;
white iron torrents fill sand moulds for her titanic cylinders.
Dickens watches first attempt at launch: a man killed; Brunel soon dies.
Children play street cricket in the funnels’ shadow.

Greenwich
Ships skied on high tide’s plinth glide past Royal Greenwich,
Elizabeth’s Court; Donne preaches before James’s Queen.
Greensward swells to Flamsteed’s Observatory, a multiplicity of meridians:
cross zero longitude, switch hemispheres.
Red time ball falls for mariners in the Pool.
Halley’s Comet crowns the Altazimuth Pavilion.
The Royal Society, the Board of Longitude, Their Lords of the Admiralty.
Harrison’s chronometers defy the elements, convert time to longitude.
John Penn & Sons marine engine works.
Cutty Sark pub, Naval Hospital, College; Maritime Museum marks the lost world.

Whitebait is served; Cabinets and notables dine
in the Trafalgar Tavern, Crown and Sceptre.
Writers, artists, smoke, confer, watch the river: Dickens, Turner, Marryat, Conrad . . .

Magical photographs, time-frozen light, captured in chemicals:
tiller-steered topsail barge, sprit sailed, swim-headed,
mizzen stepped on rudder-head,
tall-bowler-hatted skipper at tiller, slipping down on the tide;
more barges, a stackie, moored inshore.

Two hundred years after Trafalgar.
Tissot, connoisseur of curves of quarter-deck and women,
paints the Trafalgar Tavern, lads larking on foreshore.
Wyllie etches barges, lighters, a steam tug –
Toil, Glitter, Grime and Wealth on a Flowing Tide.
Rule Britannia! prints of Nelson, battles;
Come cheer up my lads ‘tis to glory we steer! The Saucy Arethusa.
Heart of oak! Steady, boys, steady! Press and bless our Tars, our Wooden Walls;
but mutinies at Spithead, on the Nore;
rum, sodomy and the lash.

Tilt boats to Gravesend, bumboats provision ships;
wherries, skiffs; watermen take skulls and oars, drive lighters.
Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling;
Poor Tom’s a cold – he’s gone . . . aloft.
Greenwich Pier; the glorious greyhound Cutty Sark, like London, falls apart.

Deptford
Deptford Creek; Zeebrugge’s Royal Daffodil, lighters sit on Ravensbourne mud.
Henry’s Royal Dockyard, Pepys, Royal Victualling Yard.
Tsar Peter learns his trade; ruins sylvan Evelyn’s hedges, trashes his house.
Kit Marlowe’s quarrelsome riverside death; an agent liquidated?
Brocklebank Line, General Steam Navigation, the Plinlimmon.
Barnard and Dudman’s shipbuilding yard,
Ferranti’s Power Station electrifies London.

Rotherhithe and Surrey Commercial Docks
Adieu to cold Greenland – brave boys; whalers on the Surrey side,
Greenland Dock – whale jawbones for bollards, whalebone arches, narwhal tusks.
Muscovy Company’s God Speed, 60 tons, sails to Spitzbergen
to slaughter walruses, gain oil and ivory.
Narwhals, the water unicorns, betray the right whales;
she blows! Ahab’s whaleboats oceans away from Nantucket.

Howland Great Dock, Greenland Dock, Gulliver’s home in Redriff.
South Dock, the Surrey Commercial Docks: masts and bowsprits over packed houses,
square riggers, Finnish barques, Baltic trade, timber stacks;
deal porters bounce ashore, loads whipping leather.
Grand Surrey Canal bears spritsail barges, lighters, to Camberwell;
the Croydon Canal cuts the railway and dock no-man’s-land
of Rotherhithe, Bermondsey and New Cross Gate.
Redriff Road winds past docks and timber ponds;
Russia Dock, Quebec Pond, Lavender Pond,
Nelson Dock, Rotherhithe Street, pints in The Clipper,
in the Blacksmith’s Arms, PLA maps of the River and the Docks.
Surrey Docks Station, Lower Road; dockers shape up by Station Yard.
68 tram: Waterloo, Elephant, Tower Bridge, Bricklayers Arms,
along Jamaica Road, Rotherhithe, Surrey Docks, Deptford, Greenwich.
70 tram: London Bridge to Greenwich via Tooley Street.

Technologies clash in Rotherhithe’s red dawn: paddle tug belches smoke
thrashing up Turner’s Thames, towing the Téméraire,
to the breakers at Beatson’s Yard, Bull Head Dock Wharf.
Randall & Wells build ships. One house survives by Kings Stairs,
on the flattened river bank’s Desolation Row;
where is the Dover Castle, where The Jolly Waterman,
where Armstrong Jones entertains Margaret
when they’re not in their leathers at Thornton Heath Pond?
Whistler draws Baltic seamen at The Angel.
Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, the black East London Railway,
link New Cross and Whitechapel with smoke and steam;
yellow Brighton terriers work under the river.
Sailing barges and lighters cram grubby wharves.
The Shippe, then The Spread Eagle and Crown, later the Mayflower;
Here, near Adam, Eve and Paradise Streets, Sam Weller observes
that poverty and oysters always seem to go together.

At Jamaica Level, Ropewalks, gathering anathemata,
David Jones roams Alice, his mother’s, Rotherhithe;
her father Ebenezer Bradshaw,
of a family of Thames-side shipbuilders,
mast and block maker, Prince’s Stair,
opposite the Prospect on Wapping Wall.
The Ship and Pilot pub.
At Cherry Garden Pier, steamers hoot
for Tower Bridge to open.

Dockers, stevedores, hook and heave loads,
work derricks, winches, the union purchase.
Some artists like the rough trade.
Duncan Grant paints the Surrey Docks
before Hitler’s incendiaries find dry tinder in the timber stores.
Minton paints Rotherhithe from Wapping; Bacon is hereabouts.

Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, derelict; shops, pubs, boarded up,
security grills, doors and gates, murder notice in Jamaica Road.
River slides into decadence along both banks; yuppie fortress housing,
converted wharves, warehouses, new blocks, expensive cars, all gated,
shun the council housing across Rotherhithe Street.
Give us back our waterfront, shout the Rotherhithe people
to the deaf Dockland Development Corporation.
Along the dead riverside nothing happens;
where lightermen laid into their sweeps, the river also dead.
Low tide; sad barge May motors down with trippers, no sail set.

Black crow shares foreshore with gulls and pigeons,
silent heron on the sand of Cuckold’s Point;
The blank new obelisk by Lavender Wharf speaks volumes.
In the park near the council flats, opposite the Rotherhithe Hilton,
where incendiaries’ firestorm vaporised Lavender Pond’s timber sheds,
alien yuppie mothers, babies in pushchairs, drink chilled white wine;
up the river, over the docks, on the Heathrow flightpath,
incoming plane passes the gibbous moon.

At Bermondsey, Bill Sikes haunts foul Jacob’s Island
by St Saviour’s Dock, the Neckinger’s dark, narrow chasm.
The Tooley Street fire rages for days, and in The Sign of Four
Holmes chases Aurora from Jacobson’s Yard among tugs and lighters.
Shad Thames’ grimy gloom scrubbed up, a film-set.

In the drizzle, swim-headed hulls grip the gull-specked low-tide strand,
groan, gurgle as the making flood sucks them clear of mud,
bump hollow with a hopeless thud at slack high water,
hawsers creak and strain against the tide,
sun-bleached timber gathers grime,
soot sifts through the quayside grit;
men sweat, spit and smoke by Butler’s Wharf;
another long shift before a wad and char, or a pint at Dockhead.

Tugs jet steam, hoot, anxious to catch the first of the flood;
black smoke smudges the haze, screws churn and boil;
full ahead, downstream through the tiers, towing ships and lighters.
The Lower Pool, London and St Katharine Docks
Swing west from Limehouse Reach, into the swelling Pool,
the river’s teeming womb;
boatyards, shipyards, mast, block and oar makers,
running rigging, standing rigging, hemp, caulking, tackle and tar.
Burston of Ratcliffe, hydrographer, makes charts for the King,
for the Duke, for Lord Sandwich, for Pepys.
Ships’ figureheads are carved in Wapping, Limehouse and Rotherhithe.
The great Ratcliffe Fire starts with a kettle of pitch
at Clove’s barge yard, Cock Hill,
a saltpetre barge villainously explodes; fire spreads north and east,
to timber and rope yards, sugar warehouses.
600 houses consumed.

Limekiln Dock, Chinatown, opium dens where Holmes reclines.
The Grapes (The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters),
Limehouse Cut and Basin – Regent’s Canal Dock –
freights like ice, like fire: coal and timber; ice for Battle Bridge Basin.
Ice ships burn – straw packing compresses, spontaneously combust.
Marx ponders his epic Limehouse poem – London’s Secret Sorrows.

Jack ashore – paid off, drunk, whored, robbed . . .
Jack Tar’s Drunken Frolick in Wapping,
Tiger Bay, Ratcliffe Highway murders,
Paddy’s Goose (the White Swan), Shadwell High Street.

London Docks, warehouses, criminally betrayed; Shadwell Entrance and Basin,
Tobacco Dock, wine vaults by the mile, spirits, spices, warehouses in bond.
Doré (and Dante); sweat, grime, of river, wharf and crane.
Shadwell and Wapping warehouse fortresses wrought in brick and iron,
New, East, West Docks; the Hermitage Entrance.
John Seller, Hydrographer to Charles II,
sells his charts, engraved by James Clark, and
The English Pilot, Atlas Maritimus, Atlas Minimus and Hydrographia Universalis
in his shop at the Hermitage.

Mary Read, London pirate, raids ships in the Carribean
with ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham and Anne Boney, dies in prison.
Williams the pirate hanged at Execution Dock, where Thames tides roll,
and afterwards in chains at Bugby’s-Hole. Kidd has his fake pub.
The Prospect of Whitby (the Devil’s Tavern); here sit Turner, Minton;
Whistler paints Wapping: Heffernan, Legros, a seaman – the whore’s assignment.
Molly was never false since last we parted
at Wapping Old Stairs; The Town of Ramsgate, Wapping Entrance and Basin.
Turner (‘Admiral Booth’) inherits the Ship and Bladebone pub.
Sparks’ barge yard, sailing barge Mafeking, lighters, sit on the mud.
Ackroyd and Sinclair find their element.
The Blue Lamp: River Police hunt the thieves,
haul out the sodden corpses, post notices: Dead Person, Dead Child . . .

Before East Enders, on strand and hard, mudlarks scavenge,
children play cricket, wicket chalked on a lighter’s side,
PC 49 chases villains from Wapping to Lower Thames Street,
while Dixon patrols Dock Green.
Bewick lands from a collier brig below London Bridge
in the year of Wealth of Nations, the American War;
Geordie sea-coal whipped out by plunging human counterweights
for London’s houses.
St Katharine Dock, Blitz’s rubble dumped in Eastern Basin.
Telford’s warehouses, wantonly destroyed;
The narrow St Katharine Entrance, Tower Bridge.

London’s threat from the east
First, Zeppelins and Gothas navigate to London, by the light of the ‘bombers’ moon’,
following the silvery Thames; then the greater replay.
Little ships sail to Dunkirk to evacuate the BEF. Ack-ack hacks the sky,
the river meanders; the docks draw black rectangles in the bombsight,
Merlins scream, Spitfire and Hurricane zip white the blue,
scrawl and swoop; fighter boys battle it out –
Brylcreem boys, top tunic button undone, victory roll or burnt to a cinder,
the bomber will always get through.

London’s burning, pour on water, steel-helmeted firemen engulfed,
warehouse walls collapse, black against incandescence.
Docks burn – Royals, East and West India, Surrey, London, St Katharine.
Water aflame, molasses, rum and sugar boil a searing Vesuvius,
timber blazes for days in the Surrey Commercial.
Wapping and Rotherhithe crackle and cool,
no nightingale sings in Shad Thames in 1940, or even ’41.
Hitler’s panzers chew into Russia,
but he can still twitch his tail at England. Searchlights sear the sky,
St Paul’s dome soars above ruins,
Ludgate Hill railway bridge, flame and smoke;
Gog and Magog perish again in the Guildhall.

Weeds spring up – London Pride.
In the estuary, Maunsell forts bristle;
in the docks D-Day concrete pours, Phoenix giants grow
for Mulberry Harbours off Normandy.
Last, the dread drone of doodlebugs before the cutout,
and the sudden flat blast of unheralded V2s.

The Upper Pool
Tower Bridge, London Bridge, dark bridges sew both banks,
gather up the dead river in a tarpaulin for a burial at sea,
railway bridges and stations loom;
lights of silent shipping slide
up and down on the tide.

Tower Bridge, hydraulic bascules.
The Margaret, Captain Robert Fairless, sails to Hartlepool
from Pickle Herring Upper Wharf – Ken’s second riverside lair.
William Farmer, near the Limekiln, Horsely Down,
makes mariners’ magnetic compasses.

At the Drawing Room in the Tower the Ordnance Survey draughts the landscape,
copper-plates are engraved, printers pull their soot-black proofs.
Gallant Rawalpindi ladders drop to Londoners’ sandy beach;
Tower Hill’s bloody execution rills; echoes from dockers’ meetings;
Memorials of Merchant Navy, Fishing Fleets,
twelve thousand men lost in the Kaiser’s War,
twenty-four thousand in Hitler’s, torpedoed, bombed, shelled, mined
from London River to Murmansk, Tierra del Fuego and Ultima Thule:
torpedo hits midships – white water plume jets mast-high,
hull slides under, boilers tumble,
oilskinned, duffle-coated men, scalded, burned, trapped below,
fall into cold scaly care of mermaids, sea gods, goddesses, fishes and monsters.
Scurrying escorts scatter erupting depth charges;
HMS Belfast, retired from the North Cape, a pale shadow.
Port of London Authority, Trinity Square, bears Father Thames, Neptune,
Produce, Exportation, Commerce, Navigation
and other appropriate allegories, sea and river deities,
now asset-stripped, washed-up, sold-out.

Tower Dock, Wool Quay; Hans Andersen arrives at the Custom House;
the fiery Monument, Thames Street, the Coal Exchange.
Ships, lighters drive under oars, skiffs weave; stackies for London’s nags,
stumpies, spritties, swimmies, lower their gear to shoot bridges,
rig bridge sails, steer through the tiers and arches.
Billingsgate: salt cod, leather hats and beer; fast fish carriers slant up
with Dogger haul, pack like sardines in the Pool.
Margate Passage Packet, the Robert and Jane, K. Kidd, Master,
sails from Dice Key. Steam tug Nero.
Billingsgate Fellowship Porters measure out their lives
in loads of grain, malt, salt, fish, fruit and vegetables.
Ticket Porters scramble for work, land cargoes from the West Indies,
America, Canada, Ireland, coastal ports.

Hay’s Dock, where ocean-cleaving racing tea clippers berth, becomes Galleria;
Derain’s fauve Pool from Fresh Wharf.
London Bridge City looms its dark-glassed Orwellian threat over Hay’s Wharf –
the arrogant, the overbearing, man with no eyes –
capital’s dark typhoon, ripping the heart out of London.
Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, Styx, Cocytus . . . Blake’s charter’d Thames.

Bricklayers Arms, the Greenwich Railway, London Bridge Station –
crowd flowed over . . . death . . . so many.

Old London Bridge dams the tidal flow: a five-foot drop on the ebb,
craft shooting the bridge explode in splinters; a life a day.
Boswell and Johnson avoid the hazard, walk from Old Swan Pier to Billingsgate.
Houses calcine in the Fire, rebuild, then disappear;
two central arches, replaced by a single span, ease shipping.
New London Bridge built before Victoria
lasts until Selsdon Man, then goes west – to Arizona,
but watermen still race for Doggett’s Coat and Badge,
and murdered Nancy haunts the southern steps.

Pomp and Circumstance
Waterborne popinjays: royal, mayor, guilds, trades.
Colour, silk, music – in centuries of spectacles London apes Venice.
Henry brings his brides to Westminster from Greenwich.
Elizabeth, our Cleopatra, magnificently processes on St George’s day
and dallies with Leicester. Shakespeare paints his word picture:
gilded barge, burnished throne, burning on the water,
silver oars keeping stroke to the tune of flutes . . .

Caus the hydraulic engineer, Heidelberg’s Prospero,
creates at Somerset House the Earl of Arundel’s Parnassus;
in this quadrivium, the Thames transmutes to a river of Paradise.

For the Palatine Elector and Elizabeth, daughter of James, alchemically wed,
The Tempest at Whitehall: this music crept by me . . .
water music, efficacious dockology: watermen, immune,
hurl colourful abuse and treason;
also for the doomed pair The Marriage of the Thames and the Rhine.
John Taylor, water poet, stages the battle of Algiers with cannon, fireworks,
and on Valentine’s day, Lepanto, the Sultan’s nemesis.
Charles, divine right curtailed, defenestrates through Inigo’s Whitehall window;
the headsman’s mask ends the time of masques.

Gorgeous barges glide – Kings, Lord Mayor and Companies;
Charles’s brings pickled Nelson from Greenwich to Whitehall Stairs,
from where Constable paints Prinnie’s and City barges, opening Waterloo Bridge.
Cranes dip for Churchill from Tower Pier to Waterloo.

Frost Fairs
London Bridge holds back the river; while it freezes
frost fairs spill land life onto river, fire on ice.
Orlando looks through, sees below, the frozen bum-boat woman,
The world turned upside down.
Skaters spin and swirl past the Muscovy ambassador;
thaw turns entertainment into tragedy, the ice’s trapdoors open,
traders and stalls crash through, to feed the eels.

Southwark and Bankside
The South Work guards London’s bridgehead,
heads grin on the gatehouse spikes.
The Tabard Inn sees off Chaucer’s pilgrims.
Railway arches dwarf Borough Market’s glass halls, cathedral, The Market Porter.

The Curtain theatre glides across the river, towards the bear-baiting ring.
Through Shakespeare’s muse, Aphrodite of the Thames,
Bankside playhouses, bearpits for human groundlings, England’s glory;
Rose, Globe, Swan, Hope, Cockpit, Phoenix,
Burbage, Marlowe, Spenser, Alleyn, conjure within their wooden ‘O’s.

Bankside barge, brailed sail and sprit framing St Paul’s,
replaced by Hirst’s spotty boat, Tate Modern’s diseased decadence;
million-brick power station generates light entertainment. The void turbine hall,
the ‘blade of light’ (gives swing bridge a new meaning);
god-like architects, masters, not servants.
Albion Mills burn down. The shot-tower topples.
The Oxo Tower beefs up the bank, but yuppies colonise the warehouses.
Waterloo Station; Southampton boat trains, the Windsor side,
Eurostar makes Paris in two and a half hours.

Temple, Blackfriars and Queenhithe
Grahame sits in Threadneedle Street, dreaming of wind and willows;
Eliot banks cultural fragments, the declining west. Vintners Hall sports iron swans;
at Swan Steps, Old Swan Pier above London Bridge,
the Crested Eagle paddle-steamer to Margate, Rifleman steamboat.
Cavernous Cannon Street Station, railway bridge, Southwark Bridge.
The City’s holy hills, Mithras’ temple, St Paul’s.
Fleet Street, St Bride’s, founts pour letterpress rivers, hot metal flows.
Templar Knights – Pip’s Temple, blasted by east wind and rain by
Aethelred Hythe, Queenhithe, the Saxon port.
Railway crossing to Holborn Viaduct, Snow Hill, St Paul’s, Smithfield, Farringdon,
the Metropolitan Widened Lines to Kings Cross, St Pancras and Paddington.
City of London School, the Black Friars, and Blackfriars Bridge.

Charing Cross and Westminster
King’s Reach: Monet and Picasso at the Savoy; Adelphi;
the river from Whitehall Stairs dominated by St Paul’s;
south bank’s shot towers, smoking chimneys of leadworks, breweries.
Cleopatra’s Needle, en route from Heliopolis, city of the sun,
threads the Med, Channel, estuary and river.

South Bank: Festival of Britain, Festival Hall, streamlined spiky Skylon,
the Hayward’s concrete brutalism. Scott’s Discovery, escaped from antarctic ice.
Hungerford bridge loses its chains to Clifton; stackies unload Essex hay.
Troop trains for the front, returning wounded, at Charing Cross.
Francis Thompson, down-and-out, haunted by Heaven’s hounds,
has visions of cricket at Lord’s, and Jacob’s Ladder
stretching from Heaven to Charing Cross; his Jesus walks on the Thames.

Canaletto’s river sparkles in serene hydrography, topography;
Constable and Daubigny, Pissaro and Sisley,
Turner, Monet, Whistler, dissolve London’s substance –
sun burns through fog, smoke, steam and mist;
images swirl through the pearly northern light.
Palace of Westminster; Parliament blazes;
Red bursts through grey, reflects off river;
Monet haunts the Savoy, Waterloo Bridge,
savours the atmospherics, loves the fog, a hundred canvasses in five years.
After the fire Scott and Pugin do Gothick;
Pugin sails up from Ramsgate to supervise the decoration
of the talking shop – the elective dictatorship.

The London Eye’s slow clock mocks Big Ben; red trams rattle and sway,
red buses roar, over Blackfriars Bridge, Westminster Bridge.
By County Hall, another Thatcher victim,
a Coade-stone lion arrives, from the Lion Brewery.

Lambeth
Hamlet, 36 tons, built at Lambeth two years after Blake, the great Londoner’s, death.
Vulcan’s factories and forges, potteries, pour smoke;
St Thomas’ Nightingale nurses face Parliament’s terrace, the longest bar in London,
and Bedlam becomes the Imperial War Museum.
Barge-building, boat yards, Bain’s, at Fore Street and Bishops Walk.
Lambeth Palace; the horse ferry to Westminster.
Hewed timber, floods, filth. Paddle steamer Boadicea at Lambeth Pier.
Miriam Branson, daughter of a dray-horse stableman,
tells stories of her beloved river to John Berger, her son and London’s.

Thames’ waters bathe Blake’s infant limbs.
He lives in Hercules Road, has visions; draws, paints, engraves . . .
ponders the men of Thames, the cheating waves of charter’d streams.
The Rights of Man named seditious libel, Tom Paine runs from Pitt’s repression,
nips over Blake’s wall to find William and Catherine in Eden,
tipped off, escapes to France, is nearly guillotined.
Thames filling with captured French ships, the invasion threat –
Tower and workshops vomit pikes and muskets;
Jerusalem’s River feeds the dread forge, trembling, shuddering.
Under the shadow of war the bright Thames is chok’d, dirty, not silver;
He found Jerusalem upon the River of his City . . . sang soft thro’ Lambeth’s vales,
beast and whore rule without control . . . doing the Lambeth Walk.

Millbank, Vauxhall & Wandsworth
Secret services spy on each other from Millbank and Vauxhall.
Prison, Tate Gallery, dinghies and motor boats beach.
In Grosvenor Road proud figureheads of broken frigate and seventy-four
rear from Castle’s Yard, Baltic Wharf – Hood, Bristol, Princess Royal, Cressy –
of ships Thames-built and broken,
light-burned onto glass plates, loom through memory’s fog,
HMS Colossus, Edinburgh, Ocean, Orion;
which breasted the waves, patrolled empire.
England expects . . . mementos of heaven’s command, on the beach.

Nine Elms locomotives; goods depot; Covent Garden market relocates.
Surrey Iron Railway’s horses drag wagons through Mitcham and Merton,
come to wharf at Wandsworth.

Pimlico and Battersea
Pimlico, Grosvenor Bridge: Southern Belle, Golden Arrow, Night Ferry
slowly pound from Victoria up Grosvenor Bank pouring columns of steam,
past Peabody buildings, carriage sheds, Grosvenor Canal, pumping station;
across shivering black mercury, sparkling with reflected lights
of Chelsea Bridge and Albert Bridge;
Battersea Park, power station’s foursquare pile, giant white chimneys,
railway arches, Brighton Railway roundhouses, goods depot,
tracks to Stewarts Lane shed, London, Chatham and Dover’s Longhedge works,
gasworks, Dogs’ Home, South London Line, Gypsy caravans below railway arches,
Pouparts Junction, Lavender Hill Mob, up the Junction.

III. The Upper Reaches

By the fertile, promiscuous Thames in its upper, green, reaches,
in and beyond Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Cremorne,
fireworks soar and stain the night sky,
pleasure reigns in fête champêtre.
Among shadowy glades and willows, lantern lit,
benign, divine Bacchus and Priapus rule.

The river pulses in and out, wine flows,
hands stretch to thigh and breast,
cocks and nipples swell,
sperm spurts in all the right, and the wrong, places;
among the melons, on the grass,
in the pleasure gardens.

Champagne flows above the locks,
[cocks] rear among the cushions,
knees are raised and parted as swans look on.
Leda’s Maidenhead . . . taken, on sweet Thames;
later the waters break, tears . . . over countless weirs.

The river ebbs and flows,
black smoking steamboats, barges, lighters, work the tide.
Whistler paints water music – nocturnes, symphonies;
grey, blue, gold fantasies, Battersea Bridge’s skeletal timbers, Cremorne fireworks,
the stuff of Ruskin’s ire – a paint pot flung, a farthing damages.

Swanky Cheyne Walk, The Adam and Eve,
Royal Hospital – scarlet survivors of shattering battle.
Kings Road, Swinging London struts mini-skirts . . .
Cremorne Gardens – Whistler’s Nocturne, Blue and Silver,
and Rossetti, demi-monde: dancing, drinking, deviltry,
closed by church order – here Lots Road Power Station chimneys
tower over spritties by Chelsea Basin,
where the West London Extension, war’s artery, steams across the river
from Clapham Junction to Addison Road.

At Putney, in England’s revolution,
Cromwell, Lilburne, Rainborough contest the constitution and liberty.
The Wharf, beached stumpie barges; The Eight Bells, Star and Garter, White Lion.
Fulham Palace and football. Hurlingham’s polo.
Boat Race on the tideway, Putney to Mortlake; The Ship, by the finishing post.
cox yells, muscles burn and hearts burst to dig the oars in, follow the stroke.
Greaves, Whistler’s waterman, paints Hammersmith Bridge,
boat race spectators defy gravity on its chains,
horse bus crawling to Cremorne; Tideway Sculls; Diamond Sculls.
At Chiswick, Thorneycroft’s yard builds HMS Speedy, torpedo boat.
The river the Heathrow flightpath; a plane a minute over Brown’s vegetable Kew.

Brentford Dock, Isleworth; The London Apprentice, and Syon House.
Ham House’s river god, and Turner’s majestic sweep from Richmond Hill.
Three obelisks by cast shadow plot London’s time.
Donne and Pope at home at Twickenham. Rugby football.
Teddington lock, the tideway’s beginning and PLA’s west end.

Kingston, Thames Ditton, Molesey Lock.
Hampton Court, Wolsey’s futile gift.
Sunbury, Walton, Shepperton, Weybridge, Chertsey, Staines,
Egham, reservoir’d Wraysbury, Datchet.
Royal Windsor; Gray’s Eton. The river’s mid-point.

Robber barons lean on the king at Runnymede,
the Stones play Monkey Island, Bray’s oscillating vicar;
Maidenhead and promiscuous Skindles.
Great Western’s river, the western Thames,
Brunel’s broad gauge, Rain, Steam and Speed,
Brunswick green, copper and brass, brown and cream,
crossing and recrossing the sweet Thames plain,
of lush water meadows, stately swan-specked sweeps,
reeds and rushes, islands, bridges and weirs, fish and fowl,
the bubbling, burbling, babbling river.

Barges sail, men and horses pull against gravity’s current;
Taplow, Boulter’s Lock, Astors’ Cliveden;
Cookham lock crammed with white phantoms, punts and launches;
Spencer’s surreal swans, resurrection.
Bourne End, Marlowe’s suspension bridge, the Marlowe Donkey.
Walton copes with Cromwell’s dictatorship, the rule of the major generals,
by writing on fishing.

Hurley; Medmenham: Constance Babington Smith,
air photo interpreters of a twentieth century Hell Fire Club,
measure ships and wingspans, spot buzz-bombs and rockets at Peenemunde.
Bisham, Temple Lock; Temple Island – start of Royal Regatta;
Wyatt’s temple folly the Etruscan interior’d fishing lodge for Wren’s Fawley Court.
Hambleden Lock; beneath the Chilterns – the longest straight:
Wordsworth’s son pulls an oar in the first varsity race;
hats and white dresses, caps, ties and boats, serenades from punts, height of empire.
Marsh Lock, Wargrave; Shiplake weir; Jerome’s Three Men.

Great Western’s great cutting at Sonning.
Reading’s strategic crossings, railways, biscuits, beer and Oscar Wilde.
Caversham; at Mapledurham Court, Blunt entertains Elizabeth. Pope’s poetic visit.
Wild Wood across the Pangbourne water meadows;
Rattie and mole mess about among the willows.

Whitchurch, Roman causeway and the Goring Gap – wide sweep to Pangbourne.
Streatley, Cleeve Lock, South Stoke, Moulsford, North Stoke,
strategic Wallingford straddles trade-routes crossing; Benson Lock;
RAF Benson’s photo-reconnaissance Spitfires spy out the Bismarck, the dark lands.
Shillingford, Dorchester, Sinodun Hill, Wittenham – Paul Nash paints surreal Clumps.

Clifton Hampden’s bend; Gilbert Scott’s six-arched bridge;
London’s State Barge runs aground; sheep roast on the frozen river.
Clifton Lock, Appleford, Culham Lock, Sutton Courtney.
Ancient Abingdon; by water meadows the Ock flows from the Vale of the White Horse.
Radley and its College, Sandford Lock, Rose Isle, Kennington, Iffley Lock.

Oxford; Cherwell’s beauty flows under Magdalen Bridge.
Folly Bridge, eights sprint, punts glide for the few
along rivers of pleasurable knowledge.
On Christchurch Meadow, Carrol ponders his muse, while Alice rows.
College barges founder, near the gasworks and railway bridges.

At Swinford, lush meadows, meanders, ridge and furrow;
George III got wet, precipitating the bridge’s building.
Osney Lock, Medley Weir, Godstow Lock, Wolvercot,
King’s Weir, Eynsham Weir, Pinkhill Lock, Skinner’s Weir,
Arnold punts at Bablock Hithe, Scholar-Gypsy’s wet fingers trailing,
Arle Weir, Ridge’s Weir, Newbridge, Shifford, Duxford Ferry, Chimney,
Tadpole Bridge, Rushy Lock, Old Mans Weir,
Radcot Bridge at Faringdon, oldest on the river; twin islands, three channels.

Eaton Hastings, Morris’ Kelmscot, Hart’s Weir,
Buscot Lock; meanders, wildfowl, kingfishers. The Lechlade bend,
Leach and Coln flow in; barges load stone for St Paul’s dome;
Colley’s Supper Rooms. Inglesham. Hannington Bridge.
At Kempsford troops take off for D-Day.

Castle Eaton, Water Eaton, River Ray; River Churn joins at Cricklade,
Waterhay, Happy Land; Ashton Keynes, Somerford Keynes, Poole Keynes;
Kemble Mill, Ewen, Parker’s Bridge; RAF Hurricanes muster near Kemble.
Trewsbury Mead and Thameshead, the source in the stony hollow by the old ash;
Fosse Way; Cirencester, Seven Springs, Coberley.
On the Cotswold Hills the rain falls.

Thames Themes

The River Gods

Aphrodite, born of the foam
Domine Dirige Nos – Venus or Mammon?

Gods, goddesses, entwine, copulate, create the sacred Thames.
In wood and stone they spout crystal, life and power.
At birthplace source, by spurt of milk and sperm,
their sweet waters run softly, flow strongly,
swirl and twist, rear and plunge,
to watery grave’s full fathom.

Magical, fertile river,
mysterious, druidical,
guarantor of fecundity and wealth;
water gods are propitiated with skulls,
Thames becomes Golgotha.

Acheloüs, Brother of Nilus,
offspring of Oceanus and Thetis,
defeated by Hercules, becomes serpent and bull;
nymphs fling his wrenched horn to the river,
in which Acheloüs drowns.
The horn bears fabulous fruit – the horn of plenty.

Among the bulrushes,
Thames’ urn disgorges
a cornucopia of sea creatures.
But here are monsters, for the dark Tamasa,
for the wild and wasteful ocean.

Apollo and Venus protect its swans,
but Mercury, for the quicksilver river, is London’s watch and ward;
Mammon’s victory.
A blessed flood like the fertile Nile,
it is also a river of blood.

Fragments of History

Mammoths’ tusks, hippos’ horns, litter the thawing tundra;
bog people live in marsh and fen.
Sacrificial axes, swords, skulls, clutter the river’s depths.

The river’s debris our history;
mud holding its ancient people,
rites and rituals in waterlogged timber piles,
murders and suicides in its bones,
sadness in its bicycle wheels, supermarket trolleys, plastic bottles, coke cans,
tragedy in our loss.

Levant traders, Phrygians, Phoenicians, Romans
pulled and sailed to Albion.
Cultured Celts, Greek-speaking druids, blueskin warriors, wicker-sacrificing,
hammered by Caesar’s phalanxes sailing round the North Foreland,
wading ashore at Reculver,
making for Thamesis, creating Londinium.
Over-extended Rome has trouble in the Teutoburgerwald,
and also with Boudicca and the Iceni,
but builds a bridge and a port.

Legions, Roman engineers, hew timber
for river spans; bridge follows bridge.
Saxons follow, burn to defend.
Londinium abandoned,
badgers scuttle over tesserae, among sub-mural child sacrifices.
Londinium survives the raiders for a few centuries
before disappearing under Wild Wood.
Ambrosius Aurelianus fights a rearguard action against the darkness,
beat Saxons at Badon,
sinks without trace till troubadours resurrect Arthur
and a round table.

Tribes take over real estate – Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Vikings;
Saxons come to market at Lundenwic,
between Covent Garden and The Strand,
found St Paul’s church on a sacred hill,
create Aethelreds Hithe, Queenhithe,
refortify Southwark: Canute’s entrenchment from Redriff to Walworth.
Lundenburh grows within Roman walls.

Curled Norse prows hunt the sunset,
bite against English coastline,
forge up Blackwater, Crouch, Thames,
nuzzle into misty creeks;
clinker hulls ground on Essex mud and sand,
horn-helmed scourges leap ashore,
fling spears, stab, hack.
Corpses feed carrion birds, swell the eels,
Saxons retreat from Maldon.

Normans build a white tower on Bran’s Hill,
and nineteen stone arches, piers, protective starlings,
houses built, drawbridge, chapel to murdered St Thomas.

Charles returns, plague rages, London burns,
the Monument its exclamation mark.
Renaissance Wren rebuilds St Paul’s and City churches;
Hawksmoor does more.

We read the river’s story in maps, paintings, photographs, books, charts,
struggle to fathom its meaning; mere greed, capitalist conspiracy or cock-up?
Sound the bottom with tallow’d lead – what sticks? Lies? Myths? Truth?
But the mud runs, and the bed-sands shift. No anchor holds.
Why, how, to unravel the strands of tarred, twisted truth’s cable?
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
that I love London town, lament by the waters.

Tides

Life’s tides
water surges
London pumps
blood pulses
river flows
pulled up and down its serpentine course by the moon,
our sheet anchor; without her mass
we veer off course.

The river waxes on the flood, invades the land,
forces inland, upstream;
wanes on the ebb, pulls back slimy fingers from glistening shores;
flows to the sea’s moon-tide,
not our sun-tied work,
clocks, timetables, not tide-tables.

River Poets

Leland’s Thames engineers a nation’s glory;
his Cygnea Canteo celebrates a progress of royal swans.
Spenser’s Faerie Queen makes London his Cleopolis.
His Prothalamion has sweet silver streaming Thames run softly,
bearing lovely nymphs, swan-daughters of the Flood,
celebrates marriage, sexual joy, ordered estate, elite culture.
Drayton’s river runs with fertility and pleasure in Poly-Olbion.
Camden, like Spenser, conjoins Tame and Isis in Britannic marriage,
while Taylor, the water poet, exchanges oars for pen
to write Thames-Isis, an alchemical wedding.
Pope makes the Thames the Old Father, gives him a beard
like some Roman river god. Gray perpetuates this hoary Thames,
ponders youth, with ball and hoop, and tragic age.
Blake’s Thames, innocence betrayed, by experience’s corporations.
Wordsworth’s sublime, calm, cathartic Westminster dawn.
Thompson’s Christian visions at Charing Cross.
Owen’s Shadwell ghost traverses a slaughter house, not yet the trenches.
Eliot’s Thames Lorelei shore fragments against the west’s ruin.
David Jones loves the Lady of the Pool, the people and places:
Rotherhithe, Limehouse, Wapping.
Poets keep coming to drink.

The River’s Colours

Short brown chop, green Thames lop, wind across white tide over yellow shoal
Diamond facets of waves reflect wharves, ships, sky
Crystal for the cups in the riverside palaces
Gold for the Bank and the barge she sat in
Silver for the asset-strippers’ betrayal
Mercury, quicksilver for the river’s rippling mirror
Copper for the peoples’ penny pies, and the muffin man
Pewter for the poets’ ale
Lead for the fires’ melting roofs
Black for the oil and tar, the murderers, the suicides’ depression, the dark river
Slate for roofs, slivers of Welsh mountain, landed at Dinorwic Wharf
Grey for the City workers’ suits
Blue for the tars
Indigo for Boudicca’s warrior woad
Violet for Monet’s light
Green for the starboard lights
Brown for the sewage
Red for the rusting hulls
Khaki for the empire’s garrison
Yellow for the London fog
White for the masthead lights

Shoals, Deeps and Reaches

Sands & Shoals

Maplin Sands
Barrow Sands
Buxey
Foulness Sands
Oaze
Mouse
Gunfleet
Little Sunk
Long Sand
Shingles
Girdler
Shivering Sands
Red Sand
Tongue
Margate Sand
Kentish Flats
Knock John
Kentish Knock
Pan Sand
The Flat
Pudding Pan
Margate Hook
Last
Woolpack
Clite Hole Bank
Stud Hill
Columbine
Spaniard
Gilman
Nore Sand
Middle
Spile
Cant

Deeps & Channels

Wallet
East Swin (King’s Channel)
Middle Deep
Black Deep
Barrow Deep
Knock John Channel
Knob Channel
Mouse Channel
North Edinburgh Channel
Princes Channel
Queens Channel
West Swin
Oaze Deep
The Cant
The Warp
Margate Road
Gore Channel
Horse Channel
Four Fathoms Channel

Reaches – The Nore to Teddington

Sea Reach
Lower Hope Reach
Gravesend Reach
Norfleet/Northfleet Hope
St Clement’s or Fiddler’s Reach
Long Reach
Erith Rands
Erith Reach
Halfway Reach (The Guzzard)
Barking Reach
Gallions Reach
Woolwich Reach
Bugsby’s Reach
Blackwall Reach
Greenwich Reach
Deptford Reach
Limehouse Reach
Lower Pool
Upper Pool
King’s Reach
Lambeth Reach
Nine Elms Reach
Chelsea Reach
Battersea Reach
Wandsworth Reach
Barnelms Reach
Chiswick Reach
Corney Reach
Mortlake Reach
Syon Reach
Horse Reach
Cross Deep
Stairs & Wharves

London Bridge to Limehouse c.1800

The Surrey Side The Middlesex Side
Tooley Stairs Fresh Wharf
Toppings Wharf Cox’s Key
St Olave’s Church Botolph Wharf
Chamberlains Wharf Lions Wharf
Cotton’s Wharf Billingsgate
Smarts Key
Bridge Yard Dice Key
Ralphs Key
Hayes’s Wharf Wiggins’s Key
Cox’s Wharf New Bear Key
Beales Wharf Bear Key
Porters Key
Battle Bridge Custom House
Yoxall’s Wharf Galley Key
Griffin’s Wharf Chesters Key
Brewers Key
Gun & Shot Wharf Tower Stairs
Symons Wharf
Stantons Wharf
Pickle Herring Stairs
Pickle Herring Wharf
Hodson & Hayters Wharf Kings Stairs, Tower
Still Stairs
Walter & Redman’s Wharf
Davis’s Wharf Traitors Bridge, Tower
Dancing Bridge Irongate Stairs
Hartley’s Wharf Irongate Wharf
Horslydown Old Stairs St Katherine’s Wharf
Pearsons Wharf St Katherine’s Stairs
Holland & Butlers Wharf
Old Rose Stairs Wheelers Wharf
George Stairs St Katherine’s Dock
Coles’s Wharf Harrisons Wharf
Briants Wharf
Horslydown New Stairs Millers Wharf
Alderman Parsons Stairs
Crows Nest Wharf
Hawley’s Wharf

St Saviour’s Dock Hermitage Dock
Savery Mill Stairs Hermitage Stairs
Hoffams Wharf Browns Key
Springles Wharf Dundee Wharf
East Lane Stairs Union Stairs
Three Mariners Stairs Kingstons Wharf
Fountain Stairs Bell Dock
Cherry Garden Stairs Wapping Old Stairs
West Lane Stairs Wapping Church (St John’s)
Hoopers Wharf Gun Dock
Rotherhithe Stairs Wapping New Stairs
King Stairs Thames Police Office
Princes Stairs Gun Wharf
Elephant Stairs Phoenix Wharf
Rotherhithe Church Execution Dock
Church Stairs Wapping Dock Stairs
Cumberland Wharf King Edward Stairs
Carolina Wharf
Hanover Wharf Frying Pan Stairs
Hanover Stairs New Crane Stairs
Russells Mill Stairs New Crane Dock
King James’s Stairs
Shadwell Church
Pelican Stairs
The Kings Mills Shadwell Dock & Stairs
Randalls Cawseway Water Works
Walters Wharf Coal Stairs
Pitchers Point
King and Queen Stairs Bell Wharf & Stairs
Great Stone Stairs
Globe Stairs Trinity Stairs
Stone Stairs
Shepherd & Dog Stairs Ratcliff Cross Stairs
Hall Stairs

The Docks

Royal Group of Docks

Gallions Entrance
Western Entrance
Tidal Basin
Royal Victoria Dock
Royal Albert Dock
King George V Dock (New Dock)

East and West India Docks – Blackwall & Isle of Dogs

Blackwall Basin
Blackwall Docks: East India Docks (Import & Export)
Poplar Dock (Midland Railway)
North London Railway Company Dock
West India Docks (Import & Export)
South Dock
Millwall Docks (Outer & Inner)
Limehouse Entrance

Surrey Commercial Docks (Rotherhithe)

Lavender Pond
Globe Pond
Stave Dock
Acorn Pond
Lady Dock
Basin
Island Dock
Albion Dock
Canada Dock
Russia Dock
Centre Pond
Quebec Pond
Canada Pond
Norway Dock
Greenland Dock
South Dock
Surrey Canal

Regents Canal Dock

Regents Canal Dock (Limehouse Basin)

London Docks (Shadwell & Wapping)

Shadwell Entrance & Basin
East Dock
Tobacco Dock
New Dock
Wapping Entrance & Basin
West Dock (Western Basin)
Hermitage Entrance

St Katharine Docks

St Katharine Entrance & Basin
East Dock
West Dock

London (Toil, Glitter, Grime and Wealth on a Flowing Tide)

Sulphurous fogs, watery miasma.
London’s wen smokes and swells;
stains the maps wider, tells a million stories.

The river bobs with sodden suicide logs;
disease, unemployment, poverty, hypocrisy, depression,
twists, bubbles, like an intestine; plague, rheum, cholera . . .
ever a running sewer, squeezes the foul flood against wind and tide,
through its reaches (Sea Reach its colon), shits it out at Southend.
The Great Stink triggers pipes, sewers, pumping stations and outfalls.
Parliamentary Reports on London, on housing, on embanking the Thames
for sewers, roads and underground railway,
to speed the current, to scour the cess.
A Court for King Cholera: Booth and Mayhew highlight the rookeries, cesspits;
dosshouses, fleas, lice and bedbugs prepare men well for the trenches;
river, street, dock, trench . . . Jack London, Conrad, make connections.

Yet in this death the river was alive; its emptiness signs our destruction.
Where are the boats, barges, tugs and lighters; where the wharves, docks, factories,
where the lightermen, barge skippers, mates and boys,
the casual labour, the Tidal Basin, Custom House, the foreman’s prejudice?

On tugs, coasters and ships, hands haul lines and hawsers,
in fierce engine rooms, stokers swing coal and slack to furnace, raise steam,
engines hiss and thump, pistons push connecting rods, swing big ends,
turn shafts for paddles and screws; tend roaring diesels.
Telegraphs ring from bridge to engineer – slow ahead –
as tugs take the strain, hawsers bar-taut,
and, snap, sudden as chain-shot, whip off a head;
into, out of, locks, docks, away from wharves, down river.

Tower Bridge’s arms rise in Minoan goddess salute:
arrival on the flood, departure on first of the ebb.
Ships grow; pallets and containers; docks move to Tilbury;
no more manufacture, no more exports,
Barber’s, Lawson’s, Brown’s booms – on credit.
What is this service economy, so hard to comprehend?
No more jobs for the boys. Banks to the Isle of Dogs?
Investment bankers and computer whizzes in Wapping, in Rotherhithe?
Capital unbound; property and greed create London, railways, docks,
and destroy them.
Londoners – passive victims, used and ignored, experience the trickle-down effect;
now called globalisation (pushed by politicians, corporations),
forces are more uncontrollable. Bombs explode in bus, tube . . .

The map (Post Office Directory 1904)
chatters its urgent message: I am gone and not gone;
you can read me – I record, am the key; decode.
Through me swirls the indifferent river.
You are the ones who care . . . or not.

The American banker knows his Thames, sees it sweat oil and tar,
sees barges drift with turning tide, red sails wide to leeward,
swinging on the sprit . . . down Greenwich Reach past the Isle of Dogs,
knows he is dead with that city crowd flowing over London Bridge,
the corporate Thames, a bankers’ Waste Land –
Canary Wharf’s Manhattan, omphalos of an Empire of Capital,
Mammon’s towers, terrorist target.
London City of Merchants, Capital of Das Kapital, enslaving the world.
Marx writes in the Bloomsbury dome.

A vocabulary of decline hits the Thatcher fan:
monetarism, deindustrialisation, shock therapy,
Schumpeterian wave of creative destruction, Kondratief’s long cycle.
Dockers’ unions, casual labour, death of the docks, of manufacturing,
three million unemployed. Out go local government, in come
Docklands Development Corporation; property speculators, asset-strippers.
The Times, News International, Telegraph,
bulldoze through unions to Wapping and Millwall.

The new gospel: we can survive without manufacturing;
those who make things, ship them, are dispensable.
We can write them off, whom we called the salt of the earth –
chirpy cockneys, Bow Bells boys and girls,
who did the dangerous, dirty jobs, who took Hitler’s bombs.

We consign them to weaselspeak:
claimants, clients, service users, jobseekers’ allowance, new deal, delivery . . .
we will not provide apprenticeships, retrain them, create jobs.
we will ignore them, we will take away their self respect,
we will pay them not to work, we will import cheaper immigrants to do the jobs,
we will call them racist, we will call them the underclass,
we will weave webs around them, we will betray them,
the meek will inherit the dearth.
Triumphant Thatcher’s children inhabit the wharves, dispossess the people, the river;
blessed are the yuppies, blessed are the investment bankers,
blessed are the media people, blessed are the Britpops,
blessed are the property developers, blessed are the estate agents,
blessed are the spinners, blessed is Blairspeak,
blessed is the information economy.

We can live on a knowledge-based economy, we can live on credit,
we can increase public-sector employment,
we believe in globalisation, multiculturalism,
postmodern relativism, post-colonialism;
In our hubris we will build the Millennium Dome,
spin off the planet.

Domine Dirige Nos?
But not through the lost opportunity of post-war destruction and rebuilding.
Developers’ fatuous renamings – Canada Water, Surrey Quays, Chelsea Harbour.
Fake pubs, gated communities . . . London’s enemies:
Ken Livingstone bans the pigeons, brings in bendy buses, bids for the Olympics.
Prescott’s Thames Gateway sinks the arid floodplain.
Floods and barriers – the Thames rises in revenge.
Livingstone and Prescott conspire to complete the destruction,
create towers and dark canyons to squeeze out the river,
making Thames the Styx – hateful and gloomy river
of the lower world.

Wharves disappeared, docks filled, walls and corners removed, names changed –
the peoples’ very landmarks erased, lives rubbed out of history.
I remember . . . it was about here, or was it . . . over there?
I unloaded timber, welded, rivetted, drummed up the char,
was hit by a swinging block, slipped from that lighter,
saw the river on fire.

Through the parkland, housing estates, apartment blocks, woods, new roads,
emerge granite, brick, cast-iron fragments;
sudden swing or bascule bridge, bollard, hydraulic tower,
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Nicht ärgern, nur wundern!

Memory, years ago from 2005

54: the last trams rattling and swaying
to Westminster and Blackfriars, the Festival of Britain.
50: the Boat Race on black-and-white TV,
river boat from Westminster Pier to the Tower, to Kew, to Hampton Court.
49: spritsail barges in Whitstable harbour.
48: Woolwich Free Ferry, see the shipping
and catch the river’s smell.
47: Cutty Sark, and the reaches around the Isle of Dogs,
the ships in the West India, Millwall and Surrey Docks, from the Observatory on Greenwich hill.
43: lighters on the Surrey Canal and the ships in the Surrey Commercial from
the railway arches near South Bermondsey, the Royal Docks from the North Woolwich train,
and steam across the river, from Victoria, and into Charing Cross.
41: Lots Road Power Station and the river
from a Willesden to Norwood freight on the West London Extension Railway.
40: drink in the Prospect of Whitby,
the morning sun reflect off the Upper Pool, dazzling, silhouetting Tower Bridge;
in the fog all is mysterious – ships, lighters, cranes and tugs loom out
for Fresh Wharf and Hay’s Wharf.
38: punt on the Isis and Cherwell.

Then I see London Bridge rebuilding, dock strikes, dock closures.
The Dockland Development Corporation and the rape of London’s River.

Rotherhithe foreshore

Low tide; a wide foreshore opposite Gun Wharves,
gulls, pigeons, a heron;
waves lap bones, bricks, flints,
oyster shells, broken clay pipes,
rusted steel cable lengths like turds,
broken pots, rusty chains, bolts and huge square nails,
driftwood, old branches entangled with wire grids,
frayed ropes, old metal frames, bits of tyres, scrap iron, broken bottles and glass,
iron slag, feathers and chalk.

Tidal River

Low slack water shivers and stirs;
the salt, flood tide gathers with the moon,
pushes up river between glistening banks,
slides up like a wedge over the fresh downstream current,
an outstretched hand reaching for the source,
eddies inshore, by the mudbanks and piles, reeds and rushes,
mouths and inlets, dock entrances and locks, piers and jetties,
whirlpools of contradiction.
It takes hold of buoys, piles up against them, presses them upstream,
swings vessels around at their buoys and anchors.

Needle-like kingfishers, herons, dive through the looking glass,
slide under into the dimming brown-filtered light, towards swaying weeds,
up and out, breaking sudden surface, gulping air, bobbing or flying.

The mesmerising river our hope, fulfilment and betrayal.
In its deeps lurk eels,
monsters, worse.

***********************************

Concept, text and photographs
by Peter Chasseaud
Text © Peter Chasseaud 2005

Aerial Photograph of a bomber over the Isle of Dogs and Rotherhithe by kind permission of
The Trustees of The Imperial War Museum

Page layout and print preparation: Peter Flanagan

Lithographically printed by VR Litho in 20 point Gill Light
on 310gsm Somerset Tub Sized Satin archival-quality paper

Edition limited to 50 copies

Peter Chasseaud at Modern Works on Paper Fair, Royal Academy

2008-01-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

I'm showing my artist's books at The Modern Works on Paper Art Fair

The Royal Academy of Arts
6 Burlington Gardens, London,

I will be on Stand 8 in the 'Covered' section devoted to artists' books.
The dates of the Fair are:

Wed 30th Jan, 3-9.30 (Preview); Thur 31st Jan, 11-9; Fri 1st Feb, 11-8.30; Sat 2nd Feb, 11-6;
Sun 3rd Feb, 11-5.30

Work on show will include the following:
Kings Cross
Thames - The London River
Afghanistan - A Journey
Rosenberg (work in progress)

Kings Cross text; artist's book by Peter Chasseaud

2008-01-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Here is the full text (copyright Peter Chasseaud 2004) of my Kings Cross artist's book (Altazimuth Press, 2004). This book was inspired by my memories and love of the Kings Cross and St Pancras area, and its proximate cause was the redevelopment of the Kings Cross Railway Land and the construction of the CTRL (Channel Tunnel Rail Link) to the new Eurostar Terminus at St Pancras. I took these two photos (which don't appear in the book) in 1959-60 with the family box camera which took 120 film (two-and-a quarter-inches square negatives). This camera hung on a strap around my neck at waist height, and I had to look down into the fold-out viewfinder. My next camera was Brownie 127 which had an eye-level viewfinder but didn't take such sharp (!) photos. I'll put some more images on here soon.

Kings Cross

Kings Cross
Clay – squat-seated on London clay –
fired, fused, buff London Stocks from North Kent brickfields;
London built from herself,
Kent clay kiln-fused with North Downs chalk,
with London mud, sea-coal ash, and clinker
swept down on the tide to Sittingbourne
by long-spreet, rust-sailed, barge;

returning, skipper, mate, eighty tons of bricks,
stumpie butting up the gull-stitched estuary,
deck awash in fresh Thames lop, on port tack, starboard tack,
working up the inshore eddy against the main current
or slipping up with the tide, 32,000 bricks,
past square-riggers, steamers,
Gallions Reach, Woolwich, Greenwich, Deptford . . .
for Limehouse dock, through the lock,
and into the canal for Islington – Battle Bridge Basin.

Clay on clay, we’re all made of the same . . .
Kings Cross yellow brick, square clock-tower,
Cubitt’s, brick-unit, Italian-arched, Czar’s riding school.

No soaring Crystal Palace greenhouse for the Great Exhibition
to defy the rain, to delight the heart, to entice the sparrows
that shat on Queen Victoria
(the Duke returning fire – ‘sparrowhawks, Ma’am’),
but a plain train glasshouse; Great Northern’s London stocks,
joint-stock, limited liability, paying four per cent.

Kings Cross; brick, screen-wall arches,
tower clock proclaiming Railway Time to nation’s nerves a-quiver
(galvanised by electric telegraph,
no longer by focussed sun’s rays firing the noon gun),
fronting frowsty London;
Euston Road, Gray’s Inn Road, Pentonville, Caledonian . . .

Laminated wood, wrought iron, steel,
ribbed roof, glass hothouse vaults –
to suck smoke palms and plumes upward and outward
to melt into the fog, the ether, the London particular.
Next door, Saint Pancras’s red brick,
Scott’s soaring gothic sermon,
Burton beer-vaulted, barrel-unit, its utilitarian base;
Barlow’s iron roof-span vaults on stout ribs, proudly embossed
Manufactured by The Butterley Company Derbyshire 1867.
West again, Somers Town Goods Station, Potato Market,
metamorphosed into the redder brick, Midland Red paint,
of the British Library.

And further west, Euston’s doric arch (at which Pugin bitched),
Hardwick’s Hall, long ago bit the dust,
but not before I passed through, saw them,
en route by steam for Liverpool, slogging up Camden Bank . . .

Back along the Euston Road to Saint Pancras,
CTRL’s new terminal builds beside selected remnants –
German Gymnasium, Stanley Buildings,
Victorian iron-balconied model tenement blocks,
improbably still lurk, boarded, by Clarence Passage.

At the north end of Barlow’s roof, incongruous,
the new station block strangely abuts the old.
Fresh concrete carves through Kings Cross railway land,
traverses Belle Isle’s steaming ghosts, plunges into bank,
by primroses, old allotments, quick rust fox flash
near Black Dog Lane,
for Stratford, Thames Gateway and Channel Tunnel.

The map changes yearly, monthly, weekly, daily;
by earth and moon orbit, by globe’s revolution,
by sub-division of slow-spinning spheres;
the sun’s scapement ticks off lines of longitude,
here topography melts in time’s furnace; engraved in copper,
heliozincographed, at the Ordnance Survey; paper palimpsests;
lines blur, names and landscape all utterly changed.
Is any terrible beauty born?

At Kings Cross, on Boudicca’s grave,
here it was the Small Pock Hospital, there the Pleasure Ground,
and over there the Rope Walk (not Tyburn’s).
This rubbish heap rose a hundred feet, covered five acres,
sold for £15,000, fabulously sailed to Russia,
rebuilt Moscow, in 1818.
Kings Cross
steel, glass, iron arches, pulled earthward by core’s gravity,
bend knees, strain elbows against retaining walls,
thrust to east and west,
hold open the escape forward, northward,
squeezed like a pip through the station throat,
past northern heights and watery fen,
over canny keel and coal,
leaping Forth and Tay (once caught by side-blast,
train and bridge plunged screaming).

Grim brick-arched walls; vaporous tunnel mouths, hanging grime.
Black tank-engines winged with condensing gear,
divers, mouths clamped on air-pipes,
plunge into the soot-black pit from York Road platform
for Farringdon and Moorgate, on the Widened Lines;
Holmes’s Metropolitan . . . steaming to Baker Street
underneath the arches . . . under heaven’s vault

pound up from the deep, by the Hotel Curve
into lighter, thinner murk;
stop at the sunk suburban platform (still on the steep up-grade),
pass Milk Dock, black Culross Buildings
(where Battle Bridge Road once spanned the tracks)

Gasworks Tunnel, Copenhagen Tunnel . . .
spit sulphur, swirl steam,
in Carel Weight’s watery London light,
or rich raking sun’s glow, red-blown tint
through London’s evening dust-lens.

Booking office clerk takes shillings, pence;
hands pasteboard ticket, date-punched,
to journey past Blake’s London world:
Maiden Lane, Belle Isle, Vale Royal, Pleasant Grove,
et in arcadia . . .
Copenhagen Fields, with a view sweeping down
over London chimneys and spires.

Eleven years old,
I crossed the river from Beulah Hill,
Sisley’s Upper Norwood, Turner’s Thames,
to wonder at all this; what was, what is.
In school uniform and cap,
with cocoa flask, sardine sandwiches, Mars Bar, box camera,
to capture the essence, suspected unknowable;
I knew then I couldn’t hold it, it would slip away . . .
I knew already that time betrays, that what I loved was going,
if not gone (new loves replace . . . ); life’s early lesson.

Time’s particles grain the image;
life’s grey or coloured dust, silver nitrate, paint pigment,
Daguerre, Corot, Monet, Degas, Seurat . . .
sensitive coat of 1959’s photographic emulsion.

Snapshots in time;
It don’t mean a thing; except
In the same brook none ever bathes him twice.

Proud hero engine driver, arrived from north,
resting, leans on cab side,
smiles kindly on schoolboy,
wipes hands on cotton-waste.

Fireman, aching from shovelled tons of coal
shot to firebox corners under the brick arch,
feet braced against rocking miles, swinging shovel,
clanging it off firedoor ring,
seeing flames sucked swirling and burning white
through tubes, up blastpipe;
slowly scrapes loose coal from footplate, hoses dust.

They drink tea from aluminium mug, enamel can;
eat corned-beef sandwiches.
Engine radiates heat, hums and sizzles, wisps steam, drips water;
they wait to return to shed.

At the departure platform, Papyrus fronts the waiting north,
400-ton train for Scottish run
fills with elided lives –
they’ve never had it so good –
they read about Sputnik, the economy,
human particles glancing off each other.

Crew tense, blower forces incandescent hell’s banked fire,
Pressure gauge needle quivers on red, safety valves straining;
my camera’s shutter clicks, light’s rays imprint.

Signal off;
driver leans, looks back, waits for ‘right away;’
blows steam and water,
ejector creates vacuum, releases brakes,
sets long cut-off for expansive steam, pulls on regulator . . .
willing her to grip, to start without slipping on greasy rails,
to climb, leaning into the bank;
no rear banker to help lift the load
up past Finsbury Park.
Stasis uncoils to motion;
alchemical atmosphere; coal, fire, air, water, smoke, steam –
elements and humours - explode, spurt and swirl
into Gasworks Tunnel, under Regents Canal,
beneath brick columns of ventilation shafts
(no longer surprise with sudden steam);
climb under goods station, the slow acceleration
by coal drops, granary, potato market:
Yorkshire coal, Lincolnshire spuds, Fletton bricks.

Burst out into Belle Isle’s grey brick chasm;
sheer sweating wall swings to left,
breaks into sudden up-grade lifting Down South London Goods,
and locomotives going back on shed, up to yard level
where steel ribbons thread brick arches -
Maiden Lane, York Way . . . No. 5 Arch -
patinated with the soots of decades, stone-capped,
gnarled tree-root forcing bricks apart,
under jagged tenement skyline silhouettes –
high grey half-gables, chimneys, churches, schools -
to goods yard and engine shed.

Top Shed (crescent, iron-horse stable,
destroyed as soon as closed, gone like Euston’s arch),
Derby Shed, Metro Shed, Running Shed . . .
A century of steam’s hissing names -
Sturrock, Stirling 8-footers, Ivatt Atlantics, Gresley Pacifics:
No. 1, Flying Scotsman, Mallard, Woolwinder, Cock o’ the North -
heroes, imagination catchers;
pulled Lord Salisbury to Hatfield House,
Leeds and Bradford wool-men, engineers, Geordie coal-owners,
merchant banking Quakers, racing record-breakers,

sailors to Rosyth and Scapa, for Battle Cruisers and Grand Fleet,
eyes screwed against cruel bite north and east,
for Dogger Bank and Skagerrack, Jutland
(to burn in cordite’s furnace, drown in trapped hull, feed dogfish
and eels), Horns Reef,
for arctic North Cape, North Sea, Narrow Seas, High Seas, Western Approaches . . .
soldiers, sailors, airmen, women, to factory, camp and airfield;
posted to France and Flanders,
Dardanelles, Mesopotamia, Macedonia;
for Phoney War and Norway, Dunkirk, Greece and Crete,
Western Desert, Atlantic, Normandy . . .
the burning skies over Germany, Hitler’s Götterdämmerung,
and freight engines, suburban tanks . . .
hurrying coal, explosives, munitions,
south under London, past Smithfield, Ludgate Hill,
smoking ruins below Saint Paul’s, over the river . . .
towards the front.
Sheer wall again, past Belle Isle’s brick half-mile,
past fogmens’ huts, gangers crouched over braziers,
tending detonators,
signal boxes’ interlocked levers, men throwing and heaving,
switching and signalling, nerve endings of a complex control,
where puffing shunters’ buffers clang,
couplings chink, links hook or sway,
goods trains dissolve and form,
past brick arches, scape of rails, sleepers, iron chairs;
under soaring black pillars, steel spans,
sweeping North London Railway dockward.

No docks now; euphemistic wharf, quay, water,
for an insubstantial world – merchant bankers, developers,
estate agents, lawyers, web designers,
who toil less but certainly do they spin.

Quick steep down-grade joins from shed,
where Goods and Mineral Junction Box levers,
sweat- and cloth-polished, heave and swing to change points,
raise signals, give us the road . . .

Full bunkered engines, slip out onto down lines
At Copenhagen Tunnel mouth;
heaped tenders back onto holding road,
wait for the signal to drop through Gasworks Tunnel,
couple on . . . for Cambridge, Leeds, Bradford, Edinburgh.

Today, no smoke, no fog, in the sunshine, drizzle, seasons . . .
no trains from Moorgate hammer up the Hotel Curve
from the Metropolitan,
stop at gloomy heavy-awninged platform,
restart on 1 in 43 gradient,
slipping, spitting smoke and steam, gripping sanded rails,
sometimes two engines to lift the train up Holloway bank,
the Northern Heights;

past the turntable, plunge into Gasworks Tunnel
dip under the canal, climb again, still in tunnel
through dripping sooted brick miasma,
past Belle Isle, Pigeon House, Copenhagen Junction,
into Copenhagen Tunnel
(where Ladykillers look over railway tracks, signals, goods sheds,
engine shed, St Pancras spires, tip bodies into wagons),
under the market, gin palace, pubs.

Out and under skewed steel girders sweeping Up Goods over,
past Holloway, past old chieftains’ mounds –
Canonbury, Highbury, Finsbury –
past brick arches, stations, tunnels, bridges.
At Belle Isle now, from the top deck of the 390 bus,
lurching across York Way’s arches,
both ends eroding, nibbled by hungry JCBs:
construction workers, today’s navvies,
CTRL, white-helmeted, yellow-jacketed, tan-booted.

This was a new railway - Great Northern;
grew; main line, suburban, City, goods;
tracks doubled, tripled; cuttings widened, walls erected,
new tunnels bored, yards and sheds spread;
wars, steam, goods traffic passed, eastern tracks lifted,
yards derelict, ripe for redevelopment.

No workers in clanging goods yard,
sweating, shouting urban harpooners dodging shunting engines,
slinging hooked pole over buffer, under coupling links,
heaving on, flicking off, sorting and making up the goods
for the long haul north;

no fitters, cleaners, drivers, firemen,
wartime women, post-war Poles, Caribbeans,
raking, coaling, washing out,
in the mess-room with sandwiches, mugs of tea,
nor beer in York Way local after day’s or night’s work.

Damp, ratty, terraced streets gone . . .
replaced by good intentions, bad outcomes,
smack and crack, uncertainty, incoherence . . .
Love, life, belief, acceptance, community, gone;
railway’s proud working gone,
commitment betrayed or side-slipped,
by technological or market elision,
by capital’s greed, by Canute politicians claiming to control . . .
Brick bones, steel sinews,
fire and steam roaring, pulsing, throbbing, pounding . . .
into portals, under canal, up the gradient,
climbing one foot every hundred, past Belle Isle.

We dug this chasm, clawed these bores, kicked this clay,
forged this steel, hewed this coal and timber,
cut, welded, rolled, rivetted, these rails, these locomotives.

Washed out these boilers, raked out this ash, fed this fire,
forced this draught to suck flame through boiler-tubes,
built up this steam pressure (clamped down with coiled springs),
roasted steam with superheat, fed it through valves to cylinders

Where it rammed pistons, pulled wheels around,
surged against shining steel, jogged heavyweight elbows,
to slug, pound, grind against sanded rails,
then trot, sprint, run,
through Gasworks Tunnel
and under Copenhagen Fields.

Concept, text, terrestrial photos and binding
by Peter Chasseaud
Text ©Peter Chasseaud 2004

Aerial Photographs by kind permission of Simmons Aerofilms
Potters Bar, Hertfordshire

Lithographically printed in 24 point Gill Light
on 410gsm Somerset archival-quality paper

Edition limited to 50 copies
This is no …..

Peter Chasseaud, Altazimuth Press, at Modern Works on Paper Fair 2008

2008-01-13T14:23:00.000-08:00

Peter Chasseaud / Altazimuth Press

I'm showing my artist's books at

The Modern Works on Paper Art Fair

The Royal Academy of Arts

6 Burlington Gardens, London,

I will be on Stand 8 in the 'Covered' section devoted to artists' books.

The dates of the Fair are:
Wed 30th Jan, 3-9.30 (Preview); Thur 31st Jan, 11-9; Fri 1st Feb, 11-8.30; Sat 2nd Feb, 11-6;

Sun 3rd Feb, 11-5.30

Work on show will include the following:

Kings Cross

Thames - The London River

Afghanistan - A Journey

Rosenberg (work in progress)

Peter Chasseaud, Rosenberg page images

2007-12-07T06:48:00.000-08:00

Rosenberg artist's book by Peter Chasseaud; work in progress December 2007. Here are images of some of the pages I'm currently working on. The format is approx. 15 x 20 inches (37 x 50 cm).
This book is very different from my earlier artist's books, which combined photographic images with my poetic texts. In the Rosenberg book I'm experimenting with a mixture of pochoir (stencil), hand-painting using acrylic paint, and mixed-media (paper, canvas, metal, wood, etc.), on Khadi hand-made paper, which has a lovely weight and texture. The stencilling brings to mind the utilitarian lettering on trench nameboards and on shells, boxes of ammunition, rations, etc. Some of the sheets are white, and others grey-black. Although the book will incorporate the texts of some of Isaac Rosenberg's poems, I am concentrating on the overall design and 'objectness' of the book - its materiality - and in particular the creation of appropriate images. I like the immediacy of bold and simple signs and geometric shapes, such as were used by the Dada and Constructivist artists of the early 20th century - the period of Rosenberg's war service. I'm also experimenting with incorporating maps and other war documents and materials into the pages. The book can be seen on my stand in the 'Covered' section of the British Works on Paper Fair at Burlington House, London, 31st Jan - 1st Feb 2008 (PV evening 30th Jan).

Peter Chasseaud, Isaac Rosenberg images at LAB07

2007-11-27T08:33:00.000-08:00

Images of work-in-progress (acrylic paint and pochoir on Khadi hand-made paper) for my new artist's book inspired by the war poetry of Isaac Rosenberg. The completed book, which commemorates the 90th anniversary of Rosenberg's death in action on the Western Front in early 1918, will be launched at the Modern Works on Paper Fair at Burlington House (behind the Royal Academy), London, at the end of January. I am also planning to show work-in-progress towards my new book/installation (working title 'The Erotic Cabinet').

Dates for the Works on Paper Fair are:

Wed 30 Jan (evening only - Private View)

Thurs 31 Jan

Fri 1 Feb

Sat 2 Feb

Sun 3 Feb

My work will be on show in the part of the Fair dealing with artists' books, called 'Covered'.

Peter Chasseaud, Altazimuth Press, at London Artists Book Fair 2007

2007-11-19T09:46:00.000-08:00

I'm showing my artists books, including Kings Cross, Thames - The London River, and Afghanistan - A Journey, at the London Artists Book Fair (LAB 07) at the ICA, The Mall (near Trafalgar Square), London, from 23rd to 25th November.

I'll also be showing some work-in-progress for my new artist's book inspired by Isaac Rosenberg's poems from the front. This includes pochoir and hand-painted images. I'll post some images soon.

LAB 07 public opening times:
Friday 23rd 12 – 6.30
Saturday 24th 11 – 7
Sunday 25th 11 - 5

Isaac Rosenberg, Marseilles, Lausanne

2007-10-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

Photo of me painting in my studio during the Phoenix Open in October 2007. Photo credit: David Flindall.

I'm currently working on a new artists book inspired by the poems of Isaac Rosenberg. I hope to have some details of this ready for the Oxford Fine Press Book Fair at Oxford Brooks University on Sat 3rd and Sun 4th November, and certainly by the London Artists Book Fair (LAB'07) at the ICA at the end of November. I'll have some speciment pages of text and images, and a specification, to look at.

I'll also be showing my existing artists books:

Kings Cross (2004)

Thames - The London River (2005)

Afghanistan - A Journey (2007)

and my smaller book about my Willows project (Willow/Wilg/Weide/Saule, 2007).

You can find out more about these books and projects elsewhere in my blog.

MARSEILLE & LAUSANNE

With Carolyn Trant (Parvenu Press), I recently travelled to Marseille for the annual book fair, which had a big artist books section organised by Atelier Vis-a-Vis, where we both had stands at the 'English Desk' showing our own artists books. Atelier Vis-a-Vis bought work from both of us, and in addition I sold a copy of my Afganistan-A Jouney book to a visitor to the fair. It was great to be able to visit Atelier Vis-a-Vis and hear of their incredibly ambitious plans for the future, including a new art school with 150 printing presses! What an amazing place for artists Marseille is! Why can't Britain be like this?

Marseille was wonderful - particularly the old part of the city on the Butte des Moulins, the Panier and Lenche districts, and of course the Bar de la Marine. The town museum by the Bourse was particularly good, with impressive displays, models and reconstructions of the history and archaeolgy of the city - Roman ships, amphorae filled with sardines and wine, a huge jar of grain, potteries, etc. Glorious sunshine most days, but a cold wind announcing the onset of autumn if not winter. Great restaurants here - particularly if you like fish. Travel by Eurostar and TGV as we did and (provided its daylight) you see a lot of the wonderful French countryside.

From Marseille we took the TGV to Geneva and changed for Lausanne, where we arrived in a freezing wind and stayed in the Backpacker Guesthouse with a wonderful 4th floor view of the historic railway station. In Lausanne we found, or were taken to, all the right places, including the Musee de l'Art Brut, the Romand restaurant, the Maharajah's Punjabi restaurant, and an Erotic Cabinet in a bookshop and art gallery. Our host in Lausanne was Stephane Fretz, of Art and Fiction publishers, and we were privileged to see the Art and Fiction office and studio and meet Stephane's colleagues there.

After this it was TGV back to Paris and a congested and claustrophobic Eurostar (with several non-working loos) to London. Now for the Oxford book fair! (and the LAB'07!).

Peter Chasseaud (Altazimuth Press) at Artists Book Fairs 2007

2007-09-25T03:56:00.001-07:00

My studio in Brighton (Phoenix Arts Asociation, next to The Level and St Peter's Church) will be open to the public Fri 12 (5-8), Sat 13 (1-9) - Sun 14 (1-5) October 2007 (Phoenix Open weekend: www.phoenixarts.org). You can see my paintings and artists boks there, and also a new mini-installation relating to my new 'dark desires' project. I will be there on the Saturday and Sunday.

I will be showing my Kings Cross, Thames - The London River, Afghanistan - A Journey, and Ypres Willows artists books at the following artists book fairs this autumn (2007):

Marseille (20-21 October)

UK Fine Press Book Fair (Oxford Brooks University, 3-4 November)

LAB 07 (ICA, London, 23-25 November): link to Marcus Campbell/LAB 07 website:
http://www.marcuscampbell.co.uk/

Peter Chasseaud drawing at Ploegsteert, Belgium

2007-09-16T03:21:00.001-07:00

A photo of me drawing a panorama at Ultimo Crater, Ploegsteert, Belgium, while working as artist in residence on the archaeological dig in July/August 2007.

Photo courtesy of Joanna Ramsay.

Peter Chasseaud working at Ploegsteert, Belgium

2007-08-15T02:43:00.000-07:00

Two photos of me drawing at the Ploegsteert site in July/August 2007. Both photos courtesy of Richard Osgood. The top photo was taken looking south over Ultimo Crater. I am sitting on the southern lip of the crater, looking south over Factory Farm. The Bottom photo shows me sitting at the north-east lip of Ultimo Crater, making a panorama drawing of the view to the east towards Warneton. I am talking to Martin Brown who, with Richard Osgood, organised the dig.

Peter Chasseaud, Ploegsteert images 2007

2007-08-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

Images drawn by Peter Chasseaud at St Yvon, Ploegsteert, Belgium, while working as artist in residence at the archaeological dig there in July-August 2007.

Pillars of Fire: the Trench 122 mines, 7 June 1917. Ultimo Trench on the left and Factory Farm (Ultra Trench) on the right. Copyright Peter Chasseaud 2007.

Below: Pollard Willow, Factory Farm. An old willow tree, regenerated survivor of the First World War. Copyright Peter Chasseaud 2007.

Wotan at Ultimo Crater; Sir John Tomlinson visits the 1914-18 archaeological site

2007-08-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

Wotan at Ultimo Crater. Taking a break from my landscape work at the dig, on Tuesday 31st July I showed my friends Sir John and Lady Moya Tomlinson, with their daughter Abi, around the Factory Farm and Ultimo Crater sites. Later we visited Tyne Cot cemetery at Passchendaele, and they also satyed on to attend the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate before crossing to England.

Sir John Tomlinson at Ultimo Crater, St Yvon, Ploegsteert; 31st July 2007. Photograph courtesy of Martin Brown.

Peter Chasseaud artist in residence at Ploegsteert, Belgium

2007-07-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

I will be in Belgium from 28 July to 4 August 2007 (apart from a quick return to England for 1 August to see Tristan and Isolde at Glyndebourne), at St Yvon near Ploegsteert, as artist in residence at an archaeological dig run by a group called No Mans Land.

The dig is just east of Ploegsteert Wood, a place I recently visited as part of my Willows project (see elsewhere in this blog). It focuses on the British and German front line trenches of 1914-1917, the 'no man's land' between them, and two huge mine craters blown in 1917 at Factory Farm and Ultimo Trench.

To the artist and writer Davis Jones, who served in this sector with the 'flash-spotters' of 2nd Field Survey Company, Royal Engineers, Ploegsteert (and also the Ypres Salient) was the mythical 'Broceliande' of the Arthurian legends. The job of the 'flash-spotters' was to locate enemy artillery batteries by taking intersections on their flashes when they fired. They relied on elevation to gain observation from church towers, windmills, hills, etc. In this area the great eminence of the Kemmelberg was vital for British observation, and also the lesser heights of Hill 63 and the hill at Neuve Eglise.

Ploegsteert Wood was an incredible warren of tracks, dugouts, headquarters, billets, reserve trenches (like the dugouts built above ground level as sandbag breastworks to keep above the high water-table). The clay soil in Flanders drains very poorly, and water (and related willow trees) is a significant landscape feature.

Visible and invisible:
I shall be making a close study of the landscape, including elements of visibility and intervisibility. I shall also bear in mind the invisible - the trenches near the surface, some of which the archaeologists will reveal, and the mine shafts and galleries which lie much deeper.

The air photo (conventional orientation with north at the top), taken in June 1915, shows the opposing trench lines with no man's land in between. Ploegsteert Wood is on the left, and at the top are the moated farms known to the British as Hull's Burnt Farm (left, to the west of the British front line) and Factory Farm (right, with the German front line trench running through it).

Afghanistan - A Journey. Artist's book by Peter Chasseaud 2007

2007-07-18T04:08:00.000-07:00