Barnton

Barnton Quarry produced stone until 1914.

In 1942, during WWII, the Royal Air Force built a fighter command operations room in the quarry to operate the Turnhouse Sector (now Edinburgh Airport) of RAF Fighter Command.

In 1952, as part of Cold War precautions, the facility was expanded. A three floor R4 bunker, the highest level, was constructed and the quarry backfilled to provide a Sectors Operation Centre (SOC) for correlating information from Project ROTOR radar stations throughout Scotland. The bunker was given the code letters MHA.

In 1958 the ROTOR project was decommissioned due to the time delay involved in passing information from radar station - to SOC - to the fighter aircraft.

During the 1960s, the facilities found new use as a Regional Seat of Government and was kept ready to accommodate 400 politicians and civil servants, for up to 30 days. Although the government building was meant to remain secret, its existence was revealed to the public on Good Friday 1963 when a group known as Spies For Peace published its details. It remained operational until the early 1980s.

In 1983, ownership was transferred to Lothian Regional Council, who sold it in 1987 for £55,000 to a Glasgow developer (MacGregor Properties), but they failed to get planning permission for development. In 1991, the structure sustained fire damage. The property was put up for sale again in 1992, but before it could be sold the interior was largely destroyed by a fire in May 1993. The fire released asbestos fibres throughout the underground rooms and put them in an extreme state of dereliction. The site was then purchased by James Mitchell, Managing Director of Scotland's Secret Bunker in Fife.

Since 2011, a team of volunteers has been involved in restoration efforts to return it to its 1952 condition.

In June 2021 Historic Environment Scotland gave the site Category A listing.

Exit is a collaborative project exploring the shapes, forms and patinas of the site.

S Borthwick, E Robson - 2024

Triangle

The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area. _{Wassily Kandinsky}

A Triangle is a shape, part of two dimensional space. They appear everywhere in everyday things. The books Triangle and hanging Triangle were inspired by locations throughout Britain from London to Dundee and influenced by the Bauhaus artists Kandinsky, Klee and Moholy-Nagy.

S Borthwick

Saltmarsh, Oh Saltmarsh!

A few houses cluster together at Lee-Over-Sands on the Essex coast. They are built on piles, and for good reason. They lie on the seaward side of the sea defences, where the sea could overwhelm them. Saltmarsh and creeks lie between them and the sea.

Flocks of starlings, power lines in catenary curves, telegraph poles leaning at all angles, saltmarsh, saltmarsh.

Wartime concrete. Redshanks, egrets, oystercatchers and the sound of a curlew.

Wind turbines out at sea and a decommissioning nuclear power station on the horizon.

Sea Asters, Sea Milkwort, Seablite, Sea Purslane, Sea Rushes, Sea lavender, Golden samphire.

Saltmarsh, saltmarsh…..

Out from the Colne River two huge London barges ghosted by, all their great red sails hoisted. A century and a half ago they would have been commonplace. In front of me there was a pillbox and a line of tank traps stretching west. I saw a boy climb onto the pillbox and stand there – it was an arresting sight, and it stuck in my mind, as did a murmuration of starlings. Later two girls did a pop video dance on top of the pillbox, with a construction rig out at the wind turbines as a backdrop.

Until the late 1960s you could hear the wildfowlers’ shotguns banging from hideouts in the creeks; years before that you might have heard the boom of a punt gun and, perhaps, have seen the gout of flame from its vast long muzzle. On a famous occasion, or a notorious one, two punt-gunners fired at once, killing seventy-four Brent geese between them. Now the place is a bird sanctuary reached by a wooden footbridge, close to the black rotting stumps of a pier once used for gravel extraction. Turning the place over to a nature reserve had a mixed reception from locals. Tradition died hard here.

A middle-aged woman outside one of the houses told me her grandparents bought it seventy years ago, and it has been in the family ever since. Seventy years ago, not seventy-one. In 1953 the sea rose up in the night and submerged this place, and much of the English east coast as well. Thirty-seven people were drowned in Clacton-on- Sea, three miles east of here. Hundreds were drowned not much further away, in The Netherlands too. All the houses in Lee-Over-Sands were washed away. And now the sea is rising. Where would you rather live – on the slopes of the volcano, or in front of the sea wall?

A J Kinroy, October 2024

Palimpsest

Is it ghost writing on the wall? Hieroglyphs marking a tomb? Phonetician tally marks pressed into clay? Incisions to convey meaning to last through the decades?

I like to imagine it is.

E Robson - August 2023

In Memoriam St. Osyth

St. Osyth is fifty miles from London, and a mile or two from the Essex coast. Londoners from the East End have come here on holiday for more than one hundred years. One of them, I surmise, left the glass in a charity shop in St. Osyth High Street. The glass would have been unremarkable, but for the note tucked into it:

“A printing works in a side street off King’s Cross were where I spent many happy hours. This Gold Label glass belonged to “Pat”, the general factotum, who drank himself to death, aided by me, “The hook”. I used to open the windows. Cheers’! Pat [heart]!

Seemingly “The Hook” wanted to perpetuate Pat’s memory. But who was Pat, beyond a man who worked in a printing works in King’s Cross and drank himself to death? How old was he when he died, and when was that? Did he have a family? If so, did they mourn him, or was he estranged from them by alcohol? Why did The Hook not tell more? Maybe the note in the glass is not a commemoration, but a confession. You can decide for yourself, because the glass and the note are both here.

A J Kinroy, October 2024

To The Peninsula, my Friends

To the Peninsula, uses found poetry and photography to revisit an area by the Thames in South-East London that has undergone massive development, playfully questioning what lies behind the façade.

Read the story of the book over on Edinburgh & Elsewhere

C Marshall