Books

Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast – Tom Bolton (Penned in the Margins, 2018)

Think of Essex and what comes to mind? For many it will be Norman Tebbit, Teddy Taylor and that peculiarly Essex-led brand of working-class Toryism that brought Thatcher to power in 1979 and sustained her through the 1980s. Or maybe it’s the unbridled aspiration, conspicuous consumption and cheerful anti-intellectualism of Essex Girl, Essex Man and TOWIE? But Essex, we should remember, has a proud history of dissent and radical politics: it was the seedbed of the Peasants’ Revolt and, since the nineteenth century, it has been home to a number of experimental communities that sought to reject capitalism and conventional notions of patriarchy.

Tom Bolton sets out to explore this history by walking the entire length of the Essex coast; and, as we learn, it is a very long coastline, one that meanders drunkenly through creeks, mudflats and low-lying islands. But for Bolton, and his walking companion Jo Healy, the quest is not so much about history but about the present day. Geographically close to London, but far-removed in so many other ways, Essex is at once a point of access for those wishing to enter England peacefully and along its coast we are frequently reminded of its role as a key front line of defence against those who wished to invade. Crucially, the county was one of the heartlands of the pro-Brexit campaign with some 62.3% of those who took part in the 2016 referendum voting to leave the EU.

Bolton’s walk takes him from Purfleet on the Thames Estuary to Manningtree on the Suffolk border. But his odyssey is not unbroken: work commitments and the practical limitations of public transport mean that the journey needs to be made in stages and on weekends often weeks apart. But this does not seem to affect the continuity and power of Bolton’s narrative, indeed there is a hypnotic quality to his landscape descriptions in this book; something to do, perhaps, with the way that the writer conveys how it seems the three elements of the coastline of Essex, sky, sea and sand, constantly coalesce at the vanishing point forming an unreachable fourth place.

We pass through mudflats and along crumbling sea walls, taking in retail parks, sewage outfalls and coastal forts. At a line of concrete tank obstacles just beyond Manningtree we reach Suffolk and the end of Bolton’s journey.

And as he walks Bolton mediates on Essex past and present. It is a Janus-faced county, divided in its nature. Divided, Bolton seems to suggest, in much the same way as Britain as a whole has turned in upon itself.

(Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast is launched on 30 October 2018 and my review copy was kindly provided by the publisher)

Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent – Owen Hatherley (Allen Lane, 2018)

I first came across Owen Hatherley’s writings on architecture, society and politics in 2009. In Militant Modernism he wrote scathingly about the British take on modernism with his starting point being his own upbringing on an estate in Southampton, a place that was ‘impoverished, violent and desolate.’ Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent is an anthology that attempts to take a much broader scope, but once more he starts his story in his home city of Southampton.

A few days after the Brexit referendum he returned home and ended up having a heated exchange with his mother over the result. She supported the leave campaign from an old-style socialist perspective, whereas Hatherley voted to remain. His reasons for wanting to stay in the EU, however, were primarily architectural rather than economic or political. Hatherley associates Europe, we learn, with good architecture, of both the traditional and modern variety, whereas so much of the architecture of Britain, he argues, is blighted by the primacy of the economic bottom line.

Trans-Europe Express is not a systematic review of European architecture, but more an anthology of essays based on a series of journeys through the continent. It is also a lament for the way that Britain’s few brave attempts at European-style communal cityscapes has given way to our more ubiquitous privatisation of public spaces. Hatherley presents the cities of Łódź, Hamburg and Rotterdam as models, but also as lost opportunities.

Music

Audio Albion – A Year in the Country (2018)

A Year in the Country is an ongoing project exploring the mythical underbelly of Britian’s rural topography. Through music, writing and visual art we are invited to dream, and in doing so take a deep dive into an ‘otherly pastoralism’.

Blending music and field recordings Audio Albion maps out the countryside and edgelands of this island and immerses us in the myths and legends that inhabit even the most mundane landscapes. The album comprises the work of fifteen different artists. But this is not a collection of tracks: it is a carefully constructed aural journey.

Joy’s Reflection is Sorrow – Sharron Kraus (Nightshade, 2018)

Sweet and sour, light and shade, happiness and despair, Joy’s Reflection is Sorrow is underpinned, as its cover illustration suggests, by a Jungian shadow-self and a mix of contrasting styles to match Kraus’s sweeping gamut of emotional reflections.

The ethereal opener My Danger gives way to the rockier, anthemic Figs and Flowers. The Man Who Says Goodbye follows with a joyous melody and lush instrumentation whereas Joy’s Reflection is Sorrow returns us inevitably to a more introspective mood. Sorrow’s Arrow and Secrets are achingly poignant and When Darkness Falls and Death and I are both as dark as their titles suggest.

Kraus’s songs are subtle and heart-felt and her influences are clearly very eclectic. With the musicians she has gathered around her for this release and with the quality of her own performance Sharron Kraus is clearly an artist who has reached her musical prime. Long may it last.

Film

Arcadia – Paul Wright (2018)

Arcadia could so easily have ended up as nothing more than a cobbled-together and vaguely diverting compilation of archive footage of the British countryside; something that might find a comfortable home in the early evening schedule of BBC Four. Instead, with his inspired selection of footage and skilled editing, together with an atmospheric soundtrack by Adrian Utley and Will Gregory, Paul Wright has produced a folk-horror classic. A film that is all the more disturbing because it is not a work of fiction.

Watching Arcadia one is left with the impression than nothing but a thin veneer of rational modernity covers up the essentially pagan nature of life in rural Britain. Customs, rituals, protests and the daily routines of rural life are all recontextualised through Wright’s lens into a film that is decidedly eerie in its effect. Viewing this montage of images and voices in 2018, one is left with the uneasy feeling that our current Brexit woes are the revenge of deep rural Britain against a metropolitan-led nation.

You Were Never Really Here – Lynne Ramsay (2017)

Lynne Ramsay has directed some of the most innovative and compelling British films of the past two decades, most notably Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. You Were Never Really Here is her first feature film since 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and received awards at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for Joaquin Phoenix’s central performance and Ramsay’s screenplay.

Released in the UK this year You Were Never Really Here is a taut psychological thriller and features a standout musical score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Phoenix is excellent as a hitman unwittingly caught up in a web of political corruption and human trafficking. But it is Ramsay’s tight, uncompromising direction that drives this film forward.