Soundings from the Estuary

Germander Speedwell's work for the Soundings from the Estuary exhibition:

For Soundings from the Estuary, Germander has been ferreting on foreshores, poring over pilot maps, quizzing twitchers, apprehending historians, and intercepting the internet for information – both old and new, formal and local – and has arranged her findings in a Germanderly manner into pieces on the following subjects (a few sample lines are given):

The Rise and Fall of the Lower Hope
Physical features in and along the Thames Estuary, and their names
Islands and inlets, settlements and sandbanks, towns and attractions, including some lost due to erosion or human intervention, and some newly created by development. Names both ancient and modern are included, from those found on maps and on location, to nicknames used only by locals.
“...Fleets, creeks, guts and gores
Bights, banks, hithes and havens
Dozens of Hundreds
And the Lathe of Scray…”

Sightings and Soundings
Avian activity in the Thames Estuary
Bird life and bird sounds, and their human interpretations and descriptions. Including local bird names and nicknames, the language of birdwatchers, and the reporting of sightings in bird hide record books and on birdwatchers’ websites.
   “...Avocet egg watch
  Pipits on pit-stops
  Godwits on slipway
  And ducks flushed from ditches…”

The How, What, Where and Why of Hoo
The Hoo Peninsula of Kent on the Thames Estuary is surprisingly remote and unknown for somewhere so close to London. In response to finding the same limited, and sometimes inaccurate, information about the area constantly repeated, Germander has collected the lesser-mentioned minutiae of Hoo – its hidden institutions, industries, agriculture and histories, names of places, houses and characters, and re-asserted the correct meaning of its enigmatic name!
  “...Mudflats to saltmarsh to cliff of chalk ridge
  Launching of seaplanes and assembly of airships
  Summer walkers, overwintering waders
  Spring onions year-round and autumnal intermittents…”

Loadings and Landings
Shipping activity in the Thames today
The curious and multifarious items, from rubbish to richnesses, which are conveyed via the Thames today, as well as the grand, evocative or curious names of vessels and ships that transport them, and their journeys, locally and internationally.
  “...Ballast and bitumen, cement clinker and gypsum
  Pallets of bricks and waste silt for landfill
  Sand to Battersea, dredgings to Greenwich
  Crushed rock to Dagenham Dock
  And gravel to the Isle of Grain….”

All pieces © Germander Speedwell 2008.
Design and formatting by Stephanie Thomson.  

All the above pieces, together with detailed background notes, were produced
in a booklet, which may be updated and made available again at some point.