sculpture – East of Elveden

Trinity Buoy Wharf, down by the River Thames on the Leamouth peninsula in Poplar, is a place where the past is deeply layered. It is also somewhere that seems to beckon an uncertain future. Even to reach it is to cross some sort of temporal boundary, from humdrum modern metropolis to another London where the past and future converge. Waters come together here too: Trinity Buoy Wharf lies at the end of Bow Creek, the meandering estuarine section of the River Lea, the city’s largest tributary. Here, at London’s eastern edge, is its confluence with the Thames. To reach the wharf on foot from East India, the closest DLR station, you are obliged to trace a dual carriageway through an anonymous, rather faceless part of the city. The only thing that holds any sort of familiarity is the logo of a Travelodge glimpsed in the distance across the busy highway.

The entrance to the wharf announces itself with a large red-painted buoy. It is an apt introduction, as, in a previous life, this was a place centred upon the manufacture and repair of buoys. Further along Orchard Place, the almost traffic-free main thoroughfare, are the high brick walls of old warehouses and industrial buildings. One bears the ghost lettering: Mathers Whale Oil Extraction. It feels almost a little too self-aware, as if history has been carefully curated to engender a tangible sense of place in this heavily revamped zone of erstwhile maritime London. A couple of information boards do much the same thing, expanding on the theme of whale oil production that dominated this neighbourhood in the late 18th century. But such industry is now a thing of the past and the new focus is on comfortable living in a post-industrial setting.

You can tell that estate agents and developers have already been busy here, doing their utmost to create a desirable brand that combines housing, place and historical context. The bakers and baristas have already moved in, and so we spend a pleasant half-hour sipping cappuccinos at a newly opened artisan bakery. Sitting outside, shaded by geometrically spaced trees and new-build apartments with balconies, I wonder who actually lives here; or, more to the point, who is meant to live here. I suspect that many of the properties have already been snapped up by members of the owner-occupier niche that estate agents term ‘young professionals’.

In plain sight, immediately across the Thames, is the O2 arena on the Greenwich Peninsula. The view is telescopic; the O2, née Millennium Dome, a semi-collapsed Bedouin tent (or ‘sorry meniscus’ as Iain Sinclair has more scathingly described it) seems almost close enough to touch. At the next table a young couple in wedding outfits greet a photographer before they leave together to find a suitable backdrop for shots for their nuptial photo album. The O2 is clearly a romantic location as well as a capacious centre of entertainment, which brings to mind couples in Eastern Europe doing much the same with historic churches, castles and mosques in their country: the notion of iconic viewpoint as wedding photo setting.

Trinity Buoy Wharf is more than simply a photogenic backdrop and fresh location for city living, it is also an artistic hub, something apparent in the quirky statuary and murals that abound here. A little further on along Orchard Place is a café housed in a shipping container that has a black cab taxi with a tree sculpture growing out of it on its roof. What does it signify: green roots taking hold of familiar London emblems, or a post-apocalyptic vision of an abandoned city of the future? The same artist, Andrew Baldwin, has several more works around the wharf, and art is clearly encouraged here, with a choice of galleries and workshops available for hire. Most eye-catching is a colourful ziggurat of repurposed shipping containers that serve as offices and arts studios.

But we are here for something else; something that will outlive all of this worthy but ephemeral creativity. If the past has been remodelled to provide a new vision of the present, then what of the future? At the end of the wharf, occupying the upstairs space of the Bow Creek Lighthouse, is Longplayer. Longplayer utilises an instillation conceived and designed by former Pogues banjoist, Jem Finer. Materially, it consists of 234 brass ‘singing’ bowls and gongs of various size and pitch, although Longplayer in essence is actually a musical composition designed to last for a thousand years. Based on an original piece of music recorded in December 1999, just twenty minutes long, the composition is processed by an algorithm to self-generate a piece that will continue until midnight December 31, 2999 CE. A glacially slow build of subtle musical variation, Longplayer will never repeat itself. Naturally enough, given its planned longevity, the piece is aimed at reflecting the concepts of time and impermanence from a cosmological and philosophical perspective. To house such a conceptual work of art in a redundant lighthouse seems somehow wholly appropriate.

The brass bowls, arranged in a swirling, concentric pattern are beautiful in their own right. Many are adorned with discrete messages or the names of sponsors. Longplayer can be heard best upstairs, where the latticed lantern glass looks out across the river to the high-rises of the Greenwich peninsula. As we view and listen, the ethereal ambient ring of metal is embellished percussively by workers banging on wooden beams elsewhere in the building. The uninvited drummers will soon stop, of course, but the composition will go on, inexorably, chiming with the ever-changing tide lapping the foreshore. A question lingers: where will the river be when the composition finally draws to its millennial conclusion? Will the lighthouse itself be high and dry above the water, or drowned in the Thames? And who will be here to listen?

To reach Another Place you have to start in Liverpool. At least that is what we did, taking a Crosby-bound number 53 bus from the city’s Queen Square terminus. Leaving the Victorian magnificence of the city centre behind, the route leads through the edgelands of north Liverpool, in sight of huge abandoned red-brick warehouses that fringe the wide silver Mersey below. Away from the revitalised city centre and the heritage revamping of Albert Dock, this is a zone of substandard housing and broken dreams; a place where most of the pubs are boarded up and semi-ruined now that the dockers who once would have drank in them no longer have wage packets to fritter. The whole area seems partly abandoned to buddleia and the memory of better days although, here and there, like red-brick phoenixes, are signs of identikit housing development: new-build semi-detached homes with small gardens and big aspirations.

Things seem to degenerate at the southern fringe of Bootle where the principal pub lacks not only clientele but also a roof. Narrow Victorian terrace streets slope away from the main road, their grim countenance softened by the names of flowers: Daisy Street, Woodbine Street, Harebell Street, and even a Pansy Street, which is perhaps a problematic address for a burly Scouse docker. After passing through Bootle, whose main centre of social interaction appears to be a bar located in the lower storey of a massive concrete complex that looks like it has been transported wholesale from Bratislava or New Belgrade, things start to look up, socio-economically speaking. Waterloo, where we alight next to the Merseyrail station seems altogether more prosperous, with a handful of smart cafes and a long marine parade of white-painted houses equipped with dormer windows to peer over the dunes to the beach and sea beyond.

At the end of South Road, the road gives way to a track past a man-made lake behind sand dunes. Oyster catchers, gulls and ducks have taken refuge here and have arranged themselves in tightly-packed groups to brace against the bitterly cold north-westerly wind blowing across the Irish Sea. Climbing slightly to reach the dunes and a coast path, the beach and sea are revealed. As are several of the one hundred life-sized cast iron sculptures that dot the foreshore here between Waterloo and Blundellsands, and which constitute the Antony Gormley landscape installation that is Another Place (although here they are more prosaically referred to as simply ‘The Iron Men’). It is a bright, if brutally windy, afternoon and there a few people about, strolling on the beach, walking their dogs, weaving nonchalantly between the iron men that punctuate the beach like sentinels.

The Gormley figures (modelled on the artist himself) stretch as far as the eye can see, each one staring out to sea isolated from the others: a statement on the human condition that refutes the John Donne position that ‘no man is an island’. Here, it would appear, every man is. The beauty of the figures is that, seen from afar, it is sometimes hard to distinguish those which are iron from those which are human. Covered and uncovered by each successive tide, the installation clearly points towards the relationship that exists between man and nature. Perhaps, silhouetted against the backdrop of Liverpool Dock’s cranes, it also alludes to the historical connection that links man and the seafaring trade in these parts?