Time & Tide Bells; Trinity Buoy Wharf

 Time & Tide Bells; Trinity Buoy Wharf

 

 

Antony Gormley is the pre-eminent artist of the tidal foreshore, where land and sea converge. He has positioned 100 iron casts of his body (as usual) on a beach in Merseyside, spaced out over 2 miles.

 

The figures are wholly exposed at low tide and fully submerged at high tide. The figures are neither waving, nor drowning, and they are certainly not King Canutes. They are poignant occupiers of the watery, sandy, liminal space

 

There’s another artist who is interested in the tides. He’s Marcus Vergette, and he’s created sea-bells that ring when the tide rises. Fixed in position either on beaches, or harbour sides, the bells are all of one clever design. 

 

The waves of the tide agitate a long rod attached to a clapper, which conventionally strikes the bell. But, by the miracle of the bell’s unique shape, the sonic result is a series of different notes, rather just a repeated one-note “bong”.

 

The aim of the artist, now backed by a charitable project https://timeandtidebell.org, is to place bells in various locations around Britain’s coasts.

 

The bells are intriguing art installations in their own right: in the Gormley tradition, but bells, not bodies. They are also intended to provoke reflection on rising sea levels, and the cause of that – global warming.

 

The Tide & Tide Bell in London is of course by the side of the tidal Thames. It is positioned in the intriguingly named Trinity Buoy Wharf https://www.trinitybuoywharf.com.

 

The Wharf is a relic, more or less, of London’s old docklands. Its near neighbour is a small park set about the remains of the East India Dock. This was built at the beginning of the C19 to take the ships bringing goods and booty from India and beyond. Opposite the Dock, across the Thames, looms the huge and preposterous shape of the Dome/O2 Arena, a truly jarring visual counterpart.

 

Close beside the Park, and hard against Trinity Buoy Wharf, pushes another non-watery, tide. This is one of the relentless large building sites of the Docklands. Office blocks being now out of fashion, what is going up are expensive apartment blocks.

 

Bits of the old still cling to the edges of the river. The Wharf is one such bit, though far from unchanged.

 

It sits on a corner where the River Lea flows into the Thames, so with water on three sides, due to a sharp final bend in the Lea. It is an area of middling size.

 

For nearly 200 years, up towards the end of the C20, it was the working waterside base of Trinity House. Trinity House is one of those ancient and peculiar British institutions: a corporation charged in Tudor times with protecting the maritime world from unfortunate encounters with the shores of our Island, and the treacherous areas of our coastal waters and estuaries. 

 

Trinity House was, and is, responsible for building and maintaining lighthouses, lightships and buoys marking channels or dangers.

 

When the London Docks, as destinations of commercial shipping, faded away, Trinity Buoy Wharf faded away too, into dereliction. 

 

Great schemes were set afoot, in the 1980s and 1990s, to regenerate the Docklands. The regeneration has given us the soulless financial centre of Canary Wharf, and miles of redevelopment along the Thames, and now North to Stratford.

 

These days the Wharf is a place of artistic workshops and studios (or would be in normal times) and the improbable location of a small private junior school (playing field on the roof). 

 

It has a few traces of its heritage. There’s an old lighthouse, which was used for training lighthouse men, and on which the great electrical scientist Faraday experimented with lighting systems and optics. There are some old vessels – tugboats, and a magnificent retired lightship, now a recording studio.

 

And, of course, the Bell.

 

Feb 2021