Experiential Drawing, Capture, Writing, Recording, Play, Photography
Looking, seeing, capturing
On my first visit I began by photographing the area to make an initial documentation. It was not instantly noticeable where the street started. The High Street fed into the town’s square and the numbering and street name sign didn’t correspond to a clear beginning for the road.
Once onto the definitive part of the street and examining the building numbers further, there were several numbers missing along with their corresponding buildings. I had walked up and down the same road so many times but had completely missed these oddities.
The buildings are of a mixture of eras dating back hundreds of years. Today they comprise of mainly private housing, as well as, pubs, restaurants, cafes, antiques, estate agents, barbers, a charity shop, public toilets and a car park!
From here, I decided to delve into the archives to see what could be thrown up on the mysterious missing buildings. There is a Facebook group who share old memories of Emsworth including old photographs, artworks, stories, and reminiscences. The photographs below flagged that there were some large prominent buildings rising above the houses and pubs, which are no longer there. The largest I was guessing would be a brewery, as I have seen similar architecture in a brewery building in another local town.
I decided to take a trip to the local museum to see if more light could be shed on the missing. On asking a helpful museum volunteer, she steered me towards some files containing numerous documents relating to the buildings in South Street. I found several houses had been demolished in the 1950s/60s to make way for a car park signifying the growth in the motor trade and the increasing number of cars on the road. Prior to this the town’s square had been sufficient for parking including horses and carts.
After scouring the archives another museum volunteer enquired how I was getting on and then promptly whisked me off to the museums main collection. On studying a map from 1876 the missing large buildings protruding into the skyline were indeed from a brewery. Emsworth had also been hit by several bombs during the second world war due to its proximity from the city of Portsmouth. Not many buildings had taken a direct hit but the force from the blasts had caused considerable damage.
Several of the houses are old fisherman’s cottages reflecting a long-gone thriving trade. Today, there is only one operational fishing boat working out of Emsworth harbour.
South Street was known for being a rough area and outsiders were not welcome. Demonstrated in this old photography showing a cluster of menacing looking men, most likely fishermen and sailors stood outside the Anchor public house that also doubled as the customs house.
After WW2 many families were relocated to another area of the village. Declining fishing industry and the scandal of poisoned oysters brought on a huge change for the area.
On chatting to one of the museum curators there are several connections still seen today to the past existence of the Kinnell & Hartley Brewery. Watch makers, Zero West, are located in the old boathouse, which was once part of the old brewery. When the brewery was demolished, Noel Kinnell, had the cottages to the left of the boathouse built for the families that had worked at the brewery. He also paid for the erection and repair of the seawall and much used promenade still standing today. Kinnell lived in Emsworth at Seafield not far from the millpond and has left behind quite the legacy. The road in which Seafield House is located is also named after him, Kinnell Close.
The museum also has an archive of audio recorded interviews, which could make a nice typographic map.
There is so much material here, I have unearthed several projects I can come back to. For now I am going to focus on the idea of the 'missing' and go from there.
Development
When I was playing detective with the buildings based on the old 1876 map, I chose to create it on my studio wall as a visual reference to see where I had got with the investigation (image 1). This made it so much clearer to track, so I could associate the buildings with the numbers and where they were, rather than the numbers alone. From this exercise I could see exactly what was missing now.
Image 6 shows the building identifiers (signs and numbers) and image 3 of the digitised versions. I created these as grayscale images in Photoshop before vectorising them in Adobe Illustrator.
Another avenue I looked at for portraying the missing was to use some of the old photographs I had discovered and recreating the scene now by finding the rough point in which the originals had been taken (images 4 and 5). I then overlay the two images in Photoshop to create some ghostly images of past and present. I also explored blanking the old buildings out combining the images with the same technique but then drawing the buildings shell with the pen tool in Illustrator (image 5). The image then represents past, present and gone!
Final Outcome: The 'missing'
I decided to produce an abstract road map of the properties today . The missing numbers represent the lost or missing from the past to in turn convey there is a history behind it and the variety of type styles reflect the eclectic character of the street past and present. I feel the figures are just about recognisable as building identifiers and as to what they represent.
There are so many ideas here I found it difficult to hone in on just one aspect, but I really enjoyed creating something a little more abstract.
