Rich and Strange
Worthing's seaside reinvention
Welcome to another Rich and Strange, my monthly Substack about seaside towns and their culture.
I’ve been busy this month, designing and installing a new exhibition for The Bay Trust, at the Pines Garden cafe and visitor centre in St Margaret’s Bay. I’ve been working with them for five years, helping them understand their work in a different way. The most pressing issue humanity faces together is adapting to a changing climate. From building the carbon neutral Pines Calyx building and making their Hugelkultur beds to experiments in producing Biochar, they have been working on things to help with this for a long time..
And they used to have a ramshackle ‘museum’ on site, that had lost its accreditation, committee, curator, and most of its collection in about 2014. It was limping on with a few odd Second World War objects in old cases, and every space on the wall covered in prints, photocopies, and old exhibition panels from the 1990s. We have cleared all that way, reopened windows, and made a simple cafe and visitor centre that can house exhibitions about the environmental work of The Bay Trust, the Pines Gardens, and St Margaret’s Bay.
Cross Channel, the new exhibition, includes images from The Bay Trust’s archives, alongside contemporary art work. It also connects to objects in the gardens, seeing the whole of the site as a museum. It looks at the Cross-Channel Geopark, and the English Channel/La Manche not as a contested border, but as a place of connection, shared culture, and coming together.
I’ve included the staff magazine for the construction companies who worked together to build the Channel Tunnel, and a Roman oil lamp, that tells the story of the trade networks joining the Romano-British people living in this northern corner of the Roman Empire with people living in France and Germany, the Mediterranean countries, North Africa, and the Middle East. There’s a contemporary work of art that connects the Somme battlefields to Kent, and a map made by an artist who chose self-exile to France after Brexit. There’s Mini Moderns wallpaper and work by Margo in Margate and Vanessa Daws channel swimming paintings. There’s the story of a Jewish refugee whose statues of Winston Churchill can be found across the world. It’s complex and subtle and tells a big story in a simple way. If you can find the time, please go and see it. Enjoy the gardens and pop down to the bay for a paddle while you’re there.
Here’s another piece, roughed together as a story of Worthing’s Twentieth Century reinventions from scraps I’d written previously. I suspect Worthing needs a whole book, not a chapter, which is what I was aiming for. It’s a bit ragged, but there’s the start of a story in there:
In 1933, architect Charles Cowles-Voysey built a new Town Hall for Worthing’s self-important councillors. Refused permission for a plaque with his name on it, he instead hid his name in the design of a circular carpet at the centre of the council chamber. Woven among the sea creatures and fronds of seaweed are the letters of his name. Won’t be druv, indeed. Every councillor has to look at those letters. In memory of the ones who didn’t want his name remembered.
