St. Decay in Cornwall Today

My book of infrared photos of Cornwall, Welcome to St. Decay, is featured in this month's Cornwall Today magazine, available from most supermarkets and book shops in the county. Photos from the book grace the cover and a six-page article (which I also wrote). I'm extremely grateful to the team at Cornwall Today, in particular Tim Dixon, for featuring my photos.

Previously on Barnflakes
Welcome to St. Decay

Flickagrams #20

Like Hevon, but more fun

Inspired by those two fine wordsmiths Nind and Ray.

Previously on Barnflakes
Welcome to St Decay
Corn + Wall = Cornwall

Untitled (L.A. in Cornwall reflection)

Previously on Barnflakes
Untitled (Fish & Hips)
Untitled (legs in air)

Welcome to St. Decay

Cornwall as it's never been seen before, in glorious infrared. Welcome to St. Decay – the book – celebrates Cornwall's mining heritage through a luridly-bright colour palette.

Taken over a six-month period walking and cycling around the Cornish countryside from St. Agnes to St. Austell, the book explores nature's gradual but inevitable reclamation of the man-made, focusing on abandoned engine houses where ivy climbs the chimneys and walls. For me, these engine houses are as grand and beautiful as any cathedral or castle and deserve to be celebrated.

All photos were taken by me with an infrared camera, and the book was designed by myself.

Book specifications:
Softback, full colour, 62 pages, size 120x120mm.
£9.99.

Get it on Etsy now!

Flickagrams #18

After heavy rains followed by sunshine, the remnants of arsenic and copper create beautiful, surreal colours in the Tailings lagoons at Wheal Maid, near Redruth, Cornwall.

Previously on Barnflakes
Wheal Maid Tailings lagoons

Phone box bookshops

BT's Adopt a Kiosk scheme (which costs £1), introduced in 2009,  has given a second life to hundreds of the iconic yet defunct red phone boxes around the UK – from miniature museums and cafes to defibrillators and nightclubs (though the best I've seen is undoubtedly an aquarium) – yet the most popular enterprise seems to be the book shop (or swap shop or library). I can imagine them lasting about a day in London but there are three within a mile of us here in Cornwall, including the brightly-painted one pictured above. With bookshops, libraries and charity shops still shut, these phone boxes are the only place to find books (without using the internet, I mean) at the moment.

Here's my lockdown reading so far:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Absorbing recasting of Thomas Cromwell as the good guy.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Classic haunted house story, made into several films and TV series.

Normal People by Sally Rooney
Apparently the zeitgeist novel of the decade (the last one, presumably), featuring two, erm, Damaged People. Similar in plot and technique to David Nicholl's One Day.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Wildly imaginative and entertaining novel featuring the devil and his cat coming to Moscow in the 1930s and causing havoc, interspersed with Pontius Pilate's trial of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm
Classic text exploring man's tendency to destroy or control life.

Previously on Barnflakes
Don't Just Be Yourself
The top 100 books
Notes on Giles Gilbert Scott
Sex workers' cards Gilbert and George style
London through its charity shops #12: Kingston

Top ten things to be positive about during the Coronavirus pandemic

With millions of people around the globe entering isolation, losing their jobs and getting into debt, as well as thousands dying, it’s understandably hard to remain upbeat at the moment. Here’s ten ways to look on the bright side.

1. Air pollution in the UK halved during the first day of the lockdown; similar results have been recorded in Europe and Asia.
2. When I’ve been out for my daily walk, I’ve heard the sound of children playing and birds singing, instead of cars.*
3. Nature is loving it. Birds and animals are everywhere. Nature is able to breathe.*
4. People are generally being friendlier, and it’s mostly bringing out the best in them.
5. Spending more time with family doing things – creative projects or games.
6. Doing proper cooking and baking at home (my daughter, aged 13, has made olive bread and naan bread, and cooked a curry, so far)
7. Everyone has instantly been cured of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), an anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere. Don’t worry, it’s not.
8. You’re not in an office.
9. There are loads of free stuff online, from concerts and plays to films and apps, including two cool synthesiser apps from Moog and Korg.
10. It's a great time to be an introvert – extroverts have had their day (if only social media didn't exist)!

*On our brief country walk today, we encountered a woodpecker, horses, swans, squirrels, crows, dogs, cats, a partridge, water rats, a rare North American black fox, goats, two emus and a reindeer (I'm cheating slightly here – the last four were seen whilst walking through Feadon Farm, though we were lucky the fox was being taken for a walk as we wandered past).

We had a brief chat (from a distance, obvs) with a couple who pointed out to us two water rats in the lake at Tehidy Woods.
Enjoying your walk? They asked us.
I said it's a beautiful world without cars or people.
The man agreed, though said he was ready to get back to reality.
Reality?
This is reality. Nature. What an artificial bubble we created with offices, cars, shops, roads. A false reality. Nature was here before us and will be here after.

Previously on Barnflakes
Staying at home: a guide to enjoying isolation
Armchair atlases

Flickagrams #17

National Explosives factory site at Hayle awarded heritage status

Initially built to provide dynamite for the mining industry, the National Explosives Factory at Upton Towans near Hayle went on to supply the Royal Navy with explosives during the First World War. On the advice of Historic England, last year it was given heritage protection by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

The site is situated in an expansive, undulating area of sand dunes overlooking Hayle beach, where golden sand runs for three miles. Acres of sand dunes, rolling grassy hills and windy paths form Upton Towans, and the area feels like a golf course for giants, with sand dunes as bunkers. It is littered with various architectural remnants from the factory site, including what is believed to be the earliest surviving mass-concrete magazines from the 1890s (one of which is pictured above).

From the beginning it was mainly women who worked in the factory, with the number of staff increasing more than tenfold with the start of the First World War, from 175 to 1,800. The factory was state of the art for its time, only overtaken in the 1950s by Goonhilly as the most technologically advanced project in Cornwall.

Previously on Barnflakes
Abandoned gunpowder works at Kennall Vale, Ponsanooth, Cornwall
The Fuse Factory, Tuckingmill

Along Pill Creek, Feock, Cornwall

Artist Alasdair Lindsay’s acrylic on board painting of Creek Vean. Paintings and prints available from his website.

Since the modernist house Creek Vean was built in the mid-1960s, many other similar-looking buildings in the area have cropped up, leading the Cornish Buildings Group to recently comment "Pill Creek has become home to a series of iconic or semi-iconic modernist houses".

Creek Vean was designed by Team 4, which consisted of architects Richard Rogers and his wife Su, and Norman Foster and his wife Wendy. Built between 1964-1966, it was designed for Su's parents. Creek Vean incorporates ideas Rogers and Foster, two young architects at the time, had learnt at Yale School of Architecture, where they had met. The building shows the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright with its flow of movement and the bold structure nestling nicely into the hillside. Its large windows have fine views of the Fal estuary.

It's hard to know exactly what each member of Team 4 actually did, but it's Su Rogers who connects Creek Vean to another nearby house: in 1973-4 John Millar and Su designed Pillwood House, which was awarded Grade II listed status in 2017. Funnily enough, Pilwood House actually looks more like a Richard Rogers building and Creek Vean more like a John Millar – a joke I had, as you do, with an elderly architect outside Creek Vean (I knew he was an architect because he wore Le Corbusier glasses).

The most recent addition to the area is Sylvania House, designed by Truro-based Kast Architects, and awarded a commendation by the Cornish Buildings Group in their 2019 Awards. A stunning five-bedroom cantilevered family home, it features the upper part of the house at a dramatic 90 degrees to the lower half. The building is sympathetic to its woodland surroundings and, again, has a hint of Frank Lloyd Wright.
 
Many of the buildings on the hillside along Phil Creek look down upon the estuary; some of the houses, including Creek Vean, lead directing down to the water. The whole area around Feock is beautiful, peaceful and relaxing. There are no shops or traffic. It feels very exclusive. Indeed, nearby Restronguest Point is the richest part of Cornwall (and third richest in the south west), with every house costing way over £1m – in estate agent speak, 'one of the most desirable waterside addresses in Britain'.

The Friends of Restronguest Point website gives useful advice on how to construct a Cornish hedge – with preference given to the local style of hedge, of course. It goes on to list all the listed buildings in the area of Feock, finding 78 of them, an extraordinary amount, it seemed to me, for a tiny village.

Frank Baker and The Birds

Sixteen years before Daphne du Maurier wrote her short story The Birds (first published in the short collection The Apple Tree in 1952), which Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) was loosely based on, British author Frank Baker wrote a novel also called The Birds, in 1936.

Frank Baker had an interesting, if mostly forgotten, career; first, inauspiciously, in a London insurance company. He then moved to St Just in Cornwall, becoming a church organist. He also began to write, publishing his first novel, The Twisted Tree, in 1935. The Birds was published the following year. Set in pre-war London, the apocalyptic tale depicts birds attacking people with the intention of the destruction of mankind. Despite the novel receiving decent notices, with the Birmingham Mail going as far as to call it "The most original piece of imaginative fiction since Wells wrote The War of the Worlds", the book only sold several hundred copies.

Nevertheless, Baker continued writing, and Miss Hargreaves, written in 1940, became his most famous book. It later became a stage play, TV show and radio programme. During World War II Baker was a professional actor, touring with the likes of Paul Scofield. Then he was the pianist for Players' Theatre, a West End music hall. Still writing, he produced novels, short stories, articles and plays. His 1954 novel Lease of Life was adapted into a film by Ealing Studios the following year.

When Hitchcock's film The Birds came out in 1963, Baker was tempted to sue Universal Studios for the similarities between the film and his novel, believing his story to be the inspiration for the film, but demurred. Daphne du Maurier denied ever having heard of Baker's The Birds, though they both lived in Cornwall (a small county where everyone seems to know everyone else), and, by coincidence, Baker's The Birds was published by Peter Davies, who was du Maurier's cousin. Apparently excited about publishing Baker's book, it is likely he might have mentioned it to du Maurier at some point.

Hitchcock scholar Ken Moss believes the Baker novel has more in common with the Hitchcock film than the du Maurier short story, citing certain scenes including an attack in a phone box as well as the triangle of the main characters. Author Christopher Fowler goes as far as to say Hitchcock meant to buy Baker's version but bought du Maurier's instead, accidentally.

Anyway, it seems Baker himself wasn't immune to a bit of plagiarising. In his autobiography, I Follow But Myself, published in 1969, he admits that his birds book bears some resemblance to Arthur Machen’s The Terror, published in 1917. Baker's The Birds was reprinted in a paperback version in 1964 (above) featuring a cover with characters not unlike those in the Hitchcock movie. It was reprinted again in 2013.

Frank Baker and Daphne du Maurier ended up writing to each other. In one letter, du Maurier tells Baker, "I wish for your sake Hitchcock had bought your novel rather than my short story from which to adapt the film". They both lived and died in Cornwall, du Maurier a legend and Baker a complete unknown.

Hidden, ancient forest uncovered after storms on the beach at Portreath, Cornwall

 

Recent storms have again uncovered the hidden remains of an ancient woodland said to be between 4,000-6,000 years old on the beach at Portreath in Cornwall. Heavy storms cause the sands to shift, a phenomenon that only occurs once every few years, exposing the trunks of the trees. Waterlogged wood tends not to rot as it has no oxygen. The wood had previously been visible after storms in 2014 and 2016. It takes a few days for the waves to push the sands back to normal and the trunks to vanish for another few years.

All Hayle The Bucket of Blood

The Bucket of Blood is a pub in Phillack, a village in Hayle, Cornwall. Said to have been built in the 18th century, the pub is now Grade II listed. According to legend, the pub got its charming name several centuries ago when the landlord went to get some water from the local well. His bucket came up full of the blood from the mutilated, murdered body of a smuggler thrown down the well. Variations of the story include the bucket containing the head of a local revenue officer. The most boring explanation, and probably most likely, is the water would have been red from the effects of tin mining; many streams and rivers (such as, er, the red river) in the county still are a rusty orange colour. The pub is also, of course, haunted.

Not to be confused with: A Bucket of Blood, a 1959 horror comedy directed by Roger Corman and starring Dick Miller.

Previously on Barnflakes
Back to the Cat's Back
The Seedy Tree

Inside St Day Old Church

When we were inside the church, we were both inside and outside at the same time, for the church has no roof. The Church of Holy Trinity, now known as St Day Old Church, was built in 1826-8 but by the 1950s had fallen into disrepair and was shut in 1956. After decades of neglect, part of the roof collapsed in 1988 and the rest of the roof was, excitingly, blown up with dynamite.

The church – referred to by Sir John Betjeman as “an ecclesiastical toy fort” and apparently his favoutite church in England – has now been saved by the St Day Old Church Community Interest Company, who have turned it into a community space for the arts. When I was there recently, to sketch, electricity had just been added and beautiful new carved window frames put in (I know, it sounds an extravagance in a building without a roof, but it was worth every penny). It's a wonderful space, where you can be simultaneously inside and outside, protected yet amongst the elements.

Upcoming event: DiaspAURA, a light festival with laser projections, illuminated artwork and lanterns runs from Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd February.

Previously on Barnflakes
Reviving Redruth (and envirions) 
Kresen Kernow now open

Wheal Maid Tailings lagoons

The area around Wheal Maid Tailings lagoons, taking in the complex of Poldice mine, active since the 17th century, and the Poldice valley, is a great place for walking and cycling. Situated about three miles east of Redruth, it's a fascinating area full of the remains of mine workings and steep paths littered with quartz and other minerals.

The lagoons themselves revealed themselves to us completely by chance one day, when we'd accidentally walked a different route to our usual Poldice mine walk. It was as if we'd entered a parallel universe; we couldn't figure out how we'd never spotted the lagoons, and several engine houses nearby, before. We spotted the lagoons from the top of the hill, looking down at them at the bottom of the valley. It was an alien landscape of greys, yellows and reds. The amazing colours of the lagoons occur due to the water evaporating, leaving the waste remains of the various mined minerals including copper, tin, pyrite, zinc and arsenic. Needless to say, though the area is safe for walking around, the earth and water is toxic.

Wheal Maid was used as recently as the 1970s and 80s to dispose of waste from two nearby mines, Mount Wellington and Wheal Jane. It was sold to Gwennap Parish Council in 2002 for £1 (presumably so the owners, Carnon Enterprises, wouldn't have to clean up their mess).

The area forms part of the Minerals Tramways Coast to Coast cycle route from Portreath to Devoran, a 14 mile ride mostly along tracks and paths, so hardly any traffic is encountered. There are cafes along the way, including several places for hiring bikes too. At Twelveheads (a 15 minute walk from the lagoons) there is a fine, and brilliantly placed (all the hundreds of times we've said at the end of a tiring walk: 'If only there was a cafe here!' Well here there actually is) outdoors cafe called Bon Appetit.

The moon and the earth

Artist Luke Jerram's stunning Moon and Earth have been touring Europe for several years now. The moon model, six metres in diameter, is currently at the Natural History museum, London. Gaia (Greek for earth), seven metres in diameter, hangs above the citrus grove in the Mediterranean Biome of the Eden Project, Cornwall. Both contain detailed NASA imagery and are on display until tomorrow (Sunday 5 January).

How many escalators are there in Cornwall?

In 2007, artist Patrick Lowry showcased his Escalator in New County Hall in Truro – Cornwall’s modernist council building, which consisted of a life size, realistic installation of an out of order escalator, leading to nowhere. A metaphor for Cornwall council, perhaps, or job opportunities in the county – interpretation of the installation is rife.

Lowry's installation was part of the MORE Cornwall group exhibition, reviewed on the artcornwall website at the time. The author of the piece mentions growing up in Truro in the 1980s and joking with friends about there being only one escalator in Cornwall, which there was then.

Well, times have sure changed. There are now eight (8) or maybe eleven (11) escalators in Cornwall. I heard this recently from a friend (who couldn't remember the exact number), who has a friend who says it's possible to get to all the county's escalators by bus in a single day. Naturally, this aroused my curiosity.

It can't be that much of a challenge though – presumably most of them are in Truro: Waterstone's, Primark, Debenhams and M&S all have them. The hideous retail parks* at Hayle and Kingsley Village both have them. That's probably about it – but there's a catch.

A couple of the escalator's are moving walkways, or travelators. This got us thinking. Newquay airport? Nope. The Eden Project? Nope. It would have to be somewhere really high tech like Goonhilly Earth Station. Then it occurred to me – Sainsbuy's has them in large branches at Truro and Penzance. 

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* I suddenly remembered looking at some new-build flats in the early noughties with my then-partner when we were thinking of buying a place together in London. The flats were tiny, badly made, bits already falling off, no storage, in the middle of nowhere. Where’s the nearest newsagent, I asked the estate agent, to buy a paper or a pint of milk. The supermarket in the retail park, a twenty minute walk, she said. No, I thought, that’s wrong, that’s crazy. No, I said, I mean the local newsagent, the friendly one who knows you. She repeated, the retail park.

Some years later, here we are, or here I am anyway. With a warehouse-sized Tesco as my friendly local newsagent, and retail parks with massive car parks a horrific reality, and the death of the high street, and internet shopping. I didn’t ask for any of it. In fact, I actively despise it all.

Previously on Barnflakes
Bus pass

Helen at Lanhydrock

Fisherman's Friends vs Bait

Fisherman's Friends (Chris Foggin, 2019)
Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)
Also: Tin (Bill Scott, 2015)

You wait years for a film about bloody Londoners ruining Cornish fishing villages then two come along within months of each other. Fisherman's Friends and Bait are two sides of the same coin, portraying the effect of tourism and second home owners in Cornwall, one of the poorest parts of Europe, in very different ways.

Fisherman's Friends is partly based on the real life sea shanty group of the same name, based in Port Issac, a fishing village in North Cornwall. Pretty sentimental, it follows the familiar trope of British films of its ilk, from The Full Monty to Brassed Off without those films' originality, humour or warmth. Nevertheless, it has its moments, as it follows cocky London A&R music scout Danny (Daniel Mays), to Cornwall with some colleagues (one of who is the smarmy Henry – all the Londoner's are smarmy – played by Christian Brassington, no stranger to Cornwall, having played the hypocritical and hideous Reverend Osborne 'Ossie' Whitworth in Poldark. Brassington has also played similar roles in his depictions of both Boris Johnson and Tony Blair) for a stag do. They stumble across a performance by the Fisherman's Friends, a group of male fishermen/coastguards who, in between catching fish and saving stupid tourists' lives, sing sea shanties on the sea shore. As a wind up, Danny's boss tells him he has to sign the boy band – and drive off, leaving him high and dry.

At first, Danny is just staying on in the hope of shagging a fisherman's daughter, in the form of Alwyn (Tuppence Middleton), before he succumbs to the authenticity of the Fisherman's Friends and the charms of the fishing village. Anyway, despite the wind up, Danny signs the band and gets the record contract. And the girl. Oh, and buys the local pub.

Despite occasional digs at Londoner's and second home owners, and as you might be surmising by now, a film supposedly about a sea shanty band and Cornwall is actually more about Danny, a London 'tosser' (Alwyn's daughter's words), and his journey to finding fulfilment (that's because the Cornish have already found theirs, quipped H).

This fact was mentioned, actually, when we heard director Mark Jenkin give a talk after a screening of his film Bait, called "one of the defining British films of the decade" by the Guardian. Stylistically, it is world's apart from Fisherman's Friends (filmed with all the imagination of a BBC drama), shot as it was on 16mm black and white film on a Bolex camera (which I used at film school in the 1990s, already obsolete then – it's a loud, hand-cranked camera and can only shoot a few minutes of film at a time, but it is durable – on one film shoot the camera fell in a river; when we pulled it out it was absolutely fine). Jenkin's decision to film this way, as well as to hand develop the film and record all the dialogue post-production certainly helps give the film its unique look (and goes some way to explaining the lavish praise heaped upon it from the likes of the BFI – well, they funded it – and the Guardian).

The slight plot revolves around fisherman Martin Ward (Edward Rowe, a.k.a. the Kernow King and general Cornish Renaissance Man), eking out a living as a fisherman and struggling to save money for a fishing boat, whilst his brother makes money hiring out their late father's fishing boat to tourists wanting to party. To add insult to injury, they've sold the family's harbourside house to poncy Londoner's who use it as a second home. The seeds are sown for seething resentment, and the film is an intense experience, with its high contrast black and white expressionist cinematography, extreme close-ups and contemptuous glances between the social classes.

The film isn't perfect – characters are slightly cardboard cut-out and it's a little simplistic – but there's no denying it's a stunningly original work, and a breath of fresh air compared to the usual Cornish fare of Poldark and Doc Martin.

Fisherman''s Friends and Bait make an obvious double bill but how about Bait and The Lighthouse, with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe playing 19th century lighthouse keepers in Robert Egger's black and white psychological horror, released in the UK next month.

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The film Tin also deserves a mention. Released in 2015, it was filmed in as equally perverse original manner as Bait, maybe even more so. Like Bait, we also went to a screening of the film (in a church in Redruth) accompanied by a talk by the film's director, Bill Scott. The micro-budget film, shot for £100,000, is set in West Cornwall in Victorian times, at the end of the mining boom.

The film was originally a play performed by Miracle Theatre (based on a novel about bank swindling in Cornwall), and filming was shot entirely using green screen in the evenings after the play's performance over several years, with the backgrounds added later, giving the film a odd and distinctive feel. The film features Jenny Agutter, who ironically (considering the other two films) owns houses in London and Cornwall.

Previously on Barnflakes
Top 30 of the year
Encrusted
Random film review: Straw Dogs
The lost art of the double bill
Double bill me