History of Orford Ness

Emily Richardson



Emily Richardson, UK: “Petrolia” (Still), 16mm film, 2005

• Excerpt of Memo Mori on Youtube
• Emily Richardson website
• Richardson's Cobra Mist [on Orford Ness]

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber from Laure Vermeersch on Vimeo.

Cyprien Gaillard, Dunepark (2009)

Newcastle Central Library

Almost secret entrance

© Copyright Mark Smiles and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Demolition video already posted here.

OK, it was hardly glamorous but once the thrill of large open interior space wears off, the new building feels like a cross between a duty free outlet and a sixth form center, but with more noise. Every effort has been made to disguise the fact that this is a library.

Birmingham City Library

John Madin's remarkable 1974 Birmingham Central Library is set to be demolished. A new glittery library is on offer, but where's the improvement? Not sure what the move to replace a flak tower with a tissue box tells us about contemporary urban space.

• Paul Dale, 'End in sight for Birmingham Library after Government refuses listed status,' Birmingham Post, Nov 23 2009.
• English Heritage response, Nov 23 2009.
• Promotional site for the proposed new Library of Birmingham, including interviews with children speaking as if, without the new library, there will be no books in the city for them to read.

Gateshead Trinity Square Car Park

Thompson of Prudhoe have got the job of demolishing this beast.

Thompson promise time-lapse footage of the demolition. The video of the Newcastle library demolition can be seen here. The new library is shiny but the old one was resplendently 'fuck off.' As Owen Hatherley points out in The Guardian, the car park is making way for a Tesco store with student flats on top. There's a form of beligerence in that, too, but it's nowhere near as bracing as stacked concrete parking spaces.

John Madin

BBC documentary on the Birmingham Brutalist from 1965.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)

Wrecked piers, empty swimming pools, drought, gangs of street kids, it's all here.

'Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor.'

--J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Clearly what Ballard needed was a board.

• Good pool skating stuff at Blue Tile Obsession.
• Also see Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (Berg, 2001).

Blyth Battery

Disinformation: Blackout

Bunker Busters

This last one is truly terrifying.

Marcel Breuer

Whitney Museum, New York, NY (1966)

British Pathe: Attack on a Pill Box (1941)

The Boros Collection

See also David Sokol, 'Bunker Chic,' Metropolis Magazine, Oct 17, 2007.

World War I Pillbox with Office

© Copyright Keith Evans and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Pillbox IoE 466394. World War I Pillbox, Haddiscoe, Norfolk. Built of concrete with steel doors c.1916. A mid C20 weather-boarded office building was built on top. This pillbox guarded St Olave's bridge.

ROC Post Winterton, Norfolk

SubBrit ROC Database Brief history and a database of all ROC posts in the UK

23 Post Skelmorlie Restored ROC post in Ayrshire, Scotland

ROC Post Internal Diagram circa 1962

ROC Remembered

Living in a Fallout Shelter

Orford Ness

German Fortifications: The Atlantic Wall