Futurescope

#12 ‘What’s so special about a potato?’

2011-06-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

I’m writing this on the 2^nd June 2011 while I’m watching installers Danny Scott (who prepares for the install by working out in the gym) and Dave Hayes (who prepares by eating kebabs) get ready to hang ‘Potato’. I have already been treated to a comment from a member of staff at Lingfield (no names no pack drill) ‘What’s so special about a potato?’ I’m never ready for this kind of question - especially when I’m wondering why the riggers haven’t turned up at 8:00 on the dot and I’m exhausting all the possibilities as to why? They have had a crash, they’re coming next Thursday, and of course the answer… They’re not in a hurry or as anxious as me. It’s fine and everything is under control.

In fact this picture is late up. We seem to have had a month of strong winds with gusts at a minimum of 28mph daily which is too dangerous for the riggers to work at height.

The wind now is perfect for the first time in a fortnight and it’s a beautiful day.

So I while I wait to check if it will be put up straight (Oddly for a round picture it does matter and I have to drive to a nearby roundabout to check this.) I wanted to add to the blog to talk around how this picture came about and what it means to us. What is so special about a potato?

Well for starters we didn’t set out to make a picture called ‘Potato’.

Following our call out (see previous post) about the allotment project John and I joined a ‘boon day’ with about 10 people at the beginning of May to start off the new season’s growing with Darlington Friends of the Earth and allotment holders after Peter Roberts and Kendra Ullyart had put a call out to holders and warned them that we wanted to be involved. We had a brilliant spell of sunny weather at the beginning of May but plants had not quite started going yet after a hard winter. Nonetheless people’s thoughts had turned to growing and there was a feeling about getting things going again. The day was infused with the ‘rising sap’ and ‘sick of winter’ feeling that all growers get.

Everybody was working together to shift soil from the dumpy bags with which the project started (not a great success, too dry and looks a mess) into new raised beds and start growing for the 2011 season.

Rabbit control is a big issue with a number of fortifications (erm…. ‘enclosures’) taking shape and much discussion of rabbit meat/myxomatosis

The growers knew we were taking photographs which could be used for Futurescope and so it was, as it always is, initially a little awkward and contrived. I’m not an immediate people person but John is very good at making people feel comfortable despite the fact that he’s lying on the floor with a camera pinned to his face. As the day wore on the job in hand took over and they got more used to us the pictures got better.

Between us we took 406 photos and later in the day sat down to go through what we had got. Not really knowing whether we had an image that would strike us as ‘right’ and of course not really having worked out what ‘right’ was.

Odd because it starts with a situation and a group of ideas, involves some choreography and contrivance and then some post rationalisation - i.e. How will the picture fit in the sequence of eight pictures? It’s generally at this point that we give the picture a name. I’m haunted by the photographer William Eggleston’s memorable statement that he took photographs ‘to find out what something will look like when photographed’ because it is in the reciprocal relationship between the replication of the world and living in it that we generate ideas and action, discover meaning or gain perspectives that challenge and change our received ideas.

We divided the days shots into #1 those we couldn’t use because the people in them weren’t consented (a shame because some of these would definitely have found their way onto the shortlist), #2 Kids (All great shots but somehow not about allotments and growing plants), #3 Duffs (out of focus, tripped over a hosepipe etc.) #3 Lifestyle Shots - things that would look good in a magazine selling something. ‘Accent pictures’ if you like and #4 ‘Possibles’ and from those we looked at another group (#5) which ones we could crop into a circle. Despite the number of photos we have taken for Futurescope it is always surprisingly difficult to take a square picture for a round crop.

This was the shortlist, http://www.flickr.com/photos/vistaprojects/sets/72157626555485675/show/ all have an inspiring sense of purpose to them.

Of these we agonised over two finally choosing this picture of Darlington resident Judith Ithurralde.

Judith is slightly out of focus but the soil is really sharp and we liked the way in which this moved her into the background of the picture. Judith had brought seed potatoes to plant in her raised bed in an egg box and when we looked at the photograph seemed to be handling them as if they were as fragile as eggs.

It’s important to us that the images are about the place and the activity and not about the people in them.

The potato is so small but it’s at the heart of the picture. The sharp focus is on the soil which is heavy clay that the allotment holders have to work hard to improve. It was deposited there when Lingfield point was constructed in the late 1940’s.

So again why ‘Potato’? Firstly we wanted to give some profile and exposure to the allotment project. We have always had the idea that the images could develop and respond to what goes on at Lingfield and show on the outside of the site what is going on at the moment. There is a propagandist element to the project and it is important to us to promote and encourage this activity. More people could join and do this and we felt that the image would ‘promote the project’.

So if you do want to join and grow at Lingfield Point call Kendra Ullyart on 01325 469 582.

‘Futurescope’ was intended to catalyse action and activity around the development of the site particularly where green issues were concerned. The allotment project is unusual. Not many property companies supply allotments on a low cost basis working with volunteers and the third sector and there is a demand.

With growing started we felt that the image of the plant being cultivated would be there when the plant was growing and encourage others to join. I checked on it today and here it is! As the Summer wears on the link between the image and the plant will be maintained.

Secondly, there is the wider history and significance of the Potato. Plants and their relationships with people are fascinating. The Potato has been a huge benefit to humanity as a food but has also been at the centre of significant tragedies where a dependency upon it became established. Also for the past few years I have been following the work of the American writer and Journalist Michael Pollan. A chapter in his book the Botany of Desire is devoted to the Potato which anticipates the next phase of our relationship with it as GM technology develops. It’s astonishing that something so ordinary is now so extraordinarily important and controversial. http://michaelpollan.com/books/the-botany-of-desire/

What the potato does is metabolise sunlight, nutrients and water to make a starchy tuber.

Until we began to regard it as a resource at our disposal it just wasn’t important at all. On the face of it it’s a fair question…

#11 Grow Zone

2011-04-19T08:37:00.001-07:00

We are looking to feature the allotment scheme at Lingfield Point in the next Futurescope. Its a project supported by the Friends of the Earth.

Its been a long hard winter and as plants start growing again we want to work with the allotment holders to make a new image as they begin to start work on their plots. (please get in touch if you'd like to be involved; details at the end of the post)

During January I had a good look at the allotments and all the stuff that's there tells its own story a bit more clearly when there are no plants around to distract your attention!

The structures on site 'speak to me' and they say:

1. Its windy

2. the drainage is difficult

3. rabbits (What's up Doc!)

Experiments have been tried and tested. The dumpy bags dry out too easily and this year new efforts are being made with raised beds. Gardeners are patient optimists.

The structures left there in February have something of deserted frontier town about them. The scale of Lingfield's buildings and the flatness of the landscape are completely out of scale with the intimate scale of the allotments but the contrast is inspiring.

This allotment in particular stood out.

This evening I'll be planting chilli seeds - my hobby project. Exotic? not really - they came from Lingfield point!

A little known part of what we do is running a veg box scheme. We started growing veg on an allotment in the late 90's and now its come to this!

Out with spades and in with tractors, accounting systems and delivery vans!

VistaVEG! a growers co-op incorporated as an industrial and provident society which Lynn has developed.

It started as a vista project and one of the things were thinking about when it started was the idea of developing a business model that could be franchised out as a template.

The idea was to promote the idea of farming on urban brownfield land and to make it productive both literally and emotionally.

The project would have two products 1, food and 2, to manage the appearance of landscape not with a design but with an autonomous business. I'm not sure we have got anywhere with this second part of the project people are really attached to mown grass (I don't know why) but its a long game, people change... I live in hope.

Its been a big theme in the work John and I have done together culminating in our proposal for an 'ornamental farm' but it all hangs on the close environment, parallel to ours, in which plants metabolise sunlight and make food.

If you are in the Grow Zone and want to work with us please get in touch or post a comment on this blog. christian@vistaprojects.co.uk. You can see some of the other stuff we do on the website at www.vistaprojects.co.uk or at www.landlab.co.uk

#10 Hum by Liminal.

2010-10-28T08:48:00.002-07:00

When we launched 'Futurescope' we felt, as we always feel, about all our work that we shouldn't stamp ourselves all over it, that we should share and not seek to carry the bill. We thought of it as a variety show that might have some guest spots, like Andre Previn appearing on Morecambe and Wise. So we made a call out for others to send us their ideas and a few people did! Mostly these ideas were rubbish but amongst them Liminal's proposal stood out. It picked up the trompe L'oeil theme we set out to achieve with 'sunflowers' but not in a way that either of us would have thought of. It also brought their preoccupations with urban soundscapes to Lingfield Point presenting as it does the drama of an image associated with aggressive noise in circumstances where it is mute.

At one time the building was anything but mute and as it happens the walls of the turbine hall are plastered with these posters.

of course these posters remind me of Peter Saville's fantastic 'Use Hearing Protection' poster for Factory records...

Its an image the 'bullhorn' I associate with alarm, with demonstrations, with control... and wierdly of seeing Mark E. Smith singing with one. It also (by dint of pure co-incidence in what is rapidly becoming a freak 80's time-warp blog entry) reminds me of the cover of my Penguin copy of George Orwell's 1984 (which covers alarm, control and demonstrations... in gruelling depth). Orwell wrote it as an uncannily accurate description of a postwar dystopia projected just ahead of the Millennium in 1948 the same year that Lingfield Point was approaching completion.

But enough of co-incidence its a change of tone for the project as it enters its second year and as the boom times of the last decade evaporate it seems really relevant... a silent factory calling for development and attention in a post industrial age. Its an image that collages the whole of the powerhouse wall and the circular image together. An image that is both urgent and eligiac. Although its so simple, so off the cuff, it has a really poetic character. That's why we loved it.

Frances from Liminal explains more about the thinking behind HUM! “As a collaborative arts practice that explores the relationship between sound and the environment, the Powerhouse and the circular image hanging on it immediately reminded us of an over-sized loud speaker. This, together with the image of the inside of a megaphone became the catalyst for HUM! As the Futurescope project has developed we noted that the image of the ‘Beeman’ made links to Paton and Baldwin’s original corporate logo of the beehive. So we called our picture HUM because its an onomatopoeic word for the sound that the turbine hall would have made; it is also the sound bees, which have been introduced to Lingfield Point as part of its sustainability ethos, make and the description of the busy workers who would have been employed in the building at its peak.”

http://www.liminal.org.uk/

The other thing the image calls to mind is Anish Kapoor's massively expensive 'Temenos' recently unveiled nearby in Middlesbrough.

Kapoor who emerged in the 80's alongside artists like Deacon, Cragg and Gormley is a sort of 'hole' master, an artist for whom surface is everything, an artist whose holes, like this one above in a private collection near Edinburgh, suck you in. Well here is another reason to like Liminal's proposal. This is punk rock to his prog rock. A digital photo - shot quick - printed big - stuck on a building and gone in three months.

It fits the the see it - think it - do it ethic we always wanted for the project. It comes right back at you.

In a really meaningful way it shouts.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vistaprojects/sets/72157625260159882/show/

#9 Lingfield Lamb

2010-05-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

When John and I first began to think about the project at Lingfield Point we were concentrating on ways of using the soft estate at Lingfield Point productively.

We had thoughts about establishing a tree nursery, growing biomass crops, grazing.... Sheep.... and right there the idea for 'Lingfield Lamb' was born. The idea of a named animal product associated with Lingfield Point. Because Futurescope isn't 'real' but exists as a rhetorical device it became a place to talk about it. We even thought about the idea of developing a brand for a product that didn't exist yet and putting that in the frame: more Duchy Originals than Fray Bentos we thought!

Despite the vast scale of the site at Lingfield, a very high proportion of the site is green or soft estate and there is a tradition stretching back to the 1950’s of high quality ground maintenance with promenading areas, playing fields and even an Italian sunken garden! This is especially apparent in aerial views of the site.

Dave Wilson who manages the landscape and who has previously appeared as the Beeman has a farming background and it seemed that there was something to think about. Marchday were interested in the ideas but we didn't really know how to develop them from nothing.

We felt that the business plans for the site ended at the perimeter walls of buildings. What was the business plan for the soft estate in addition to further development? Could it be possible to create new businesses producing food for consumption on the soft estate and altering and improving the ambience of the site for its workforce? This would be a 'city farm'.

We could see no practical way of opening a tree nursery, establishing a veg box scheme, establishing grazing or cropping other than to begin to use the device of Futurescope to produce images that made these ideas acceptable in what is a regenerating post industrial environment.

We are watching with interest an allotment project set as a partnership betwen Marchday and the Friends of the Earth as an experimental temporary growing space on the site and hoping that this can develop. Details here:http://www.downtheallotment.co.uk/content/allotment-land-darlington

As for Sheep and Grazing. Those who know me, know that sheep and grazing get a frequent mention when I'm pitching a scheme for landscape and they have learned when to apply a gag to stop the pitch going bad! Here are a few selected examples.

I first explored the idea in a disastrous 'public art' proposal for the never to be realised Tyne and Wear employment site in 2004. At the prompting of Mick Marsden, soil association rep for the North East and formerly of Byker City Farm in Newcastle, this was transformed into a concept for a butchery business selling locally and responsibly produced meat and providing training outputs in the transitional labour market.... The gateway features to the site would be cattle grids I explained...

Stock control, fencing, stiles, tethering posts, ha ha's and self-closing wooden gateways would replace the tedious ubiquity of the standard suite of urban street furniture brushed stainless steel, granite and asphalt... A la Gillespies, BDP, Edaw et al and... ta da... there would be no need for mowing!

The heart of the idea was that it would look like 'the countryside', that the 'design' would be produced by management (revenue rather than capital spending) and that the projects would be sustainable providing:- employment, produce and income or at least defraying costs. One of the concept aims was to improve the ambience of the site for everyone. To try and do this with a business rather than a big stainless steel thing. The ambient effect of this activity would hopefully be appreciated and engaged with by the people who would later work there and hopefully form emotional attachments to the site.

It sounded good to me until I pitched it to the regeneration people at South Tyneside. That was a reality check. I suspect that they wanted a big shiny stainless steel thing that in some kind of non specific way would say... Forward with South Tyneside! They did conceed however that it would aid traffic calming if fibreglass sheep were installed around the site!

The grazed car park idea got another outing with de Matos Ryan's (http://www.dematosryan.co.uk/) competition proposal for the remoddling of the Beamish visitor centre for which I acted as a public art consultant... how they must regret that! I don't think the car park was solely responsible for the pitch going bad but it is conceivable that it played a part. Nonetheless here is a visualisation of what the car park would have looked like if A. they had got the job and B. we hadn't been looked at as loonies! Stuff 'em I liked it and besides Beamish already own three farms. How straightforward is that!

Since then sheep have been 'proposed' to developers and local authorities one or two times.

The fact is however that Vista Projects has developed a Vegbox co-op in a scheme led by Lynn (http://www.vistaveg.co.uk/ if you are interested) and I have kept sheep as pets - our children loved them. So I know in a personal way that these things can work. Of course not in the 'expert consultanty' way that offers reassurance to the key people who, if they were to adopt these ideas, could really make a difference to the sustainability agenda.

So the thoughts about lambs as a product and specifically a food product with the idea that lambs raised on the site could be butchered and sold as food and the idea of creating images of lambs in this environment was among those that we included in our original list of images.

We wanted to make the suggestion that even in a modern environment such as huge refurbished offices it would be possible to manage landscape using agricultural processes.

The idea was simple, to juxtapose this environment with agriculture by herding sheep through new offices.

We are hugely grateful to everybody who made this possible (by pretending to work as normal!) and those who helped on the day. Taking the photographs was a load of fun and I have uploaded a flicker show showing what went on which you can view here. http://www.flickr.com/photos/vistaprojects/sets/72157624060537842/show/

Interestingly, in the offices that we used, all the meeting rooms carry the names of manufacturing processes relating to wool, carding, spinning etc. etc. etc. here are a set of images documenting these: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vistaprojects/sets/72157624121039426/show/

In each room there are huge photographs showing the previous life of the factory and as we drove the sheep through the offices we were struck by the extent to which their presence in the building touched upon the heritage of the site as described to me by John and George Grindley which is documented in earlier blog posts

This building was always all about wool.

During the shoot we encouraged the sheep to enter an orange lined breakout/meeting area by waving milk at them and as they did so bright orange light reflected upwards on their white fleeces. From this accident of light we selected the shot that we are using as Futurescope #4 Lingfield Lamb.

#8 Who loves the sun? Who cares that it makes plants grow?

2010-01-30T09:41:00.000-08:00

Futurescope #3 'Sun' will be a photograph of the Sun made by photographer Thierry Legault.

When we proposed Futurescope two years ago we intended to put an image of the sun into it at some stage.

We hadn't really decided what image to use this quarter until a few weeks ago. Our interest was in making a connection between plants/green space and solar energy upon which plant life (and therefore all of us, depend). We were also interested in the idea of placing an image of the sun on a building created to burn coal.

Until relatively recent times each civilisation has only used the energy of the sun only once as it falls on the surface of the planet. Our age has been different: we have used this energy twice.

We have used both sunlight and the solar energy stored/captured in fossil fuels.

Our economy is heavily dependent on the supply and consumption of these fuels and we have established a dependency on energy profligate lifestyles. Lingfield Point's 'Power House' is a 'temple' to that although the expense of running it is too great to bear now. Emerging carbon trading schemes place our use of fossil fuels at an economic premium and until very recently the environmental costs of exploiting this kind of 'stored' solar energy has not been a consideration and certainly wasn't an issue forseen by Paton and Baldwin when constructing the Power House sixty years ago.

The idea of including an image of the sun is part of the unfolding narrative that links to Beeman and Sunflowers, the previous images to have appeared in Futurescope. It is part of a speculative projection of a future world in which we would not be able to consume energy without dealing with consequences for ourselves that were not understood when this 'dependency' was established.

This is a future in which landscape (especially urban and post-industrial landscapes like that at Lingfield Point) would need to be productive without the energy of oil.

So back to the Thierry Legault's photograph. This is one of a batch of photographs taken by Thierry, showing the transit of the International Space Station across the sun. The first group were taken from the area of Mamers (Normandy, France) on September 17th 2006 at around 1:00pm local time and show the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis. Thierry's website contains his photograph showing the making of the some of the pictures. Transits such as this have given him a lot of subject matter.

We think that Thierry's image is an astonishing and significant picture and feel priveledged that he has generously given us permission to use it in this project.

Thierry documents the process of how these pictures began to be made here: http://astrosurf.com/legault/iss_atlantis_transit.html

By any standards this account demonstrates that this is an 'extreme' photograph. The very idea of pulling focus on an object so far away takes some beating! The image is all the more remarkable because the photographer could never have 'seen' it through the camera instead relying on a series of assumptions. In someways it was taken 'blind' which makes its beauty all the more compelling. The sun is a wan lemony gold and the image of the space craft a minuscule dot silhouetted against the vast mass of of the sun which is over a hundred times greater than the diameter of the earth.

It has a quality of absolute authenticity that many other contemporary images of the sun do not.

When we decided to approach Thierry for permission to use the image, we had been looking at and negotiating for the use of images taken from orbiting telescopes whose imagery is not affected by earth's atmosphere. Thierry's image shows the visual effect of atmosphere in ways that the images produced by Hubble and the Soho project do not.

http://hubblesite.org/

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120373_index_0_m.html

However having trawled through hundreds of such high tec tech images of the kind produced for release in the media we have become slightly suspicious of them and the pictorial conventions they observe. Thierry's image is astonishingly direct by comparison. It somehow matters that it was taken from the surface of the earth.

These other images are heavily produced to an extent where they might be regarded as a creative genre in themselves.

Hubble for example is perhaps best known for this image of the M16 'Eagle Nebula' NGC 6611, the so called: "Pillars of Creation." NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University). What is astonishing is the extent to which a knowledge of the history of the depiction of landscape is required to decide matters such as orientation, composition, colouring etc. in preparing an image for media release. When looking at this material we are looking at an interpretation of the material that is depicted. Not to mention the strapline 'Pillars of Creation' (they're only pillars because its this way up. Pinch yourself, remember there is no single downward source of gravity in the material that is depicted here! So 'pillars' is utter nonsense). It is well known that the universe is a volatile mix of energy, matter and time but still - crikey that's naff! Clearly they are not afraid of biblical hubris or undisciplined thinking at the University of Arizona!

Well if Thierry's photograph recalls anything for me it is Brueghel's masterpiece "The Fall of Icarus" which happens to be one of my favourite old master paintings. Icarus is to be seen upside down in the water a split second after 'splash-down' down legs sticking out of the sea having just fallen out of the sky (just below the ship in the bottom left in case you missed it!) The catastrophe that has befallen him has gone completely unnoticed by the farmer and everyone else in the picture!

It is a small incident that is shown as having gone largely unobserved by everyone except the artist.

#7 Meeting the Grindleys, Friday 13th November, 2.0 pm

2009-12-03T20:08:00.000-08:00

When John Grindley showed me round the underground passages at Lingfield Point he mentioned the family’s employment on the site that now spans three generations and I asked him then if it would be possible to meet his father. I’m really grateful to him for organising this and to Eddie for providing a room for the meeting.

John’s father, George (seen here on the right in Alistair Morrison’s terrific photograph – John is on the left.) first worked for Lingfield Point as an employee of Sir Alexander Gibb who with the contractors Laing’s designed and built the factory in the late 1940’s. George spoke of his experience during the war and how he was assigned work.

At the end of his assignment he had two job offers and his father advised him that Paton and Baldwins would be the best one to take because of the care and regard they had for their employees. Patons was a firm with generous pension benefits which George is enjoying today.

George’s whole working life has been taken up with commissioning and operation of the turbines connected to the power house building and the supply of steam around the site.

George’s retirement party was held in the turbine room in 1992 with the turbines themselves being cut apart with wrecking torches just two years later and sold by the receivers in 1994 for a paltry £10,000. Contemporary images show the ‘exhibition quality turbines’ at their peak in the 50’s. George is letting me have a video of this party which I hope to post on this blog eventually.

Although he did not expect the equipment to have a second lease of life during the British American Tobacco years he was devastated to learn of their destruction and glad that it followed his retirement and it had not been his job to supervise their decommissioning.

Talking to him I became acutely aware of the way in which employment practices have changed, the no expense spared approach at the time of the construction giving way to time and motion studies and cheeseparing by management consultants.

When we shot Futurescope 2 Beeman in the Turbine Hall we discovered a suspension file which recorded the procurement of the replacement components up to the 1970’s George knew the files much of it I suspect in George’s handwriting.

George worked at the site for over fifty years and it is inconceivable to me how anybody could work in a single location albeit for two employers for this duration of time. I hope he won’t be offended if I say that I almost feel that he lived in a different world. During our conversation which was full of anecdotes about people who could tell the breed of a sheep simply by touching a fleece, people who did not want to work the night shift, himself included (‘the night shift is for owls and prostitutes’).

The key issues were that in 1947 when the factory was built it was commissioned with machinery which had been ordered before the war and placed in storage until hostilities were over so that this somehow makes sense of the art deco feel of the design and the Ruth Ellis era (Rock and Roll just about to happen/teenagers not invented/hanging still a punishment for the

crime of murder) feel of the implementation.

He described not as I had expected a slow curve of decline to the dereliction which makes today’s development possible but a volatile sequence of plateaux and drops. Boom and Bust. Not decay.

When it was built Lingfield was ideally placed to benefit from the baby boom and the confidence as well as the paranoia of the cold war 1950’s and early 60’s rather than the gentle curve that I had expected of decline he described how the company had failed to anticipate how the textile market would respond to the introduction of synthetic fabrics.

These products precipitated a collapse in sales for wool product and led to the almost complete re-tooling of the production line.

George also explained how the company had stockpiled wool as a commodity and benefited from movements in price as a speculator.

When the Russian army decided to renew its entire stock of uniforms the world price for wool went through the roof and Lingfield’s stockpile gained £1 million of value over night.

The wool came from all over the place but most specifically from Paton’s interests in Australia. It was retailed through volume sellers specifically Marks and Spencer whose frequent inspections of production facilities were apparently the cause of a good deal of shop floor anxiety.

After the demise of wool production at the site George had expected the equipment and machinery to be decommissioned but the site was given a reprieve by British American Tobacco (Rothmans) who used the steam produced by the power house to manipulate humidity in their production process. It was only after BAT installed their own equipment that the power

house was finally decommissioned.

Amongst the anecdotes he mentioned one thing in particular which has been preying on my thoughts ever since:

On the crown of Unit 5 now re-branded Memphis by Marchday and let as accommodation for the Student Loan Company stood a huge golden and green neon beehive. Both John and George remembered seeing it from their sitting room windows and I asked them if they had any photographs in which it appeared - but they do not. I will be honest I am hunting for an image of this. If anybody in Darlington has a picture of this neon sign which was apparently thrown to the ground (decommissioned) I would be really grateful to see it. My contact details are christian@vistaprojects.co.uk.

When I asked George what the beehive meant there was no doubt in his mind that the image itself referred to the productive industry of bees as a social metaphor for how Lingfield Point worked and was conceived. The Beehive was an image of society.

#6 Beehive yourself

2009-09-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’ is the legend that appears beneath the corporate logo of Lyle’s Syrup and Treacle. It is hard today to think of any advertising agency who would allow the image of a bee colony in the rotting corpse of a dead lion and a turn of phrase that might be considered a bit ‘pulpit’ to be considered as a brand image and survive in post… but times have changed.

There is in fact a long tradition of bees in marketing. Bees are ‘productive’ and ‘well-organised’. They make sweet food out of flowers and they pollinate plants. We call them ‘workers’, ‘soldiers’, ‘drones’ and of course they have a bit of royalty! In naming them we transfer an image of our own society to them along with recognition of our own values, systems and hierarchies as if to say that they are like us and we are like them. One big happy family where everyone knows what they are doing. The image of bees has been a metaphor for productivity in commercial hands to an extent where it is almost a part of the language of corporate communication. It should of course be obvious to anyone that we are nothing like bees.

It is no co-incidence that it was for a long-time the corporate symbol of the Co-operative society. Bees and people bonded together in a virtuous cycle of production and exchange. A symbiotic relationship in which status is exchanged between the parties…Producers and consumers. Obviously I’m a bit unclear on what it is exactly that we as consumers put back into this relationship!

Perhaps bees are also a metaphor for social stability and I wonder if this was behind the choice of a beehive as the corporate logo for Paton and Baldwin former owners and developers of the Lingfield Point site.

The brand is now owned by coates crafts so I’ve called to ask them what its origins were and I’ll add to the blog if and when I hear back.

Paton and Baldwin was created by the merger in 1920 of two companies founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based in Alloa and Halifax. The two brands ‘Paton’s Rose’ and ‘Baldwin’s Beehive’ survived and you can buy Patons knitting products now (They are emblazoned with a beehive). If you don’t believe me look it up! http://www.coatscrafts.co.uk/Products/Knitting/patons/eco_cotton.htm.

At Lingfield the legacy of this brand is still felt in the naming of buildings. ‘The Beehive’ is the former theatre building. Now let as offices to among others, the naafi, a mezzanine has been constructed in the former auditorium to provide office space but the proscenium arch is still visible and the glorious plaster cartouche that emblazoned the hall has been restored beautifully. There flanked by the masks of comedy and tragedy the beehive corporate logo of Paton and Baldwin graces what was formerly a theatre venue.
Perhaps too there is something slightly transgressive or at least indulgent about bees and honey. We know when we eat it, that like Winnie the Poo, we are gluttons spoiling ourselves but that our greed could come at a terrible price as the swarm seeks revenge. Am I going too far? Think about this the next time you are asked for your nectar card!

In China, where agricultural practices are different to those relied on in the west, pollination is often done by hand which in view of the colony failures happening now might well become part of our future in agriculture too. The huge road trains that drive bee colonies around the Midwestern states are in commercial trouble. The Bees are dying… This forms part of that group of stories around our changing ecology which is such an important component of our current cultural and media environment. It is clear that when we talk about bees we are quick to find a moral narrative - isn’t that odd?

Bees of course know nothing about all this nonsense! (A.) They can't think and (B.) the only symbiotic relationship they have is with flowers.

People are nothing to them.

John and I first started thinking about bees when an architect called Joshua Bolshover presented a competition entry to Tees Valley Arts and Middlesbrough Council for a treatment of the ruderal verges of the A66 in Middlesbrough around the Cargo Fleet interchange in which he proposed bee keeping as an urban farming project which could feasibly be carried out on a trunk road. We were encouraging this line of thinking which is to say we had written the creative brief in a way that allowed a design response about productive urban landscape, but didn’t dare suggest livestock and hadn’t thought of bees! Bees he suggested would cause no damage to moving vehicles and there would be no need for fences and so on. He devised an elaborate ‘toolkit’ for verge maintenance to include hives as part of a suite of outdoor furnishings together with interpretation and of course wildflower planting. He called his proposal A66 nectar! It was a great idea beautifully expressed, exquisitely designed and although it won him an interview it didn’t get picked because (A.) it wasn’t a thing on a roundabout by an artist and (B.) it would probably have been too much trouble and for some other reasons that (er) I just can’t get into here. Anyway it was a fantastic proposal and he deserves a plug so check him out at http://www.newbetter.co.uk/.

From this point on Beekeeping became a subject of interest. My next door neighbour keeps bees and makes honey and I’ve had a good neb about at them and all the kit that is involved. She charges £4.00 for a jar which is a bit rich considering that it is probably made from our flowers.

We are thinking about letting someone else keep bees in our garden (but what happens if the kids get stung?) and various artists have mentioned it. Olaf Nicolai for example once spoke to me about his commissioned designs for hives from various architects and there is a great project currently going on in Liverpool with artist Kerry Morrison for the New Heartlands area. Bees and bee mythology are clearly ‘on trend!’ http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=111687772545

When the first Futurescope was going up we were looking at the land in front of the Power House where a significant quantity of subsoil from the construction of the new road was being dumped/stored. (Road traffic engineers never think about what to do with the waste produced by their ‘designs’ and they don’t want to pay £6.50 a ton for landfill if they can avoid it! So with poor fertility and no established sward of grass we suggested that it might form a good growing medium for either wild-flowers or Sunflowers (but we were too late with this idea).

I am suspecting now that Eddie Humphries site manager at Lingfield is possibly not grateful for this suggestion because all did not go well… The scattered seed was immediately eaten by the wretched pigeons that live in the Power House. When it comes to ecosystems it’s a dog eat dog world. However, now that summer is drawing to a close the wildflowers are in bloom and (except for the places where they been eaten) they look beautiful. There is a broad mix of cornflowers, poppies and daisies and plenty of butterflies too.

There is another intervention as well - for Lingfield Point is branching out into beekeeping for real! The first three hives are installed at a top secret location on site (I have to say this for security reasons) and there are plans to produce and sell the honey. To which end the grounds team (Aka Willy) has kitted himself out with beekeeping gear, gloves, meshes, smokers (which make them drowsy) and has been reading up on it. Watch this space.
There is a magic in the incongruity of beekeeping on an industrial site but it is a fact that the brown-field is a haven for wildlife and part of a productive landscape whose potential for development needs to provide for and respect living things.

Christian Barnes
August/September 2009

#5 A walk with John Grindley on the 19 August and some other thoughts.

2009-09-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

We have been thinking about the people who work at Lingfield Point for the October/December 2009 Futurescope image. At one point when we were doing the Sunflowers we discussed the idea of working with a group of people who work on the Lingfield site. We had thought about asking them to stand around in a circle and taking a photo looking upwards so that the picture would look very like the sunflower picture. Who works at Lingfield is very interesting. A few of Lingfield’s people have worked there for a very long time.

I described the idea for the image to Marchday’s people and they suggested I ask John Grindley to show me round.

John Grindley’s family has worked at Lingfield Point for three generations. John’s Grandfather was clerk of works on the build after World War Two. His father was the Chief Engineer and John works as part of the Lingfield Security Team.

It’s an understatement to say that he knows the place well. He knows it like the back of his hand and then he knows some more about it.

That concept of long service is something that I really have not got any experience of and it’s a tragic that it’s so hard for people to work this way now sustaining a commitment to a place for such a long time and that’s not to say that John was sentimental.

I described the idea for the picture to John and asked if he could think of good locations to stage it. I drew him a quick sketch of the Beatles ‘Please Please Me’ album cover as a starting point.

He suggested looking at the soap dock lift. The Soap Dock is the first building that faces you as you drive in from the east on the new road. When Paton and Baldwin’s ran the site this is where the fleeces would be delivered, sorted and according to their grade sent to the right floor. Like a lot of the old interiors at Lingfield it is brilliantly painted in blue and yellow which the flash on my camera made more vivid.

We moved on and John showed me the vast network of underground tunnels (miles of them) whose job was to carry services and steam around the site conditioning the atmosphere and giving the right humidity in different places to maintain the right level of moisture in the wool in the factory floors above.

John described in detail the electric vehicles used in the passages and explained the expansion pipes, and fittings. He explained that this control of humidity is what had made the site attractive to Rothmans and that after wool production had ceased tobacco became the new business on site with the steam from the power building and turbine hall being piped around like a giant humidor.

The conversation has changed my understanding of the site. Like anyone who looks at it from the outside it looks like a collection of buildings to me but from the labyrinth below it looks like a machine clad in brick curtain walls.

We stopped at a bay where he pointed out a chalked up inscription ‘END OF THE LINE 1978’. It marks the spot where the last batch of wool was stored before going up to the factory above. He regretted that someone had brushed over it and that a little bit of history had been lost.

As we walked about underground exploring I couldn’t help feeling that the whole place was like the kind of air raid shelter that people had turned the London Underground into during World War Two and it was then that he said something that astonished me. He said that as Clerk of Works his Grandfather had been involved in the specification of the buildings in 1949. The factory site had been constructed to withstand bombing. These tunnels would have been available to workers and nearby residents as bomb shelters in the event of attack and were designed with this secondary purpose in mind and that the whole factory was also designed to be used for the manufacture of munitions and aeroplanes in the event of war. Its proximity to the air base that is now Durham Tees Valley Airport was key to this. He said that during World War Two it had been understood that the impact of bombing on the Axis powers had been to reduce their industrial output to a point where they could no longer maintain their war effort. This had informed the layout of the buildings and open spaces on site. They were placed and engineered to withstand, contain and deflect explosions.

Lingfield Point could have withstood direct aerial bombardment and maintained production.
This was part of the performance specification to which the original designers had worked.
The design of Lingfield Point can be directly linked to the Cold War period, which is obvious but I just hadn’t thought of it that way.

I have always felt that from the outside Lingfield Point looks a little like a cross between an air force base and a holiday camp! But everything about the building has a quality to it. The brick is an engineering grade with an unusual fleck in the surface and hard to break. The finish is high quality but as we had been looking at the unused air conditioning plants and the interiors (We had come out of the underground passage and onto the mezzanine floor of the turbine hall.) something else really struck me - the confidence of the builders and the energy of the 1950’s. The specification of the interior materials is lavish. The mezzanine of the turbine hall for example is laid with terrazzo and the walls are part tiled with an elegant Italian ceramic tile while the paint schemes are pastel blue coloured with strong accent colours in red and ochre.

Nothing here was sorry for itself when it was made!

If it looks like a wartime base on the outside on the inside it is as lavish as a Hillman car with two tone paint job and white walled tyres… I’m even wondering if there are interior designers who specialise in Power Stations!

John said that it was deafening when the turbines were running and he explained the use of now discarded pieces of equipment in supplying the national grid. There is nothing there now other than the odd pigeon and the hum of the still operational substations. It is like standing in a library.

I remember being told how much it cost to supply the coal for the boilers that ran the turbines (Of course now that I’m writing up my blog I can’t remember how much exactly it was but it was either thirty or fifty thousand pounds a day at least it was a lot of money and if anyone wants to put me straight on the exact figure email Lingfield and I’ll update it!)

As John Kennedy and closed the door on the building today after location shooting John said that it felt like we had been in a building that was built as a temple to energy. Energy and particularly sustainability issues are a big theme in our work and have a lot to do with our ideas for Futurescope.

I think a lot of people in Darlington will know this place and perhaps that those that don’t would be interested in what is on the inside. One thing is certain the buildings need showing to people somehow. As well as being about people working at Lingfield and the changes that are afoot we want the next image to show the inside on the outside.

Christian Barnes
9 September 2009

#4 A blow to the eye!

2009-06-19T01:16:00.000-07:00

When John and I were discussing what the first picture should be we felt that it should have several properties. Although we want people to become involved in making the pictures the first one has to set a standard and level of expectation about what could happen with these pictures as their content is not pre-determined. So for us first of all, the entire image itself needed to be different from a normal picture.

The idea of Futurescope is that it would be like looking through a distorting mirror and would not be like looking at a 'normal' picture.

John and I wanted Futurescope to have something of this about it as if , when you looked, it might appear to be looking through a hole in the building itself towards a distant framed vision of a future landscape and environment.

We were thinking about reflecting pools, we were thinking about telescopes, we were thinking about distorting mirrors and we were thinking about technology. There are some great panoramas of Mars that have this distant and remote manipulated character about them. The odd thing is that a very small machine made the baseline imagery from which these images are composed but it is possible to imagine, whilst looking at them, that the machine is big in relation to the planet it is photographing!

We liked the idea of a distorting ‘Trompe l’oeil’ effect so that when people saw the picture it would not have the usual pictorial impact but would still have recognisable content. We also wanted to deal with how the image could be ‘composed’ in relation to a circular shape.

Trompe l’oeil means ‘a blow to the eye’ - a term used in art to describe a picture that is so ‘real’ it can deceive people into thinking that they are looking at real things and it has a great tradition of being used in paintings that relate to architecture.

At some point in these discussions one of John's assistants came up with a device that would manipulate the polar co-ordinates of square photographs and turn them into circles. So we started working with the idea.

One of John's photographs of the sky with meadow grass in the foreground really hit the spot and this was the starting point for the first image. It makes a great comparison with the Martian picture!

Then we got back to talking about energy crops - finally - settling on Sunflowers.

#3 Sunflowers

2009-06-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

One of the themes that we identified for picture content in Futurescope is growing crops for both their appearance and their food value. Productive parkland if you like.

We have as a family quite a bit of experience of growing sunflowers and first tried it on our allotment at home. My eldest son was four at the time and alongside the onions, potatoes, raspberries, cabbages etc. that we were growing for the table we made him a flower bed full of the kind of plants that like to ‘show off’, pumpkins, sweet peas and, of course: sunflowers. It was a boiling summer and we went away on holiday so when we came back the allotment was massively overgrown. Most impressive of all was my son’s flower bed.

When he saw it he turned round and said that ‘all his plants had escaped!’ The pumpkins had climbed out from beyond the border of the bed and the sunflowers were at least twice as tall as he was. It had all looked very different only a fortnight earlier.

The energy of plants is fantastic and thinking about the idea of plants that could be used as a crop something that would look both decorative and be productive we thought about several for Futurescope like Hybrid Willow and Miscanthus which are grown as biomass crops for carbon free energy production. We thought about rape (and rapeseed oil) and flower cropping. We had discussed sunflowers specifically in relation to our ideas for the greenspace between Falkirk and Grangemouth.

I also remember driving through Italy on honeymoon over 10 years ago and seeing sunflowers grown as a crop for the first time.

During the day their heads would follow the path of the sun and it was almost impossible not to regard them as people with faces. We stopped and took loads of photos.

We settled on sunflowers in the end because they are so beautiful and because we felt that people would think positively about them. Hopefully people will think of them as something decorative and something natural that they themselves might have pleasant memories of.

We see this kind of planting and thinking as being a potential future for the management of urban green space and we think that there is a point where grounds management and productive farming could meet.

We think that this is the future of how the spaces between buildings in cities could be managed and we think that it is a positive future.

We are very optimistic about this future.

We have loads of Sunflower seeds to give away. Please plant yours and when you have photos post them to the Futurescope page on Facebook.

#2 What is Futurescope?

2009-06-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

Futurescope is an outdoor exhibition of eight massive circular photographs one after the other over the next two years on the Lingfield Point power plant building facing the A66 devised by Christian Barnes and John Kennedy as Lead Artists in discussion with Tees Valley Arts.

Futurescope is intended to catalyse a ‘Cultural, Arts and Ecological Strategy’ for Marchday at Lingfield Point, Darlington and to inform long term thinking for the site.

‘Futurescope’ is predicated on the idea that we want to develop a relationship with Lingfield Point that lasts over time and to develop and share our creative vision for urban brown field landscape.

The images will be changed with the seasons.

The pictures will explore the possibilities of the site and its working environment in cultural and ecological terms. They will be selected/made during the life of the project (not predetermined) and could respond to developments on site.

The images will be cultural and ecological ‘propaganda’ about Lingfield Point intended to be visible to a wide cross section of Darlington’s residents and visitors.

We want to propose and envision behavioural change that will lead to the productive and economic use of the soft estate at Lingfield Point. From ‘Lingfield Organics’, to grazing by ‘Lingfield Lamb’, to wild flower and renewable energy cropping. We want to explore how such images can change our mindset and habitat and move to the negotiation of a new and stronger relationship with the people of Darlington and the Tees Valley for the Lingfield Point site. A relationship fit for purpose in the 21st Century.

We think these concerns are close to the development propositions that will make the site a success in the future. ‘Futurescope’ will also touch a building that is being considered for development as a cultural venue with a unique and highly memorable art project.

Put simply ‘Futurescope’ is about how we envisage that Lingfield Point could be reinvented, populated and managed. It is about the future and not the past. We really hope people enjoy it.

We see the opportunity for ‘doing business’ to continue into the extensive and under utilised soft estate in such a way that a perception of Lingfield Point and its accessibility to the community slowly negotiates new development propositions (including social enterprise) in a beneficial way that can be realised in the real economy. We think that the green parts have a greater value than is currently being envisaged and we feel that the soft estate (developed against an ecological, social and cultural agenda) can be central to the eventual creation of a live/work environment that realises the full potential of the site in an original and unique way.

‘Futurescope’ is wholly focussed on this idea.

We are excited and inspired by Marchday’s future vision for the site which projects an economic life for Lingfield Point beyond the oil age as an employment site where people live and play as well as work.

It is this that gives us our subject.

What will this habitat really look and feel like?

We want to engage with the company and local people in imagining and projecting this future. It is not a simple future.

#1 HOW DID FUTURESCOPE COME ABOUT?

2009-05-28T15:12:00.000-07:00

Futurescope and the first big picture might come as a surprise to people who see it for the first time and knew nothing about it. So it’s maybe important to describe how it came about. It has been quite a long time in the making.

In 2001 Marchday who now own Lingfield Point invested in an opportunity for an artist to light their seventeen story office block building ‘Centre North East’ in Middlesbrough. The company had acquired the building after it had lain empty for years after its biggest tenant the Secretary of State quit the building.

Marchday spent millions re-cabling the building and equipping it as a call centre but were worried that its visibility in Middlesbrough had fallen away. At that time I was approached by what was then Cleveland Arts (now Tees Valley Arts) and Arts & Business on the recommendation of Commissions North to manage a process to recruit a lighting artist to create an innovative lighting scheme for the building.

This process lead to the appointment of Ron Haselden whose proposal called ‘Rose’ (a new pink neon colour) saw neon strips installed through the seventeen stories of the tower. Although the project attracted a lot of comment, and not all of it favourable, the building looked for the first time in a long time as if it were open for business and shortly afterwards it was let to Garlands.

Centre North East now provides an important employment site for Middlesbrough and has been a contributor to the regeneration of the town centre. Marchday were pleased with the result, felt that the artwork had supported their investment and helped make their building a source of conspicuous interest.

As we were completing the commission in Middlesbrough they brought me to their newly acquired property in Darlington, Lingfield Point. I remember the visit well, because I could not see how anything could be done with it. It was so vast and so derelict. The sheer scale of it and the knowledge that so many people (10,000) had been employed there was astonishing as was the scale of its dereliction.

We discussed the idea of trying to raise the visibility of the site from the A66 by creatively lighting the eastern perimeter but I knew it would not work because the fields between the A66 and the site were in separate ownership and unless we could get the owners to cut their hedges and keep them low all our work and effort would be wasted!

The site was vast. I have never been under such a big roof and although a lot of it has been remodelled now I still remember a ‘secret’ but vast acreage under one roof let to British American Tobacco.

I also remember walking round with Marchday looking at the ‘Beehive’ which was then derelict and it felt like I was walking round a place built during the war although it is actually a bit newer than that. It was like a mix between a massive RAF base and Pontin’s. I loved the ‘Art Deco’ grandeur of the HQ building and took photo’s of the beautiful lamps in the main entrance!

I came away with absolutely no idea of how anything could be done… and that…. 8 or 9 years ago was the starting point for Futurescope!

Since then I have continued to work as a public art consultant in Middlesbrough and have regularly driven past it looking across the fields and thinking about it - still not seeing what could be done for a couple of years and also feeling a bit embarrassed that I had been presented with this opportunity and failed to make anything of it.

During this time I worked on other projects in the north of the UK and in Scotland and then in 2007 I saw that along the line of the former Stockton to Darlington railway a new road was being built. I thought about it and I realised that it changed everything about the site.

This new road might replace Yarm Road as a new gateway to Darlington from the East. Instead of being the last thing you saw in Darlington (and that from across a field) Lingfield Point had become the first thing you would see on your way in.

I wrote to Marchday and asked if I could have another look at it and they were kind enough to say yes.

When I went back to the site everything about it had changed. When I first went there were only a handful of caretaker staff now at least 2,500 people work on the site. Big companies like Capita and the Student Loan Company had taken significant leases. The derelict theatre had been completely refurbished and was now a constituency office for Alan Milburn MP it is also let out to some great creative businesses, architects and so on.

Marchday had transformed the McMullen Road end adding colour renders to the walls, naming and segmenting the buildings into letting units. The site was really attractive and bit by bit I could see that by doing business it was being brought back to life. I was (and I still am) astonished at the scale of this achievement.

However, all the work that had gone into the McMullen Road end made it look like a ‘front of house’ and the back of the site with buildings like the Turbine Hall around the area of the Soap Dock on the Eastern side still feels untouched by regeneration. However this back end had somehow now become the front of the site because the new road opened up access to it on the approach to Darlington and this created a great opportunity for more development.

Marchday talked about their vision for the site in the future as a live/work environment and I came away feeling that we had lots to think about. I think it is important to say this because people often think that creative projects can be commissioned just like that. This one had plenty of false starts and has taken eight years to get together.