The Blackpool of the West
It’s so close to the endless edgelands of Avonmouth,
That warehouse-dystopian modernity,
Where no-one seems to manufacture anything,
Just store stuff, move stuff or exchange stuff,
And then choose a café for a coffee and a croissant:
The British economy.
But a century ago, courtesy
Of the Great Western Railway,
Severn Beach was reinventing itself,
As a holiday resort of sorts,
A Pleasure-land of the floodplains
With their isolated farms and cottages,
And then a railway station opened there in 1923
(The circular Avonmouth line had opened
Earlier at the turn of the century).
Its inter-war hey-day saw excursions,
Cyclists, promenaders, hikers,
Chalets, sheds, a structure built from bits of an old bus,
A boating lake, cafes, tea shops,
And the Blue Lagoon Swimming Pool,
With diving boards, see=saws, a slide and fountains,
At ‘The Blackpool of the West’.
And what else might you see in the summer-time
Along its mile-long ‘shingle beach’?
Look hard and ignore the bridge across the river,
For there they all are, forgetful of war,
Picnicking, paddling and dipping in the Severn,
When that fearsome turbid tide recedes,
And there are the twopenny deckchairs,
And there, the bicycle-stalls and donkey rides,
The paddling pool and the Water Carnivals,
The Bathing Beauty contests, the Seaside Revues,
And the celebrated Dance Competitions,
Are they doing the Lambeth Walk along the shingle sands?
But look.
There’s still more to see at Severn Beach:
Rollercoasters, swing-boats, and roundabouts,
The Ghost Train, dodgems, crazy golf,
And the boating lake:
(There were two islands at the boating lake
with an ice-cream parlour and decorative ‘willow pattern’ bridges) …
If the weather disappointed, then there was
The ‘Galvanised Gaumont’ showing the latest flicks,
Or the Severn Beach Hotel (aka the Severn Salmon),
With its litany of public bars, lounge bar, skittle alley,
Snooker room and ball room.
And if the weather is fine (it usually is at Severn Beach!),
Then you can watch the bicycle side-cars
As they traverse that shingle beach,
Bringing supplies to the refreshment stalls.
But wait.
Here’s the ghost of Ozymandias
Stalking the shingle beach:
‘Nothing now remains except the ornaments
at the base of the steps leading up to the pool.
These can still be seen complete with traces of the old familiar blue paint.’
Ozymandias is the motif that accompanies us on this walk,
As do the cliches of psychogeography
(But as someone once said, cliches are cliches
Because they do the job and that’s why they’re used a lot):
Liminality and palimpsests are two a penny here,
But these choices from the lexicon are not
The sole reason why I think this amble
On a red-hot July Sunday afternoon
Elevate this meander into an
Open air pop-up museum of sorts:
‘a temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.’
We did have a widening circle of participants:
A party of Japanese tourists
Grateful for our pointing out the location
Of the Blue Lagoon and also its absence
On their guides and phones;
We tripped through time with aid of information boards,
Plaques, posts and the memory
And recitation of the opening lines
Of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
As we passed the occasional old farm,
As afternoon turned towards evening:
‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’
What next?
Hay bales in rolling fields beyond barbed wire –
Discussion on the symbolism and history of barbed wire;
Discussion on texts such as The Book of Trespass,
And the deceptive iconography in Constable’s The Hay Wain;
The personal importance of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides:
How I’ve shared this text with friends and in history talks,
Asking audience members to raise their hand if they have read it,
I do so again on this walk;
I buy another two copies when I get home,
Probably the fifth time that I have bought this book –
I leave one, not forgotten on my shelves,
But on the table in the dark back room,
The cover upturned to act as an exhibit of sorts;
The other, a present for a companion.
But back to the walk – what next?
A glimpse of medieval ridge and furrow:
“Was there really more land under the plough on the eve of the Black Death?”
The word ‘warth’ on an information board leads to further discourse
About land reclaimed from the river and also memories
Of a performative walk upstream around Slimbridge,
In search of the possible 1649 Digger settlement there.
(https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-diggers-at-slimbridge/)
Next up were teazles springing up on the footpath,
A reminder themselves of pre-industrial working
(The ‘domestic system’ as it was termed in my schooldays),
A reminder of handloom weavers and raising the nap,
And we raised the nap too with our own stories
On the Severn Beach Heritage Trail and the Severn Way:
‘The Trail starts on the sea-wall, almost underneath the Second Severn Crossing. It continues north from the trail described in the Severn Beach leaflets. Unlike Severn Beach, many of the sites still exist and can be seen by following this trail.’
And this is beguiling.
You reach New Passage,
Where ‘a ferry had plied the river for centuries’,
Updated by the Bristol & South Wales Union Railway
(1863, broad gauge),
With a train that ran up a wooden jetty,
Some third of a mile long jutting out in the river
And ‘An imposing hotel was built to accommodate passengers’,
Who were often forced to wait by inclement weather,
And the second highest tidal range in the world.
The opening of the Severn Tunnel in 1886
Changed everything, of course:
Not just for passengers but freight too,
Particularly South Wales coal –
The life-blood of the Great Western Railway.
And so concludes our trip through Severn space and time.
Did we create an Open-air Exhibition of sorts?
Did we meet our definition of a Pop-up Museum?
Yes, we did in a pedestrian manner of speaking:
‘A temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.’
A walk.
A happening.
An open-air pop-up museum.
Created by slow walking, reading, conversing, writing and recording.
This truly was “walking as a situated practice”
at “the intersection of embodiment, site and heritage”,
as I/we “write from within the grounds” we “move through”.
‘