Postcards With An Edge

Vintage postcards seem to be a thing these days: no bric-a-brac stall or antique shop is complete without a box of random postcards from the second half of the last century to thumb through and intrude on the past life of people we have never met; Tom Jackson's Twitter account and recently published book, Postcard From The Past, features a series of front images, each accompanied by a very funny Victoria Wood-esque sentence - "Went to see Connie in her new bungalow", "The sight of my box made me homesick for you", "It's all lager and cigars here", etc - from the message on the reverse; and now, tucked away in the first floor gallery at the De La Warr Pavilion, is Roy Voss's delightful exhibition of postcard collages, All The World's A Sunny Day.

Displayed in linear fashion around three walls, Voss's postcards have had a single word cut from the message, and then reversed, so that it appears at a seemingly random point in the front image. Sometimes the word relates literally to the picture, as in 'long' on a postcard of the world's longest pier at Southend-on-Sea, and sometimes a pair or series of cards form a more allusive narrative. I enjoyed the humour of the words 'trip' and 'fall' on postcards of the Matterhorn and Snowdon, respectively, and because of its local interest I was drawn to the dark edge given to adjacent Beachy Heads with the addition of the word 'on' at the cliff top on one, and 'off' at its foot on the other. In fact, Voss seemed to favour prepositions with 'up', 'down', 'over' and 'out' appearing on several images in the exhibition.

As Voss has used postcards from 1960 to 1980, the images had a youthful familiarity for me and I may be guilty of rosy nostalgia for a means of communication that seems to be coming to an end; but the exhibition also resonated less happily with me because of the memory of having to force out every single word on those postcards I was made to write to relatives on childhood holidays.

All The World's A Sunny Day is at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea until 8th Ocober 2017.

Close to the Edge

I have an old black and white photograph of myself taken - out of focus - at Beachy Head by my dad on a Kodak Instamatic camera, probably in 1971. I am standing close to the cliff edge, rictus grin of fear frozen on my face, pointing down at the sea 500 feet below. Barely discernible at the bottom of the photograph is the tiny smudge of a lighthouse. Out walking to Birling Gap recently I came across, not only that lighthouse, but another that I have no recollection of from that family holiday forty-five years ago.

The Beachy Head lighthouse is an enduring image: with its red and white marker stripes and its position nestling close to the coastline at the foot of the high cliffs, it has entered our collective consciousness. Ask any child to draw a lighthouse and it is likely that they will produce something like this 140-foot structure that shines a warning light nine miles out to sea just west of Eastbourne.

For the past thirty years, the lighthouse has been automated; throughout the years before that it had been maintained and operated by a team of at least three keepers since its construction in 1902. But the perilous Beachy Head cliffs were not just a 20th century danger to shipping: there had been numerous shipwrecks there during the 17th and 18th centuries which led Sussex Member of Parliament ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller to fund the construction of the first navigational aid for mariners at Beachy Head in 1829, the Belle Tout lighthouse.

The Belle Tout was originally made of wood but the decision was soon taken to invest in the construction of a permanent granite structure. However, it was not a great success as a lighthouse: its location at the top of the huge cliffs meant that it was not easily seen by shipping close to the shoreline and it was eventually replaced by the current sea-level lighthouse.

Despite this, the Belle Tout still exists today but not as a functioning lighthouse. Currently a bed and breakfast hotel, it has had many incarnations since it was decommissioned: private residence, historic monument and film location amongst them. It is perhaps best known as the setting for the BBC’s 1986 adaptation of Fay Weldon’s novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starring Julie T. Wallace and Patricia Hodge. What is most remarkable about the Belle Tout lighthouse, though, is its escape from coastal erosion: in 1999 the building was moved, whole and intact, away from the crumbing cliff, using hydraulics and rollers, to a new location 50 feet further inland. I know what it is like to be too close to the edge.

Sea Power

When the Devil’s Chimney, a 200ft high chalk tower that was part of the Beachy Head cliffs, collapsed into the sea in April 2001, there were several theories as to the cause: the rough seas that had been battering the rock-face throughout the preceding winter; driving rain that had penetrated the chalk and then frozen and expanded, causing the cliff to crack; a curse that had existed since Aleister Crowley, the fin de siecle occultist, had climbed the tower in 1894.

Discounting the third theory, the Environment Agency was certain that climate change was responsible for the first two. Increasingly stormy winters had accounted for the collapse of an even larger section of Beachy Head two years earlier, and the sudden disappearance of the Devil’s Chimney was part of an emerging pattern. But since those events at the turn of the century, coastal erosion at Beachy Head has been within expected limits for an undefended rock formation. However, at other points of the East Sussex shore, it has been a different story.

Slightly to the west at Birling Gap - a dip in the high coastline - several cottages on the low cliffs have been lost to gradual erosion in recent decades, and the turn of this year brought a more dramatic alteration to the cliff-face. The powerful swelling sea that buffeted the south coast at New Year, claimed a 3-metre section of chalk, making the cliff edges unstable and closing the already precarious steps down to the beach. Much more spectacularly, at Rock-a-Nore to the east of Hastings, the sandstone cliffs suffered a dramatic collapse after days of heavy seas pounding their base. The remarkable day-time rock fall was captured on film by eyewitnesses.

The effect of the continuing winds, whipping up the power of the sea, is that the craggy East Sussex coastline has become a treacherous place and coastal paths have had to be closed, limiting access to cliff and shore in many places. Perhaps walking the more sedate coastal plain of West Sussex is the way forward for the rest of this wild winter.