File under: Trails and Influences. Other Pathways. Case #37/52.
I’ve mentioned this before but I seemed to spend a good part of my younger years fascinated by small-scale defence installations; concrete pillboxes that stood in fields, resisting the passage of time, debris filled air raid shelters and the like…
These were part of what appears to be/have been a vest network of semi-invisible defences scattered across the landscape, on cliff edges and beneath our feet.
Over the years there has come to be a growing body of literature that documents and investigates such buildings and their associated preparedness; the eyes, ears and quiet claws that were intended to defend the realm.
Here are but a few of such things…
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![]() That sense of dread and its sources aren’t something that I often overtly refer to during A Year In The Country but I think in many ways it constantly underpins and informs much of these otherly wanderings. Now it is almost as though it has become in part merely a possibly over referred to cultural aesthetic/signifier but though the “hot” characteristics of such cold conflicts does not currently seem to abound, it would seem that all the associated machinery is still posted around the world, still pointed somewhere but I’m not sure quite where or what for. ‘Twould seem you can keep the genies in the bottles (fortunately and much praise for that) but not have them dissolve away, even when it is claimed that there wishes are nolonger required. Hmmm. |
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![]() ![]() …and more investigative studies of such forgotten and not currently thought needed structures… I find a strange kind of beauty in the one on the above right. I’m not quite sure why. There’s an optimism, a loneliness and a joy to it in some way… |
![]() The above image is from one of these investigations; it seems like album clipart just waiting to be sent out into the world…. |
I feel that I should use the phrase England My Lionheart somewhere on this page. I’m not quite sure why. Not in a jingoistic little England manner. More I think because it is a song/phrase that conjures a very particular yearning, loss and hope, which is something that architecture such as the above can also at times seem to…
So with that, as the soldiers soften, the war ends and the air-raid shelters bloom over, I shall depart these fields of zeros and ones for a moment or two…
Thankyou to Subterrania Britannica.
Step under the ivy: An English Lionheart.
Previous installations and ghosts.