Making The Gates to Dreamland: Script-writing and Wayfinding

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On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

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One of the overriding resonances I detected in Galileo’s story was the feeling of enclosure and inaccessibility.

Galileo was under house arrest for the duration of his time writing Two New Sciences; an experience of confinement that recent lockdowns have only briefly exposed us to. Losing his sight at the same time ‘confined’ him further, in a different sense; altering his ability to perceive the world beyond him.

Along the route between Dreamland’s gates, I used the words of my script to draw attention to moments of enclosure in the listener’s journey through the physical environment.

At the opening gate, between the metal bars, the sight of Dreamland’s Helter Skelter is visible in the distance. The words from the first scripted diary entry imagine how Galileo’s first action, upon returning to his villa marshalled by armed guards, was to climb straight to the highest window of the house. Here, he gazes upon the familiar view of a tower on a hill (though I do not name this, it would have been the Torre del Gallo in Arcetri), but his sight problems render the view inaccessible.

Here, the listener is invited to draw a connection between the inaccessibility of Dreamland’s landmarks and that of Galileo, in being house-bound and increasingly visually impaired.

The Torre del Gallo in Arcetri, Florence

Dreamland's Helter Skelter

In this early stage of the experience, you walk along a road often busy with car traffic and lined with terraced housing. As you stand beside a seemingly unbreachable metal gate, the words in the audio diary bring attention to these elements of your surroundings that convey a sense of being squeezed in.

This continues as you descend down the hill, still confined by terraced housing but with widening space visible in front, creating the sense of being funnelled down the street towards an opening. At this point in the scripted diary entries, while Galileo is still very aware of the limitations he faces, there is a feeling of progress being made as he begins to chart his plans for writing Two New Sciences.             

As the walker’s perspective briefly widens, another key theme of the work is illuminated: the opportunities for growth, creativity and imagination that restriction can entail.

With the view opening out onto the usually busier area around Dreamland’s car park, Galileo describes the encounters he has with numerous visitors to his home. Vincenzo Viviani, who would become Galileo's student assistant, is highlighted as a key figure; and Galileo describes a clarity and order that emerges from the chaos of his cluttered and busy home life. In an ironic yet symbolic twist of fate, this is the time when Galileo loses his sight completely.

Up to this point in the work, multiple references are made to plants and weeds, which can be seen in many areas around the outskirts of Dreamland.

I was drawn to the image of his garden being gradually being overtaken by weeds as he committed himself to writing his book, while his view outside to the garden would have become increasingly obscured. There is an interesting parallel here between his intellectual growth and his body being overtaken by its own ‘weeds’ mentioned in the scripted diary extracts: his loss of eyesight and worsening arthritis.

A courtyard garden at Galileo's former home in Arcetri, Florence

Weeds near the entrance to Dreamland's car park

Aside from Galileo’s physical condition, the writing of Two New Sciences would certainly have been worrisome endeavour. All of Galileo’s publications had been banned under order of the Catholic Church, and being under house arrest with armed guards lurking meant that anything potentially illicit would have had to be kept very secretive.

Later on in the walk, you navigate a narrow back-street with tall buildings on one side and a high fence on the other; a road apparently used most often for delivering and loading goods. It’s a place evidently not designed for you to dwell in.

Here, the words in the audio diary draw comparisons between this discomfort and compression you feel when physically walking and Galileo’s own anxiety, as he prepares to release his illicit work out into the world.

In the words of the audio, ambiguous references are made to objects like CCTV cameras, back entrances, invisible onlookers and hidden doorways in the audiowalk's Margate locations, which become symbols of these themes of surveillance and secrets, ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’.

Streetview image of Hall by the Sea Road, Margate

Ultimately, though, Galileo’s story is one of his work transcending the confined spaces and times in which he lived. As a form of epilogue to the events leading to the publication of Two New Sciences, I chose to set a sixth and final scene on Margate beach.

Here, the view over the sea to the horizon, the coastal breeze, sound of road traffic and sensation of sand under your feet are called upon in the script as symbols of this transcendence: the passing of time, movement between distant places, and the power of imagination and motion to connect everything.

Margate beach

These are just some of the intricate, enigmatic connections that the audiowalk’s script draws between the landscapes of Dreamland in the 21^st century and Galileo’s life in 17^th-century Florence.

Alongside these broader themes of enclosure, inaccessibility, creativity, growth, surveillance, secrets, motion and imagination, there are many other moments when individual details along the route of the walk are called upon to create figurative, symbolic links between events in Galileo’s life and your immediate surroundings.

I won’t name these explicitly as they are designed to be stumbled upon to achieve their effect. But hidden in the script are references to particular signage, graffiti, road markings, security infrastructure, photographs, historic wall lettering, paving, and a familiar Margate sound.

A final feature of the script worth noting is the series of dates associated with the diary entries you find. You’ll notice that no numbered days are given, only named dates such as ‘Ash Wednesday’, ‘Pentecost’ and ‘Epiphany’.

In historic records, none of the events described in Galileo's story have exact dates. Usually only years are given, and occasionally times of year.

This ambiguity gave me the licence to choose dates within a rough timescale that reflect the symbolic significance these events had within Galileo’s life. In particular, these are all important dates on the Christian calendar. This was a nod to the fact that Galileo was a Catholic, who did not see his scientific findings as incompatible with his faith.

I also figured that a 21^st-century listener would struggle to form any kind of impression from a specific date like ‘August 12^th 1635’, while these holy days still have importance today. More curious listeners might recognise this level of detail in the work and choose to investigate further, also becoming more alert to other subtle, intricate features of the work.

The next post in this series discusses how I narrated the scripted diary entries, recording the audio and editing it to upload to the A Different LENS map.

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How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home

The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.

However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.

Making The Timekeeper's Return: Research and Writing

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One year ago this autumn, I reached the culmination of an overwhelming three months of creative work and collaboration when I designed, wrote and directed The Timekeeper’s Return, a story-based immersive treasure hunt set in Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter.

In this series of blog posts, I want to delve into the detail of how The Timekeeper’s Return was made, including an overview of how the event turned out on the day and the project’s legacy – for the participants, the Cathedral Quarter, and my own future as I continue to work in the area of location-based treasure-hunting games for my practice-based PhD.

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Research and Writing

In my September 2018 blog post, I described how I arrived at the overarching concept for The Timekeeper’s Return – a time-travelling historical researcher called Dr. Mia Augustina, whose time machine, the astrolabe, malfunctions and traps her in the past. I briefly talked about how this concept then informed the graphic design and organisation of the treasure hunt.

However, I’ve yet to describe my experiences of creating the story upon which the event was based, which involved undertaking research to uncover the most evocative details from the Cathedral Quarter’s history, and then writing about them in an engaging way.

I can split up the sources for my research roughly into three categories: online sources, the local history section of the public library, and individuals/businesses.

For my online research, aside from looking up odds and ends relating to the histories I’d already been working on, there were certain individual websites that I regularly turned to for historic information upon which I could base my writing.

One of the most useful websites was Machadoink, which is essentially an index of historic Canterbury.

One particular section of this site, called ‘Canterbury Streets’, allowed me to delve into the records of each building on every street contained within the Cathedral Quarter, including those that are no longer there. The pages for each street are populated with old news items, photographs, public records, and other curiosities that provided a wealth of information I could use to build a picture of interesting historic events or characters.

Another source of online inspiration was the excellent public Facebook page ‘Canterbury: Remembering it as it was’, where old photographs, stories and other historical records are regularly shared and discussed by local residents.

I was keen to ensure that my representations of the histories I’d studied were as accurate as possible, and this is typically where I turned to my old friend, the National Library of Scotland website, for its extensive collection of historic Ordnance Survey maps. These helped me to pinpoint the locations of particular buildings, landmarks and roads over 100 years ago, whose layout has changed considerably in the time since.

Ordnance Survey map published in 1907 showing part of central Canterbury, including the Cathedral Quarter

As for how I found resources at the local library, this involved simply browsing every book on the shelves in the Local History section and picking out those I thought would have the most information relevant to the Cathedral Quarter.

These mostly turned out to be accounts of the WW2 Baedeker raids, which devastated one half of the area, as well as reports from archaeological excavations in the areas around Burgate.

Map showing bomb sites in Canterbury from the 1942 Baedecker raids

Some of the most tantalising leads came from the individuals and businesses I consulted during the research stage, which I could follow up on and develop in my writing.

The Cathedral Quarter team and I sent around emails asking the local businesses to send me any information they knew or could find about the history of their premises, or anywhere else in the Cathedral Quarter area.

The responses ranged from quite detailed records to anecdotal rumours that had passed down between owners, which I could then explore further using other sources.

For example, one of the businesses had heard that their building featured as the home of one of the characters in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield.

Given the significance of Charles Dickens in the literary history of Kent and the UK, I decided to investigate the rumour further online, and discovered even more connections between the author and sites in the Cathedral Quarter. As a result, this slice of Canterbury history became a recurring theme in the treasure hunt’s story.

From my research into Charles Dickens' connections with the Cathedral Quarter

Additionally, for the first time, I went on one of the official guided tours of Canterbury’s historic centre. This started at the Buttermarket and weaved its way through the Cathedral precincts, and then onto other parts of the city centre.

As well as containing some useful tidbits of information I could draw on in my own stories, I was struck by how effective the demonstrative qualities of the tour were. The guides are very adept at directing visitors’ attention to parts of their surroundings that illustrate the very history they’re describing, and I soon realised that my treasure hunt needed to do the same – to curate people’s journey through, and perspectives of, the built environment in such a way that brings the history of the area to life.

The clearest way this manifested in The Timekeeper’s Return was a QR code text in Butchery Lane that directed people’s gaze from one side of the street to the other, to demonstrate the impact that World War 2 had on this part of Canterbury. Despite looking very similar, one half of the street is lined with buildings that are centuries old, while the other half was all rebuilt after devastating bombing.

Once I’d gathered enough historic detail from my research to use in the treasure hunt, the next task was to incorporate this material within a series of short QR code texts that would be compelling to read and encourage the reader to explore further.

While it was not long before I had some initial rough drafts and outlines for some of the QR codes, the first text that I wrote in full – and the one that shaped my approach to the rest of the writing – was one that took an interesting piece of local history and made it relatable and moving on a personal level.

The information in question concerned the construction of the cathedral’s Bell Harry Tower – not only a key symbol of the Cathedral Quarter, but the iconic sight that has greeted pilgrims to Canterbury since 1498.

I’d managed to uncover some fantastic trivia about the intricate pulley system by which the building materials were raised, and how the structure is surprisingly mostly composed of bricks.

But in considering what emotional resonance the construction of the tower might have for my participants, I started to wonder what kind of toll this labour took on those involved at the time.          

I managed to find some academic texts that considered the life and livelihood of medieval masons, learning how they led a largely nomadic existence, spending very long spans of time away from their families, only to return for a short time before taking on their next round of employment.

Indeed, the master mason in charge of Bell Harry, John Westall, was not from Canterbury at all. Being renowned in his profession, demand for his services took him to Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex before Canterbury.

I found it quite moving to think of someone dedicating years of their life to a building that would define the future of Canterbury, and enduring all the hardships this work involved, despite not even being from the city.                                                             

Of course, there’s a limit to the amount of ‘life story’ you can convey in a few hundred words. But what I could do in the QR code text was light a little spark of awareness, from which participants might sympathise with the kinds of sacrifices that made the Cathedral Quarter what it is today.

From this first complete story onwards, the main objective of my writing was finding ways to transmit the emotional currents of the historic events I was recounting, within the narrative frame of a time-travelling researcher. The story wasn’t supposed to be a history lesson, but an invitation to connect with the timelines of the Cathedral Quarter on a personal level.

Now, let’s talk about the actual act of writing.

My relationship with writing is very much love-hate.

The times when I can look back on my work and be happy with how it reads are wonderfully satisfying.

But equally I tend to find the process torturous. My pet hate is not being able to conjure up the right words to precisely express what I want to say.

Instead of doing what is always recommended to writers – just getting what you want to say on paper and then editing it later – I tend to leave huge gaps in the middle of sentences and paragraphs where I haven’t yet found the appropriate terms to use. This means that writing for me tends to be a gradual process of ‘filling in the gaps’.

If you have lots of rough but finished drafts of a piece, a least you have something ‘complete’, even if it needs adjustments.

The problem with my method is that nothing is ever complete until it’s basically as good as it’s going to get.

This undoubtedly lengthened the time it took for me to finish all of the QR code texts, and for them to be uploaded to the Cathedral Quarter website. I was very grateful for the patience of the Cathedral Quarter team and the website designers as I toiled tirelessly on getting the writing to the best standard I could before the event.               

Perfectionism isn’t my only writing foible. Anyone who knows me well will know that I really struggle to write concisely.

The problem isn’t that I ‘pad out’ my writing with pointless information. Anyone who proofreads my work finds it difficult to recommend which bits of my writing to cut.

Rather, the problem is that everything I include seems relevant and useful, which makes the process of culling even harder.                      

For a project like this, though, there was no room for leeway. The aim wasn’t to have people standing around for ages reading text on their phones, but instead to get them looking around and noticing things in their surroundings; discovering people and places that they didn’t know about before.

Ultimately, this meant that I had to limit my ambitions for the narrative. There simply wasn’t space to include several interweaving subplots and intricate details, which might work well in something like a novel, where the reader is expecting to take their time delving into the text, but not for this kind of outdoor, interactive narrative experience.

I suppose what I realised was that the depth of intrigue and immersion that I wanted to inspire during the event had to come predominantly from the player’s physical surroundings, rather than just my words.

One technique I did use to make my writing more digestible is to make sure that my paragraphs were always only one or two sentences long. This is something I’ve learnt from blogging, where I’ve found that readers are more willing to keep scrolling when the text is broken into smaller chunks. It also tends to mean that individual sentences can have more impact and convey dramatic tension more readily.

I also borrowed an interesting method from scriptwriting for TV series. That summer of 2018, I re-watched the entire first series of the modern Doctor Who (my absolute favourite), and started looking into the process through which Russell T Davies and his writing team managed to make each episode so affecting, while having a clear purpose in the wider arc of the series.

I learnt that for each episode they assigned a word that encompassed the ‘tone’ they wanted the episode to have, which was always reflected clearest in its denouement – the part of the story that determines the emotional residue the audience is left with.

By keeping a clear emotional signature in focus as I wrote each QR code text, and reinforcing this in its denouement when Mia expressed her thoughts as she departed to the next point in time, I was able to carefully direct the emotional undercurrents of the story, despite the shortage of words available for me to use.

In the end, though, I would say that I just about reached the upper limit on what was acceptable in terms of length. Even though this required some very difficult decisions in terms of sentences and paragraphs that needed to be culled, any longer and some participants might have found it all too much to get their heads around.

As it turned out, the length of the final texts turned out to be enough to include a significant amount of historic and narrative detail without compromising their engagement in the activity.                                         

The last thing I want to talk about here is the music that so effectively kept me inspired and focused throughout the writing process.

Nowadays I often find that my work flows best when I listen to orchestral or neo-classical music, from artists such as Olafur Arnalds, Zoe Keating and Message to Bears.

While writing the story for The Timekeeper’s Return, I’d been watching a wonderful anime called Violet Evergarden. It’s a stunning series that beautifully explores what it means to feel emotions and communicate them after traumatic pasts or during challenging circumstances, and part of what makes it so special is its orchestral score.

I found a YouTube video with the full soundtrack and listened to it pretty much on repeat for the duration of September and October 2018. By the end of September I was so infatuated with it that I actually ordered the CD of the soundtrack directly from Japan, so those involved in creating it would receive as much of my money as possible.

I think that the reason this music resonated so deeply with my practice was the result of my aim to capture the emotional half-life of the historic events I was describing. When I was listening to the soundtrack, there would be these uncanny moments of attunement between the nuances of the music and the feelings I was attempting to evoke in the QR code texts.

So as well as helping me to zone-in on the task (when I didn’t just sit there and appreciate it), I’m convinced that this music subconsciously shaped my writing style.                

You can listen to the full soundtrack here. All of it is genuinely wonderful and I would love to highlight so many of the tracks; but if you could only listen to one, I’d say it would have to be ‘Across the Violet Sky’. It’s simply awe-inspiring.

So, after several challenging weeks of writing and 7388 words later, the QR code texts were complete and ready to be uploaded.

But the real test of the story I had devised, and the treasure hunt as a whole, would be in the playing.

The next post in the Making the Timekeeper’s Return series reflects on the process of testing the treasure hunt.

The Timekeeper's Return: The Reveal

It’s finally time to talk about what I’ve been spending nearly all of my days working on since early July, and it feels fantastic, because I have some very exciting news to share.

On 20^th October, the opening day of the Canterbury Festival, a mixed-reality game that I have designed and written from scratch is coming to the heart of the city centre.

The Timekeeper’s Return is an immersive story-based treasure hunt, designed for all ages, in which players scan QR codes to discover secrets about different locations in Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter.

Here is the blurb used on the event’s promotional material, to give you an overview of what The Timekeeper’s Return is all about, and to whet your appetite:

Layers of history connected together, the Cathedral Quarter is a unique scaffold of stories; seemingly timeless. But one person, one object, one moment… can change its future forever.

When historical researcher Dr. Mia Augustina stumbles upon an astrolabe, an antique navigation device, she discovers that it holds a powerful secret - it can transport her back in time.

Lured into the labyrinth of time-travel and its perils, the astrolabe malfunctions as Mia learns the truth of our past – threatening the future and her return. She has a plan to recalibrate the device, but she’ll need your help.

Mia has recorded her stories from each journey into the past using a ‘triangulation marker’ – a sticker generated by the astrolabe with a QR code, which holds coordinates and information about its location.

Deciphering each one will enable you to navigate to the next, and once each triangulation marker has been scanned, the astrolabe can guide Mia back to the present with history restored.

Have you got what it takes to help Dr. Augustina uncover the mysteries of the astrolabe, and reveal the secrets of the Cathedral Quarter? You’ll need a keen eye for detail and a QR code scanner installed on a smartphone.

The Timekeeper’s Return begins at the compass in Longmarket Square. Get hunting on Saturday 20^th October in Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter!

Everyone who finishes the treasure hunt will receive a small reward, and also be entered into a prize draw, with a really fantastic bunch of prizes being offered from local businesses, including:

Tickets for a group of four to see this year’s Christmas pantomime at the Marlowe Theatre
Meal for four at Chapter
Ray-Bans from Biggs Opticians
Champagne cream tea for two at Moat Tea Rooms
£100 gift voucher for The Chinaman
A pen fashioned from a 15th century joist extracted from the Cathedral, from Canterbury Cathedral Shop
£50 gift voucher for Antoine et Lili
£50 gift voucher for Canterbury Pottery

Canteen will also be offering a 10% discount on refreshments for all players on the day.

The hunt itself shouldn’t take much more than an hour to complete; and as it takes place right in the city centre, it should be easy to fit around the other events happening on the opening day of the Canterbury Festival.

Now I’ve covered the main details of the event, many of you reading this may not be familiar with what the Cathedral Quarter even is, so let me explain. In the same way that Guildhall St., Palace St., The Borough and Northgate (plus parts of Orange St. and Sun St.) have been re-branded as The King’s Mile, The Cathedral Quarter is the name now being given to the historic area containing Burgate and the streets that branch of it: half of Sun St., Mercery Lane, Butchery Lane, Iron Bar Lane and Canterbury Lane.

In my old job as an ambassador for Canterbury Business Improvement District, I attended most of the early meetings when the Cathedral Quarter was being established. As someone who spoke to all the businesses in the area on an everyday basis, hearing the issues they faced but also their energy, positivity and desire to enrich the city, I was keen to help in any way I could to breathe new life into this part of Canterbury.

In our efforts to define what we wanted the Cathedral Quarter brand to represent, we started by outlining what makes these streets so special. From a business perspective, the qualities that make this area unique are the high proportion of independent retailers, but also high-quality speciality products, such as the hand-made brogues at Loake Shoemakers, chic bohemian clothing at Antoine et Lili, or fine china gifts from The Chinaman. The service you get is personal, and those that serve you are deeply invested in the well-being of the area, either as the business owner themselves or as locals. Here is a recent promotional video which should give you a flavour of what the Cathedral Quarter is all about, from this perspective.

Meanwhile, to the eye of a pedestrian, the Cathedral Quarter is a jigsaw puzzle of different time periods that are visible in the built environment today. Of course, it is home to the medieval splendour of Canterbury Cathedral and its Christchurch Gate, alongside a number of very old buildings often formerly used as inns for pilgrims. Cobbled streets are some of the first images that come to mind. But as you walk up Burgate towards the ring road, you begin to notice a change in the architecture of the city. The streets between Butchery Lane and the ring road were devastated by bombing during WWII, and the post-war reconstruction effort embraced the modern design trends of the time, which you can see today in the concrete and straight edges of St. Thomas’ Church Hall and the often-overlooked building now occupied by Superdrug, which won a RIBA Bronze Award for its architecture in 1957.

During the early Cathedral Quarter meetings, there was a consensus that running events would be a shrewd method of generating interest about what is happening in this segment of the city. Even early on, the idea of a treasure hunt was suggested as an effective way for people find out what is in the Cathedral Quarter for themselves, by encouraging them to engage with the intriguing material landscape you can discover there. As you can gauge from the promotional video linked above, this sensory offering extends to the area’s businesses.

We knew any treasure hunt would need to be something fairly easy to implement – so not too technologically demanding – and also accessible enough for the general public. As I considered these different specifications, my focus started to centre on QR codes. Practically, most people now own a smartphone – or are close to someone who does – and QR code scanners can be freely installed on these devices (many ranges now actually come with QR scanners pre-installed). Everyone has seen these codes before and at least has an idea about what they are.

On a creative level, I’ve always been intrigued by QR codes because they’re so ‘in-your-face’, but indecipherable at the same time. They act almost as portals to another dimension, overlaying physical space with information that can only be accessed virtually.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the history of this part of Canterbury, but not just facts or snippets of knowledge. I wanted to find stories that would resonate with people emotionally, and particularly those that have left a residue in the built environment. There are few more poignant experiences than being able to see and touch something historic, knowing the depth of feeling behind it, and the significance it has had for people’s lived experiences.

Once I’d decided for certain that the event would be a story-based game, I settled on the concept of a time-travelling academic for the main character, and in particular a person who researches history. It needed to be someone who would naturally be interested in the traces of past lives and livelihoods in Canterbury, and someone with the passion to want to show other people what makes them fascinating. I imagined a smart, enthusiastic female protagonist, and after some deliberation arrived at the name Mia Augustina. It’s possible to find a few layers of meaning behind this name, but for me the overall goal was to make it something timeless, and in some ways cross-cultural – a name you could imagine someone having centuries ago, or perhaps in a far-off land.

As for the means of time travelling itself, it was quite a while later that I decided on the time machine being an astrolabe. While developing the main plot of the story, I began to ask myself some difficult questions about how the time travelling would actually happen. Where would this time machine come from? Why would an historian have one lying around, and how could they be the only person to know about it?

I figured that it would make sense, in the context of the story, if the device were some kind of artefact discovered during Mia’s research, which she has kept secret. An astrolabe seemed appropriate, again for its fantastical and timeless qualities (astrolabes were invented in ancient times, used widely in the medieval period and are still sought after today), but mainly for how they encapsulate the dimensions of space and time in a single object. Among their numerous uses, astrolabes allow you to calculate the position of stars on any given date, as well as the time of day based on their position. These attributes also made them important tools for navigation, as they allowed the user to work out their current latitude. I’ll let those who are interested dig deeper into the fictional background for themselves, but I will also say that Canterbury as a city has a long-running and intimate connection with astrolabes which is worth looking at.

You'll note that an astrolabe symbol features at the top of this blog post, as well as in all our advertising for the event. The graphics for all our promotional materials were designed by my brother Sam Lowe, principal designer at SDL Residential Design, who did a superb job at creating striking iconography that works well as a centrepiece for the event. One excellent feature of the design I should point out is the diamond shape positioned across the circle, which can perfectly hold a single QR code (QR codes can be scanned in any orientation). You'll be seeing more of this graphic soon!

As for the how story itself unfolds, in the spirit of not giving too much away, all I’ll say is that the plot advanced through each QR code ‘snippet’ follows Mia’s travels through time in the Cathedral Quarter: the people and places she encounters, their stories, and what she discovers about the astrolabe on her journey.

Looking back on the creative process behind this event, I feel immensely grateful and humbled by the faith that the Cathedral Quarter businesses and associates have put in me to lead the project. I would warmly encourage those who take part to use this event as an opportunity to meet the people ‘behind the cobbles’. Get to know them and hear their stories; find out why they do what they do, and why they’re passionate about their professions. It’s exactly the kind of people I have met through the Cathedral Quarter that make the city such a lovely place in which to live and work.

On a personal level, this has been a big step for me in terms of my artistic ambitions, having been given the opportunity to bring my ideas and imagination to such a wide public audience. I would be truly thankful for each and every one of you who plays this game. And in particular, I would love to hear your thoughts on the experience and what it means for you personally.

Before I sign off, I just want to mention that we’re going to try and run a couple of testing sessions with members of the public before October 20^th, so if you’re interested in getting involved then please let me know.

If you have any questions about the event itself, press/publicity, the Cathedral Quarter, or even want someone to discuss Canterbury’s heritage and geography with, then please also get in touch. Though bear in mind that this next month is going to be incredibly busy for me!

Pop it in your calendar, mark yourself as ‘going’ on the Facebook event page, and share the news: The Timekeeper’s Return is coming to Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter, 20^th October 10am – 4pm. Your journey unfolds at Longmarket Square – what secrets await?

Unfinished Cities: Canterbury

It was a grey Saturday afternoon in September, and I was walking into Canterbury city centre. Heading to the public library in an attempt to get some work done, I took my usual route from Canterbury East train station: crossing the grassy oasis of the Mary de Castro Garden and zipping past the rows of terraced houses and shops on Castle Street, before crossing onto St Margaret’s Street by the Three Tuns pub. As I stepped up onto the pavement, an unfamiliar shape caught my eye. High up on a bastion of scaffolding surrounding the derelict, almost unrecognisable Slatters Hotel, a helmeted builder was perched precariously on a horizontal raft of poles. With the white sky beaming through angular gaps in the metalwork, it appeared almost as if he were floating above the street.

Struck by this anachronism, I grabbed my smartphone from my pocket so I could document the moment. I felt a little self-conscious in my act, being aware of the heightened Saturday foot traffic this close to the High Street, but I took the photo anyway. To my surprise, the subject of my photograph spotted me and shouted down jokily, as he balanced in the air, “I hope you’re not health and safety!”

Continuing on and looking ahead, Canterbury Cathedral emerged between the alignment of rooftops and frontages jutting out into the street, itself plastered with scaffolding. I thought that Canterbury at this time was a city of scaffolds, with swarms of fluorescent yellow workers tending busily to their unfinished projects, hanging above the pedestrian world like puppet masters. Each fragile, temporary nest of timber and metal a monument to the city’s (re)construction.

*

Further down St. Margaret’s Street, hiding between the Superdry store and Yorkshire Building Society, is a narrow alleyway that for years served as my lunchtime shortcut; a shorter, less cluttered route between the library and Whitefriars Shopping Centre where I’d go to buy a sandwich. Turning into the passage, the busy, small movements of the pedestrian crowds are replaced abruptly by stillness, and within seconds the words and melodies of the High Street fade into a distant murmur. It has the effect of creating a kind of micro-wilderness where space and time itself appear warped and refracted. In the cracks of the cobbles, clovers peer up toward the light like the treetops of a vast underground forest.

These in-between spaces are ripe for all kinds of anomalies. Odd, incongruous objects like chairs with legs missing and pieces of coloured cloth; graffiti in seemingly inaccessible locations. In the brick wall behind Superdry, where the commercial bins are stowed, is a plain white door with no handle, sign or identifying features, which has become over time a site of personal myth. It’s the mystery I’m drawn towards – an object that presents more questions than answers. What lies behind it? What is its purpose?

I’m starting to believe that some spaces are designed to be forgotten. Does anyone ever think about these enclosed pockets of land, behind rooftops and spiked fences, where shop goods get delivered and waste taken away? Iron Bar Lane, a link between the chain stores of St George’s Street and the cosy boutiques of Burgate, is one such space, taking up a surprisingly large area in the city centre yet remaining invisible in the mind’s-eye view of most inhabitants. It is quite remarkable that such an environment – perpetually unclean, unused pavements green with grime, caked in dirt, animal excrement and plastic packaging – lies only a stone’s throw from Canterbury Cathedral, the most prestigious landmark in this corner of the country. Yet without its potholed loading bays and dusty back entrances, so much of the everyday activity that takes place in the city wouldn’t be feasible.

Every city needs these spaces of transition; changing rooms for the urban uniform. The challenge for ‘stakeholders’ in the city is how effectively they can be obscured, folding in on themselves until nothing but the alluring, illusory facets of the city remain.

*

Since mid-October, I’ve been working for Canterbury Business Improvement District (BID) in the city centre as a Visitor Welcome Ambassador. One of the main responsibilities of my job each morning is to walk around each street in my designated area and report environment problems, including (but not limited to) broken glass, faulty street furniture, loose paving stones, and on-street waste. Although you’d think it rewarding to take on a role that can have a positive impact within the local environment, the task can feel crushingly futile. In many cases, my reports seem to achieve nothing – piles of vomit are left to dry and stick to the pavement; rain rinses off the residue; the urban fauna are left to peck and gnaw at bags crammed with waste, as residents and business staff alike put them out expecting them to be taken away, never to be seen or thought about again.

Never a single day with nothing new to report; always something remaining to be fixed.

Even long-term solutions are always temporary. Shortly after I started my position, I discovered that my favourite little alleyway in St Margaret’s Street had been swiftly and brutally closed off; truncated by tall metal gates that seem to stay permanently locked. These measures were taken to address concerns about the endless accretion of waste and graffiti that occurs there. Yet within days of the gates being fitted, great masses of limp, sodden cardboard piled up high against the metal bars, as if revolting against this new imposition. Spray-painted tags still plague any wall that can be claimed. Ultimately, all that has been achieved is the closure of a route reserved for those with insider knowledge of Canterbury, to momentarily bypass the obstacles of city life.

It is inevitable, in an urban ecosystem where diverse forces interact in such high concentration, that things get ignored and abandoned, things rot, mistakes are made, objects collide and break, or at least uncomfortably coexist. Cities aren’t orderly places; in many ways, disorder is their defining characteristic. Which makes our attempts to manage the chaos somehow artificial. In our urge to tame its wildness, what we are ultimately guided by is an imaginary version of the city, one that has never existed and never will.

*

As part of my job, I have visited Canterbury’s Roman Museum twice in recent months. There is a wealth of material to see there, leading you along a timeline of the city told through a comprehensive collection of artefacts, information boards and interactive tools which paint a detailed picture of the daily lives of our ancestors. But what tends to draw my eye are the artists’ impressions of what Canterbury looked like during different time periods. My personal favourite is from the era when the city was re-occupied by the Anglo-Saxons after the Romans had abandoned it. The image depicts dwellings of wood and straw settled between crumbling stone walls; the mossy remnants of the empire now acting as the foundations for new, living structures. I try picturing what it would be like to make a home amongst ruins, and contemplate that, ultimately, this is what ‘dwelling’ means; it is the necessary precondition for inhabiting a place. What varies is the visibility of the decay.
       

Towards the end of the museum walkway you find the main event: the Roman pavement, a stretch of decorative mosaics preserved exactly where they were excavated, alongside a dusty stone hypocaust (Roman central heating system) that served the Roman townhouse whose ruins the museum is built around. For all the site’s cultural significance – being a Scheduled Ancient Monument and the only remaining example of an in-situ Roman pavement mosaic in the UK – it was an act of destruction that brought about its discovery. The WWII Baedecker raids of 1942 razed the majority of the buildings from the pavement’s site on Butchery Lane to the modern-day ring road (including Iron Bar Lane) and with them a significant portion of the medieval street layouts and buildings that Canterbury is known for today, from those areas that survived the bombardment.

Consequently, it’s in this quarter of the city centre where you’ll find the greatest concentration of modernist architecture, as the post-war rebuilding effort took shape. Recently, I found out that the building where Superdrug is currently housed, which I’d never paid much attention to previously, won the 1957 RIBA Bronze Award for its unique serrated roof and columnar design. Previously, all I’d associated with it were the heaps of cigarette butts that collect in the colonnade, where taxi drivers and nearby shop workers alike go outside for breaks. The disparity in perspective makes me wonder how these newer spaces will be valued in the future. What will the criteria be, in the decades and centuries to come, that determine whether a landmark is preserved or ‘redeveloped’? What events will define its fate?

Like flies in amber, the Roman mosaics today are encased in glass; yet still the pavement is unexpectedly warped, sloping and buckling on the uneven ground upon which it is spread. Not even the extensive preservation efforts can prevent the slow shifts of the earth’s crust beneath it.

*

One of the characteristics that distinguishes Canterbury from many other cities is the ease with which you can discern evidence of different historical periods in the built environment. Nowhere is this starker, perhaps, than in St. Radigund’s Garden. Bordering the unkempt grass and paved area on one side are remnants of the city wall, which has marked the limits of the city centre in Canterbury since the Romans. In its irregular surface, you can recognise a wide variation in texture and shape, containing materials including flint, mortar, sandstone and even brickwork, having undergone successive acts of construction, damage and repair over the centuries. On the grass nearby is a fascinating signpost matching each section of the wall to the time period from which it originates.

We’re particularly prone to these patchwork surfaces here, retaining elements of the old as we claim spaces anew. On Stour Street towards St. Mildred’s Church, you’ll find an incongruous sight where the front of a three-storey brick edifice – just the front, the rest has been demolished – is coated in scaffold. This building was formerly a warehouse for the old Tannery, where animal skins were treated to produce leather, which operated in Canterbury for over 150 years. Now, the building is being converted into housing. However, the red-brick façade is being preserved due to its historic interest, creating the unusual situation where the new construction is concealed by the wall of its predecessor.

How do we decide when the cultural value of an object overrides its practical difficulties?
               

Mere metres away on Gas Street, the entrance to Canterbury Castle – a stone keep in situ since the 12^th century – is closed off due to falling masonry. Surrounded crudely by metal barricades, piles of flint lay tiredly at the feet of the sagging walls. The site has been closed since the summer and shows no signs of re-opening any time soon.
          

That word we use to talk about the changing face of the city – urban ‘development’ – often appears to be a perpetual process of stemming the tide of chaos and destruction, like a leaking dam. Destruction is inevitable, but which surfaces we prolong and which we surrender is a choice; a slow current consisting of countless individual decisions, all adding up to something – or nothing.

*

When the weather allows, I eat my lunch in Solly’s Orchard Garden, a cosy riverside green space with planted trees and flowers, overlooked by the 13^th century buildings of the Dominican Priory.

I often like to sit on a brick wall bordering the river in summer, watching the wildlife busying itself with innocent endeavours and listening to the boat tours as they paddle behind me.

From the number of times I’ve heard the tour guides speak, I now know their script for this part of the river almost off by heart. As they approach the garden, its former use by the Blackfriars as an orchard is explained. Due to the River Stour’s former status as an open sewer, cider was safer to drink than water in previous centuries, which they made using fruit grown where the garden is located today. The guides then stop a while by the black, wrought-iron floodgates, in place since 1829, to observe them in action as the water cascades downstream, before revealing that the properties in this area are some of the most expensive in the city, with house prices in the region of £1 million. Despite, in previous centuries, being one of the most squalid parts of the city due to the river’s stench and habit of flooding.

Resting on the wall with the Stour flowing by, no single droplet the same; an image of time passing continuously, inevitably, and without care. While it follows the course it has done for more generations than I can perceive, the judgements of worth that we humans make are as fickle and predictably changeable as the seasons. There can be no masterplan of the city, for there are always inconsistencies in resources, lifespan and interest.

Over the rooftops beyond the river, Canterbury Cathedral looms, half under a white blanket of covered scaffolding, camouflaged with the overcast sky. Sometimes, I wonder if, one day, even the city’s most famous landmark will be considered not worthy of repair; an eyesore, even. It’s funny, and perhaps a touch frightening, how a feature that seems so intrinsic to the identity of a place, object or person can seem so foreign, given time.

*

Back on St. Margaret’s Street on my way out of town, I pass the Slatters Hotel, where an excavation is underway. Archaeologists are attempting to discover and examine objects from the Roman and medieval levels, where they hope to find clues about life near the site of the Roman theatre (at the crossroads by the Three Tuns pub), and Roman baths on this same street.

The dig lies tantalisingly behind hoardings eight feet high, precluding participation. Meanwhile, the old hotel building rises above them, gutted and forlorn, hiding in plain sight. The receptacle of countless stories of lives gone by, now also consigned to history, waiting for the earth to envelop them. The past occupying the present in its most visible form.

I think you could call anyone an archaeologist if they observe what they find in the built environment and use it to form a narrative.

I amble back to the train station, another day done, ready to return home to my sleepy village and restore myself anew, turning my back on the glowing lights of the city as it does the same. Which artefacts of urban life will be unearthed tomorrow, and what stories will they communicate? Which will be lost and forgotten; which will remain buried?

Time will tell.

Spirits of Adisham

It’s 7.45 am, misty and fresh. On the rocky, inclining path towards the train station, a procession of gaunt commuters and schoolkids plod in sequence, tiredly brushing off the spider webs clinging to their faces from the bordering hedgerow. Emerging from the heavy green trees onto a damp platform, they wait wordlessly in their designated standing spaces until two familiar headlights appear under the bridge to the right. Screeching and whirring assaults the eardrums as the train bumps to a halt, and our small congregation of villagers clamber on when the doors bleep open, joining the other bleary-eyed passengers. The 10-minute journey to Canterbury never feels long enough.

Station Road is mostly quiet for the rest of the morning, apart from the school run when a queue of cars from the nearby villages – Aylesham mainly, and others like Nonington – siphon down the hill, turning left at the Pond to drop off their children at the primary school halfway up The Street. The Pond better resembles a village green than a body of water; yet – as all of us who went to Adisham Primary once learned – there was indeed a Pond on the site until the 1960s. Centuries ago, a woman accused of being a witch drowned there, after being dragged helplessly from one of the neighbouring settlements. The vast, grassy space where the deadly water once collected is now solely occupied by a small tree, and a handsome view of the Holy Innocents church in the background, all of which compose the definitive Adisham scene that is captured most often by photographers. The dank mire of yesteryear is now safely undetectable to the cars pootling past.

Children who live in the village tend to walk to school. Indeed, a short distance up The Street, two siblings are swinging their blue bookbags embossed with the Adisham Primary School logo – the silhouette of a tree – bounding down the pavement towards the black metal gates. They live in the Ileden cottages, part of a tiny farming hamlet on the other side of the village woods that has been around since God-knows-when. Its existence has continued largely unchanged, except for the drone of the now ever-present road traffic that emanates from the A2 road to the west. The Street doesn’t reach up as far as Ileden, so every weekday the children trot down the bridleway through the woods into the main village, past the horses at Woodlands Farm, the grey brick Baptist Chapel, and the former Post Office, which has now been converted into a house. Their parents moved to the village 8 years ago with their faithful Irish Wolfhound, the largest pet you will probably ever see, because they wanted a calmer life for their family.

Strolling dead centre in the middle of the road, past the red brick school building carved with the names of hundreds of past pupils, Martin’s gaze interrogates you from behind thick-rimmed glasses, as if he’s trying to build a mental factfile. It’s midday, and his hands are wrapped around gardening tools or maybe a wheelbarrow, sweat gleaming from his fleshy face. The echoes of playing schoolchildren stalk him down the road until he reaches the Bull’s Head, our local derelict pub. Once the hub of the village community, the structure is now a cocoon of peeling paint, mossy bricks, broken glass, boarded windows, and cracked roof tiles. Sometimes when he’s pruning the roses, the old Bull’s Head fades into Martin’s mind without him realising, and he is there, still able to taste the starchy ale and feel the stick of the wooden bar on his forearm. All the old guys are there, like David, the former station manager. They always got on well. They saw everything there: first kisses, new years, bobbing apples at Halloween. Like dandelion seeds, no longer here. Scattered.

Martin pauses there a moment, then turns left into a row of tall hedges that hide one of the village’s villas. Set back from the road with their long, green gardens, they remain mostly invisible in your mind’s-eye view of Adisham. They’re the kind that house those parish councillors you never see, unless you go to their monthly meetings in the Village Hall – which most people rarely do. The person that springs to mind is Valentine Stevens, school governor, who seemed to be everywhere when we were young. She would make appearances at events such as the summer fete or the larger church services, like some kind of mayor. I’ve heard that she lives in the white villa on Cooting Lane with the tall gate and flowery front garden, up by the farm with the big black dogs that inevitably come charging towards you from the cottage if you make the mistake of walking past. I don’t think I’ve seen her since I was 11, when she handed me an Oxford English Dictionary upon finishing at the primary school, one of Adisham’s traditions.         

As school finishes for the day, bunches of kids run straight to the adjacent recreation ground (the Rec, as we call it) with parents in tow, where the newly-painted and kitted-out play park becomes a swarm of crawling limbs and grabbing fingers. A group of older boys turns up shortly after, having caught the train home from their secondary schools in Canterbury, booting a beaten-up football between them as they run onto the spacious grass field pock-marked with molehills. After a quick kickaround they begin playing games like headers and volleys, or taking turns to go in goal as the others take shots. Every now and then enough people will turn up for a full game, with two teams, which will take place in the asphalt court or on one of the grass pitches with the rusty, flaking goalposts. They’ll play until the latest possible moment – after dark in winter, when the ball simply cannot be seen – and right up to the point when their parents have already called them three times to tell them to get back, or they’ll be grounded.

Later, just after the evening rush hour, a steady stream of small round European cars clumsily squeeze into the little available space on the village streets, followed by the unlucky latecomers who passive-aggressively zoom off to a less desirable spot, probably only ten metres further up the road. The fields behind their houses are carpeted with pale yellow wheat, and a red combine harvester is raking neat paths through the crop, thick plumes of coarse dust trailing behind that slowly settle into the cooler air. Within minutes, that neighbour who works as a teaching assistant at the village school emits a sound halfway between a sneeze and a shriek, and their yappy fluffball dog barks hysterically for five minutes afterward in their back garden, drawing a collective exasperated sigh from the tired Mums preparing gravy dinners in the neighbouring semis.

On kitchen tables is the latest Village Newssheet, a single folded piece of A4 paper of which half is taken up by the village directory, a list of telephone numbers and addresses for all the 'important' people in the Adisham community. This leaves room for a maximum of roughly 10 snippets of ‘news’. In the summer months, one of these inevitably reminds villagers to be considerate when lighting barbecues and bonfires. This has, after all, been the dominant subject of hushed conversations over every garden fence. Though despite the collective scorn, the same neighbours you confide in this time will be those you complain about next weekend (over the other garden fence) when they light a barbecue while your washing is still on the line.

Bonfires aren’t as annoying; they tend to be in the evening and aren’t usually accompanied by the unsettling commotion of laughter and garden-chair gossip next door. Silently the smoke swamps across the valley, spreading out in a light grey haze that dances around the nostrils of those strolling back home from the station after work. Woodsmoke is not an unpleasant scent, either. It is nostalgic, conjuring up wintry visions of quaint, timber-framed houses with crooked rooftops, like Dane Court up the road that has been sitting there for at least 600 years.

The rest of the newssheet praises the efforts of volunteers and the turnout for recent village gatherings – Wine and Wisdom nights, Messy Church for the kids, the Big Breakfast one Saturday morning each month. We like to jest at the newssheet and its charming interpretation of what constitutes ‘news’, but if it weren’t for those who are willing to make these events happen – the young families, the pensioners with little else to do, the churchgoers, the schoolkids, the parish councillors – I’m not sure we would have a village community at all. Our meeting places, where our lives intersect – the church, the school, the village hall, the Rec – they would all be desolate; exorcised artefacts. The crumbling Bull’s Head pub is a warning. Without at least the illusion of togetherness and common ground, our hopes, feelings, and prayers would only find voice in the mutterings of those hiding behind closed doors and twitching net curtains; the scroll-wheels of those silently scanning the Adisham Village Community Facebook page.

It's here, in the lands between somewhere and nowhere, that our spirits linger.

Imag(in)ing California: Shorelines

Our day began by winding through green meadows and crooked Sonoma Valley oaks, bathed in sunshine as we drove a scenic route towards the land’s edge. From the tranquil woodland town of Occidental we took the Coleman Valley Road, the sun behind us illuminating our descent, westward, down to the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay. The deep blue of the clear morning sky was reflected in the ocean peeping through gaps between crouching hilltops, opening out wider and wider as we reached the frothing shallows. From there we would start our journey up the West Coast of Northern California, following Highway 1 north for over 100 miles through snaking estuaries, shaded forests, and a breadcrumb trail of maritime communities.

As we set off, my brother asked us to tell him whenever we wanted to pull over to survey the view. After stopping twice in the first five minutes, however, it soon became clear that every single headland we encountered offered a whole gallery of vistas, making it impossible to see them all as our short strip of time gradually unravelled. Even if you attempted to stop at every single vantage point on this stretch of Pacific shoreline, by the time you finish, some new and spectacular feature would be sculpted by the relentless lacerating waves, freshly exposed when a curtain of mist is raised.

Drifting through the Sonoma Coast State Park, admiring the striking topography of stacks, arches, gulches, and striations from the car, our first stop was Fort Ross, an historical landmark that exhibits the place where Russian settlers once established a base for agriculture on the California coast in the early 19th century. After descending through a grove of stretching eucalyptus trees, grey and peeling, we emerged on a gravel path into the sun-bleached surrounds of the fort. It was there that we came across a throng of noisy schoolchildren all piling in through the entrance gate. Following them through, the scene that unfolded in front of us was mayhem. Small bodies charged wildly in all directions on the mowed grass, screeching and cawing as one of their pack began ferociously clanging a bell on display in the distance.

Strangely, after our immediate dismay and disbelief, they all scurried out within five minutes of arriving, having barely investigated all the points of interest. I wondered what impression this landmark would leave on their memories, and what role heritage has (or should have) in our lives more generally. Should it be a springboard for reimagination, play, even untamed exploration? Does a factual understanding of the past have any inherent value when inhabiting a space in the present?           

The square of land encompassed by the fort’s perimeter walls is sparse, with a total area roughly the size of a football pitch. Only one original dwelling remains, Rotchev House, where the manager of Fort Ross and his family lived. The handful of other buildings – a residence, a chapel, and two blockhouses in opposing corners – are all reconstructed. I tried to weigh up my thoughts on the idea of reconstruction for heritage purposes. It always feels as if some semblance of ‘authenticity’ is lost when new materials are added to historical sites. Though if it weren’t for the tireless efforts of volunteers, who have maintained such a visceral, solid display of what the fort was like based on existing evidence, whole generations would have gone without the experience of immersing themselves inside the redwood beams, understanding what kind of space this was to its previous occupants. Ultimately, how we go about such endeavours indicates what we value in our communities. What is remembered and what is forgotten, and what do we want to remember and forget? What do we abandon to ‘nature’ and what do we claim as ‘culture’?

The Russian influence in California is one that often goes unremarked outside of the state. Fort Ross marks the centre of imperial Russia’s southernmost expansion along the Pacific Coast. Although this territory is no longer under Russian ownership, their colonial presence can still be detected in the names of local landmarks, such as the Russian River, and the town of Sebastopol. Like a dried-up stream whose lifeblood has long since dispersed, traces remain in the arteries of local identities and landscapes. Intriguingly, the Russian and Alaskan settlers formed a close relationship with the Native Americans who lived around Fort Ross – the Pomo people, in this region – who, after originally living outside the fort’s walls, integrated with the community to such an extent that the foreign settlers married and had children with them. The fluidity with which these diverse populations mixed offsets straightforward narratives of colonial exploitation, the whitewashing of native heritage, or fixed local identity. The tree-sheltered visitor centre that we wandered through on our way out gave an evocative, panoramic perspective on these different cultural tributaries. Displays presented detailed insights into Native American history in this region, as well as the influence of shipwrecks and seafaring that paint a highly nuanced picture of life on the shores of Northern California in earlier centuries.

Before leaving Fort Ross, we took a moment to soak up our surroundings: the striking cerulean of striding bluejays; fleeting fragrances riding on the breeze. All along the golden coastline that day, the air bloomed with an unfamiliar scent: a sweet concoction of cinnamon and coconut. The aroma was so distinct that you’d like to bottle it; to capture a single moment in time and place like bubbles in glowing amber, there to appreciate and revisit. At every stop on our journey, we scoured the yellowing grasses and flowering shrubs in search of this elusive aroma’s source. Yet even after asking the lady at the fort’s exit, and trawling online in the days afterward, it proved impossible to put a definitive name to this manifestation. As fickle as the fog, which had mysteriously (for this time of year) failed to make an appearance, its character has been hinted at in articles yet never accurately rendered in the way we experienced.

Back on the highway, we fell once again into the trance of vehicular movement, the road undulating through the sandy inlets and craggy slopes of Salt Point. We surfaced from our daze in the peculiar settlement of Sea Ranch, which sprawls along branches of private roads that straddle a 10-mile stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. This assorted collection of wooden structures is the legacy of architect Al Boeke and his recruited designers, who imagined a community built around the principles of common ownership, with architecture that preserves and compliments the surrounding environment’s natural beauty. Each abode is adorned with grey, weathered timber from local forests, and – at least for older plots developed in line with the original design principles – are built to reflect the individual characteristics of the segment of terrain they occupy. Given the variety of coastal features and morphological events that take place here, this design brief has led to some visionary, one-of-a-kind inventions.

The previous communities we’d passed through on the way here, where the main establishments were all bunched up oppressively at the roadside, made you feel unnervingly like the new guy in town in a Western film. But at Sea Ranch the pockets of buildings were more understated, camouflaged and kept a safe distance from outsider traffic. Nonetheless, there remained an authoritarian presence; a quiet tyranny in which the isolating layout of the built landscape itself makes you feel like an intruder, where signs warn that unauthorised vehicles will be ‘immobilized’. Once you detour from the highway, you become subject to the Sea Ranch Association Board of Directors and its rules. If Sea Ranch were adapted for the screen, you could imagine it as the setting for a murder mystery story: a remote small town, doggedly resistant to change in a dramatic rural landscape, where everyone has something to hide and all is not as it seems.       

We visited one of the few publicly accessible sites as we drove through to the northern side of Sea Ranch. Nestled in a roadside meadow, accompanied by bushes, firs, and a trickling fountain, the non-denominational Sea Ranch Chapel squats as if to take a closer look at you. The most eye-catching feature is the tiled roof, asymmetrical and curving steeply to a point, where it is bisected by a skeletal ornament made of teal-coloured copper, creating the image of long fingers curling outward from a cloaked figure.

Every new angle divulged another interpretation in the obscure, indefinite shapes and arrangements. The roof appeared to me alternately as the crest of a wave, a bird, a boat, and a witch’s hat. Inside proved no less inspiring. Every surface enticed you to touch, from the smooth, hollowed wood seating to the swirling patterns of the wrought iron fretwork by the stained-glass door. The cosy space cocoons you in the sensation of being inside a shell, with a dim aura of sunlight overhead filtering through the narrow, enamel windows, and this glow reflected on the white of the low, spiralling ceiling above. As all these phenomena take place, nothing attempts to identify a name or reason for what you encounter. There are no slogans or statements, appeals to the conscience. Avoiding traditional architectural styles, the chapel embraces ambiguity. It finds reverence in not-knowing; in indeterminate moments of simply living, feeling, wondering.

Wandering purposefully on to Point Arena, a single road curving off the coastal highway leads you to Point Arena Lighthouse, a bright white beacon that serves as a glimmering landmark for road trippers on their West Coast pilgrimages. Just before you hit the gated visitor checkpoint, a narrow gravel verge opens out to the left where you can pull over and walk around. Here the cliff juts out squarely to form a platform where you can observe the coastline in all its intricacy. On both sides, as far as the mist permits you to see, beige sandstone is layered with neat grooves like claw marks, shoreline punctuated with inlets and outcrops that mirror the fluctuating pattern of the waves themselves. A primal cathedral with the shining lighthouse as its steeple, the rumble of crashing waves its choir. Stepping tentatively up to the precipice, whipped by wind and salty sea spray, the noise and energy reaches a crescendo that crowds out your senses, wrapping you in a deafening stillness. A divine balance, gripped in a communion with the colossal forces of ocean and land, beyond and beneath.

After this detour from our planned route (isn’t every trip a detour of some kind?) we returned to Highway 1. Driving between the white picket fences lining the roadsides of Elk, we paused awhile in Mendocino to gaze from cliffsides at the quaint rows of painted shopfronts, driftwood heaped on the damp sand below. Only ten miles later, we washed up at our final and northernmost stop, the old industrial town of Fort Bragg. Past gas stations, barren parking lots and an old railroad, we turned left and parked up on a soft slope that slid into an amalgam of shingle, rock pools, and swashing surf. Sauntering onto the foreshore, between pebbles we began to spot what we came here for: shimmering beads of glass. Clear, green, and brown mostly, and, very occasionally, sapphire blue and ruby red.

The history of the Glass Beach isn’t romantic. From 1906 until 1967, Fort Bragg locals dumped waste into the water at three sites. This practice continued until 1967, when the California State Water Resources Control Board closed the last active dumping ground and cleanup programmes followed. In the decades since, however, the discarded wrecks underwent a transfiguration. What was large was chomped down, what was biodegradable was swallowed, the earth reclaiming its bodily organs that were surgically removed, modified, used, and left for dead. At the same rocks where crabs crawl and limpets lie, now barely identifiable implements of plastic and metal have implanted themselves like some abstract sculpture, a geological cyborg. All edges rounded and smoothed, in time.

The Glass Beach now harbours tens of thousands of visitors each year, making it one of the prime tourist attractions for miles around. There has even been a campaign to resume the disposing of glass there to ensure the replenishment of the beaches, where collecting is discouraged but not illegal. Fort Bragg has gone full circle: a town salvaging the last knockings of an industrial heyday to fashion a spectacle that people from the Bay Area will drive for hours to see and touch (and, of course, buy). All relying on two resources it has in abundance: human waste, and the unyielding power of the ocean. With the same apocalyptic beauty of a coastline undergoing perpetual destruction, it is both miraculous and tragic at the same time.

Despite the majority of glass being clear, brown and green, pieces can be found in a wide spectrum of colours. Some browns soften into amber yellows or deepen to blacks and maroons; greens turn to emerald or lime; and whites tinge with aquamarine. Every piece unique and precious; the confluence of innumerable streams of stories and events encapsulated in a singular object.   

         

Nearly three hours from home and with our own earthly schedules to meet, our time was equally rare. Handfuls of debris we had no chance to examine, slipped through our fingers like grains of sand in an hourglass. By twilight we would be back among the seemingly eternal plantations of concrete and corrugated steel in Petaluma, feasting from ceramic plates.

Turning our backs on the beach, and the Pacific Coast, felt like leaving a treasure chest half full. Footpaths not taken, guidebook entries unvisited; everything plunged into a state of temporariness. The Midas effect, where the very things you want to hold are what you must let go. We rolled out of Fort Bragg along Route 20, bearing inland toward the cavernous depths of Jackson State Forest. With the sun sinking into the ocean behinds us, its golden, angular light igniting the redwoods beyond, we weaved a path through the dusky darkness.