Marine Court, St. Leonards-on-Sea

Marine Court, St. Leonards-on-Sea
... along the prom ...

Friday 10 September 2021

9/11 Where I Was Not

 On our first and my only trip to the USA, Rob and I spent a week in New York intending to be total tourists, before moving on to visit friends Stan and Jen in Medford Lakes, NJ.

If our original itinerary had worked out, we'd have been in New York and would probably have done the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building on the 9th September. Once actually there, the more enigmatic Empire State came first, but might not have done if it hadn't been closer to our hotel. This budget hotel had roaches in the shower and smelled mouldy, but that was ok, it was exciting, we were in the Big Apple!

Luckily, because of various minor complications like Stan and Jen being on holiday in the West Indies and because BA's discounted airmiles tickets weren't available when we'd originally planned to go, we'd reversed the order of our trip and went to Medford Lakes after New York. We never made it to the World Trades Centre and I am eternally grateful for those minor complications.

Watching the events on live TV, while in the safe living room of Stan and Jen's charming log-cabin home, on the shore of the lake, was terrifying. None of us could believe what we were seeing. 

We spent half the day frantically trying to phone home, to reassure our family in England that we were safe. All the mobile lines were completely overloaded and landlines weren't much better. Eventually Rob managed to get an email through to his father in Leeds and asked him to please phone my mother in Hastings to tell her we were safe. We carried on watching the inadequate TV reports while Stan managed to get in touch with his cousins in New York, who thankfully were safe too. 

Just as alarming was seeing that there was nobody on top of this. Politicians were panicking and TV channels had no known pattern, no appropriate template to follow, on how to report an event of this magnitude which was actually happening to their fellow American citizens, not people in far off lands of whom they knew little and cared less.

The pristine, primped and botoxed newsreaders unemotionally reported on whatever garbled messages emerged from the authorities, (with jollifying adverts) between distraught and panic-stricken vox-pops. The reporters were without a hair or tear out of place and the requisite toothy grins were still plastered on their shiny faces, their body language mocking the horrors they were failing to report in any meaningful way.

There was no information.

Later in the day I went alone for a swim in the lake, it was peaceful and temporarily soothing.

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I don’t deliberately try to mark 9/11. The stress (mine), the horror (everyone's) and the fear (the victims), is something I'd like to forget, although I won't. The only events which have come close to affecting me that much since are the horrific Grenfell Tower fire and most recently the impossibly hopeless evacuation of desperate people from Kabul. The only earlier event to have the same effect was, as a child, watching reports from Aberfan. I felt I was one of those children, experiencing that horror.

Monday 30 August 2021

Lighthouses at Dungeness 2

 According to this website, there have been not five lighthouses and Dungeness, which is how far my research led me, but seven. Two were low lights not the high ones I'd found. The first was constructed in 1884 in metal on a wooden base and included a huge foghorn. The second came in 1932 as a replacement for the metal structure which was by then, unsurprisingly, in need of extensive repairs. The 1930's structure was subsequently demolished to make way for the fifth high tower which was needed so the light wasn't obscured to the west by the nuclear power station.

Both the fifth high tower, which became an unmanned, automatic light, and the Dungeness nuclear power station  remain in operation today.

This article is fascinating, do read it! :-

Lighthouses at Dungeness - Romney Marsh, The Fifth Continent (theromneymarsh.net)  



Dungeness Lighthouses

 This is the Old Lighthouse at Dungeness in Kent.  Built in 1904, it is properly known as the High Light Tower and is 41 metres high. It was originally painted in black and white stripes, to make it highly visible in daylight, even in poor weather conditions.


The High Light Tower, 1904. Behind is the accommodation
 block built around the base of Samuel Wyatt's 1792 Tower.
Although called the old lighthouse, it is far from the original one. The history of lights at Dungeness is documented back to 1600 and probably goes back further. Dungeness is part of a huge strand of sand and shingle, many miles long, which stretches from Dymchurch in the east to Camber Sands in the west and is backed by the marshlands of Romney, Denge and Walland. At Dungeness the shingle forms a low, pointed promontory out into the sea which is extremely dangerous to shipping, hence the lighthouses.

The problem with Dungeness is that it moves. The sea, powered by currants and winter storms, is constantly shifting the sand and shingle eastwards, a process known as longshore drift. To the east, the town of Romney, once situated on the estuary of the river Rother, was left inland and became Old Romney. The port of New Romney, one of the original Cinque Ports, was also left behind and is now more than three kilometres from the sea.

There have been five light-towers at Dungeness. The first, probably a 10 metre high wooden tower illuminated by a coal fire, appeared soon after 1600, built by landowner Edward Hayman who intended it to be a 'tollgate' to earn him revenue as much as a warning to sailors. He was licenced by King James for forty years to collect one penny per ton from all passing ships. The light was poor and the whole scheme proved hugely controversial and difficult to manage. While people argued, the shingle moved.

In 1635 the tower was demolished and the Lamplough Tower, about 30 metres tall, was constructed in brick, nearer to the end of the shingle point. Disputes over revenues, the quality of the light and even the ownership of the tower continued for a hundred and more years. Ownership and overall responsibility for all lighthouses was eventually taken over by Trinity House in 1836. They today are responsible for 65 lighthouses around the British coast and as far afield as Europa Point, Gibraltar

In 1792 the third tower was built by Samuel Wyatt, with accommodation for the keepers in a circular block around its base. This superior light was powered by oil and used the new technology of parabolic reflectors. By 1862 another new technology was tried, electric light, though the supply was not up to the job and it was soon replaced by a much more powerful petrol lamp, its strength increased 100 fold with glass prisms.

By the end of the nineteenth century the shingle had moved again and Wyatt's 35 metre tall tower was replaced by the 41 metre, brick-built, High Light Tower in 1904. Wyatt's tower was demolished, though the accommodation block remained. Today the High Light Tower is more than 500 metres from the sea.

My 1966 photograph of the new Lighthouse. The car in the
foreground was our VW Variant Estate. Behind it are a Ford
Anglia, a Morris Minor Countryman and a VW Microbus.

The 1966 tower was built 450 metres eastward, away from the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station which had partially screened the view of the High Light Tower from the sea. The new tower is an automatic lighthouse, with an electric fog siren, owned by Trinity House. This 43 metre high light-tower, which perhaps can't strictly be called a lighthouse because nobody lives there, was the first concrete tower at Dungeness. It was constructed from pre-cast rings and the distinctive black bands were impregnated into the concrete rings. 

I first visited Dungeness Lighthouse when I was in my teens and the new lighthouse was brand new and had a circular ramp up to the base of the tower which we could walk up. The place was windswept, as always. I had just received a camera, my first, for my birthday - a Kodak Instamatic. These were amongst the first photographs I ever took, on the same roll are pictures of my family and our dog. So it seems that even then I was attracted to buildings as photographic subjects.







Tuesday 9 February 2021

Word of the Day - Mullock

 Mullock could be a handy word when commenting on the activities of certain politicians, eg. those blithering mountebanks have made a total mullock of... (insert official title of latest politicians' balls-up)

Mullock - noun originally describing waste from gold mining activities in Australia. If you prefer non-antipodean words, try slag-heap.





Monday 8 February 2021

Leaky Lockdown Chaos

Our house has sprung a leak. It’s probably been there for some time, but extended working from home makes these things more noticeable. Extraneous water was first noticed in the tiny cloakroom (and I mean tiny, think the smallest toilet you’ve ever seen on a plane) when a different leak was noticed under the washbasin, running down from the cold tap. The plumber arrived and fixed that, so we took up the vinyl sheet to allow the concrete floor to dry. There was black mould on the underside of the vinyl, which was consigned to the garden. Noticing the dark patch on the concrete extended under the door we pulled back the carpet and underlay in the hallway to reveal that floor was damp too. So were the doorposts, having swelled because they had been sucking up moisture, causing the toilet door to stick.

That was during the November lockdown. Since the washbasin tap was repaired, the doorposts have shrunk and we can close the toilet door. Everything else is still damp and in an attempt to trace this further leak the water to the toilet was turned off for a week, which made no difference. At least we could no longer blame that toilet. Next the panel behind the toilet was taken out to see if the pipework there was the source of the leak. It wasn’t. 

The vinyl in the next-door shower room was peeled back, revealing the chipboard flooring there to be dry by the shower, until we moved around the corner to the second toilet, where damp was suspected. The facts that the plaster was blowing off the walls, there was black mould and and the screws holding the boards down were rusting were a bit of a giveaway.

However even cutting and pulling the vinyl so far back that it ripped and will probably have to be replaced didn’t reveal the source of the leak. Neither did removing the bit of board below the boiler. So next up came the flooring screws, well some of them. The first eight or nine were easy. Why more than fifty screws were deemed necessary to control less than one and a half square metres of flooring is unclear. Most of them were rusty, half a dozen totally immobile. Naturally the flooring ran beneath the skirting so that was all removed too.

Below the chipboard flooring the concrete floor is wet, not merely damp. Below the boiler is a void, which is also wet. The source of the water is still unclear. So while we wait for the plumber the window in the shower room is open to try to dry it out, causing freezing air to flow through to the house. The flooring from the unusable shower room is cluttering the small study/bedroom, the tiny toilet is usable but freezing cold and the hallway carpet and underlay are still rolled back creating multiple trip-hazards on the way to the kitchen.

It’s been snowing for the past two days. The plumber is probably busy.

Monday 19 October 2020

A Real Gem - Our Marine Conservation Zone - article for West Marina Group

 Article written for West Marina Group, 2019

The beach huts, a popular location with kite surfers

When we stand by the beach huts at West St. Leonards and look out to sea, what are we looking at? We can see waves, gulls, clouds, we watch the rise and fall of the tides.  Sometimes there are stormy breakers thundering on the shingle, pounding the water to a frenzy of spindrift and spume.  On a different day we can see clear, calm water lapping at the exposed rocks with a light breeze causing the merest ruffle on the surface of the lagoons.  

It’s very beautiful, poetic and it’s now also a Marine Conservation Zone.

Fishing from the beach, usual catch is mackerel and dabs.

A Marine Conservation Zone  is one of four types of Marine Protected Areas and West St Leonards seashore falls into the recently formed  (May 2019)  Beachy Head East Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ).  This is an area of sea around 200 square kilometres, which is demarked out to sea by the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse and runs around the shoreline from Beachy Head Lighthouse to Hastings Pier.  This seems slightly strange as an MCZ concerns itself with the natural environment yet is marked by manmade structures, but at least they are recognisable.

Piddock Holes in chalk pebbles
found near the beach huts
.
Before the 2009 Marine Act, there was hardly any environmental protection for our seas, but a lot of progress has been made.   Today there are 355 Marine Protected Areas around the British Isles, which sounds like plenty although they only cover 25% of the UK’s waters.   However they do include 37% of the actual coastline, including 91 MCZ’s one of which now covers our shoreline and sea.  MCZ’s and the three other types of Marine Protected Areas are intended to form the UK contribution to an international network of protected sites in the north east Atlantic.  The objective of this network is to help ensure we all have clean, healthy, safe, productive and biologically diverse seas.  MCZ’s aim to specifically protect the natural environment of the seabed, coastline and typical, rare or declining habitats and species.


The Wildlife Trusts carried out surveys of the Beachy Head East MCZ and they have described our area as, “Rich in habitats and marine life, this site is a real gem!”  It includes sandstone reefs and rare chalk reefs. Chalk is familiar to everyone living in Sussex, but undersea chalk is a globally rare habitat and we have a large proportion in UK waters. The largest chalk seascapes are mainly in the English Channel around Sussex and Kent, we have 75% of all European chalk reefs right here.

This underwater soft chalk is pitted by holes created by rock-boring piddocks. A piddock is no relation to the pollock, that’s a fish related to coley and good for eating. Neither should a piddock be confused with a pillock! This very harmful species is easy to spot littering our beaches and has been known to endanger the ocean by dumping garbage at sea and flushing out dirty tanks in deeper waters.  A piddock on the other hand is an exciting (it glows in the dark!) and beneficial type of long clam which bores its way into soft rocks as it grows and spends up to eight years living in there. Once empty, piddock holes can also house crabs, sponges, anemones and worms.  Chalk reefs also provide good nurseries for important fish including plaice, herring and Dover sole. 
piddocks
Royal Sovereign light tower,  CC BY-SA 2.0


Our ‘real gem’ spreads out to sea as far as the Royal Sovereign Shoals which house the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse. Have you ever wondered what that strange T shaped thing on the horizon towards Eastbourne is?  This lighthouse replaced a lightship in 1971 and includes a helipad, hence its shape. It was decommissioned in 2019 due to structural deterioration and should be removed over the summer of 2020.  It will not be replaced, the Beachy Head Lighthouse has been upgraded to hopefully protect shipping.


Provided there are no shipwrecks, the Royal Sovereign Shoals, which are mainly sandstone with a few chalky outcrops,  will remain wildlife rich.  Species recorded right there included cod, pouting, wrasse, crabs, blennies, sponges, anemones, sea squirts, bryozoans ( which resemble seaweed but are actually coral like colonies of small animals), soft corals, tube worms and starfish as well as many species of seaweed.  Other rocky shoals and reefs out to sea will have similar varieties of wildlife.  

Closer to shore, our MCZ includes the rock formations which appear on our stretch of beach at low tide and are known as Bopeep Rocks. These with Goat Ledge by Warrior Square, and the My Lord's, Lane End and Bar Beach Rocks at Bexhill  provide more challenging environment for wildlife, which has to cope with the rising and falling tides, while the shoals out to sea are mostly submerged whatever the state of the tide. We nonetheless have plenty of hardy wildlife here by the beach, including anemones, barnacles, blennies, crabs, hermit crabs, limpets, lugworms, mussels, razor clams, shrimp, slipper limpets, whelks and I’m sure you can name more.  All these can provide a more natural diet than human leftovers for the gulls, turnstones, cormorants and other sea birds.
  
Bopeep Rocks at Low Tide

 Other exciting species found in our MCZ include the short-snouted seahorse. These tiny fish  live in rocky areas and in seagrass but also amongst kelp, which is more important than the pretty seahorses and should be exciting, although it just looks brown and slimy.  At school, decades ago, we were taught there were two types of living things, animals and plants, however biology has moved on; all seaweeds are algae, which is neither.  Kelps are large brown algae which live in temperate and cool seas and can grow and proliferate fast if left alone.  Kelp forests once surrounded British shores, but human activity has destroyed most of them, yet the UK still has the most diverse community of kelp species compared to any other country in Europe, with 7 out of the 14 European species.

Kelp forests play a vital role in the carbon cycle of the whole planet, capturing 75% of the net carbon fixed annually in the sea. They really are as important as forests on land for carbon capture.  Kelp forests can also help reduce coastal erosion by serving as a buffer against strong waves.  Kelp needs rocks to cling to and, unlike tree roots, kelp roots act as anchor or holdfast, clinging to stones and reefs, providing a suitable environment for seahorses and numerous other creatures including young fish of many species.  As climate change creates more severe weather, kelp forests are increasingly important for holding carbon and reducing acidity in the sea, which has been rising as greenhouse gases increase.  The Sussex Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (IFCA) has become the first English regulator to propose a bylaw to ban trawling specifically to restore habitat.  Kelp growing in our MCZ will contribute and, with a ban on dredging, dumping and trawling, existing kelp beds could expand.


The fishermen's net huts, Hastings.

If you are concerned about where your fish and chips or king scallop au gratin comes from, we do have sustainable fish, such as plaice and herring, which breed and are caught in our MCZ without damaging populations. Cod and Dover sole, although they also breed in this zone, are not currently regarded as sustainable here, however you can eat Cornish caught Dover sole with a clearer conscience.  Dab and mackerel aren’t commercially fished in this area, but they are not scarce and are easy to catch locally, even from the beach.  Locally caught scallops are not usually sustainable, as they are dredged from the seabed, causing damage to the marine environment.  However queen scallops from the Fal estuary in Cornwall are fished from oyster beds by traditional methods without the use of engines or winches. The Marine Conservation Society have a detailed ‘Good Fish Guide’ which you can download as an app. It’s good to know we can continue to enjoy our fish without damaging our MCZ and destroying the marine environment.

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[photographs by Susan Gilbert except where otherwise attributed]

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This article (with different photographs) was published in Hastings In Focus, March 2020


Thursday 9 April 2020

ArchiFACT Ltd. will soon have a New Website

At ArchiFACT Limited we have been using some of the down time during the current crisis to create a new website. 

This new site should become visible to Google and other search engines within the next few hours. The old site is no longer visible.

Update - new website at  https://www.archifact.co.uk/home

 ArchiFACT are still working mainly from home and are available for consultations and new enquiries. We will continue to offer our usual range of services to all our clients. 

We can be contacted as usual by phone  - 01484 515701     
or by email  Fact@ArchiFACT.co.uk
  
Thank you for your continued support.