In 2019, as part of the National Trust’s ‘People’s Landscape’ celebrations, New Writing North and Durham Book Festival invited writers to apply for a residency on Durham’s ‘radical coast’. This dramatic 11-mile coastal stretch from Seaham to Hartlepool, now designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, including rare Magnesian Limestone grasslands, wildflower meadows and ancient wooded denes, was once the site of several of Durham’s last deep coal mines. Notorious for its ‘black beaches’ and perhaps the worst-polluted landscape in Europe, in the late 1990s it underwent an immense transformation, with the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of colliery spoil in a multi-agency clean-up, ‘Turning the Tide’. That transformation is still underway, particularly within the coastal communities, some of England’s most economically-deprived, the ‘Billy Elliot’ country of the 1984-5 miners’ strike and subsequent pit closures. The sequences that comprise Sea Change respond to the commission’s invitation ‘to look beyond’ that recent history, and imagine future prospects for the area.
In this conversation, the authors compare their approaches to the commission, and discuss their relationship to each other as writers, as the project developed.
Katrina: Phoebe, our first meeting took place in Horden, in August 2019. You were beginning the second week of your residency. We spent the afternoon drinking tea at the Welfare Park, walking in the Dene, and gluing pieces of felt onto a miners’ picnic banner with the Creative Youth Opportunities group, to which you kindly invited me. To those children, miners were distant figures – hard-to-imagine grandas in their youth. I was interested to know how you would tackle this complicated project, not least because of the differences in our backgrounds and the more than 30 years’ age gap between us. I was about your age when the miners’ strike finished, while you were born some years after it. What made you apply for the commission?
Phoebe: Before starting this project I didn’t know very much about the history of north-east mining, the strikes or even the geology of coal. At the beginning of my visit, a couple of ex-miners invited me on a walk with them along the coast and the technical terminology they used to describe the underground engineering of the mines was baffling. This, together with their very personal and embodied sense of the landscape then and now, taking in its depths as much as its surfaces, was quite difficult to relate to initially. In other contexts, such as participating in a beach clean to remove (mostly plastic) pollution, the relationships between people and the environment were more readily identifiable, happening right now rather than half-hidden in the past. For me, as a non-local, the process of excavation required an attitude of openness, listening and asking questions. Much of my finished piece is based on encounters and dialogue, and I think it was partly the potential for these conversations that corresponded with my creative interests and drew me to apply for the project. I’m very interested in how what people say, and how they say it, can reveal unexpected connections or resonate with broader issues. I had a hunch that the kinds of dialogue going on at this wonderfully complex, confused stretch of coast would have important links to issues of fossil fuel use, biodiversity loss and pollution – urgent topics that are nevertheless intimidating to try to address through poetry. The Durham Coast offers the messy truth of the mining legacy by presenting a landscape in process: baring the scars of our industrial dependence for all to see, it’s a very visible example of our struggling, partly-successful and uncertain attempt to move ourselves into a sustainable future.
This is a cultural and social struggle as much as an ecological one, which was helpful to discuss with you, Katrina. You grew up nearby and were the writer-in-residence once before, twenty years ago during the millennium ‘Turning the Tide’ project. Your understanding of the communities here is much more long-standing than mine. I wonder if you could talk more about how you relate to the coast’s cultural identity and people. How did your previous experience of the coast, including the first residency, inform your approach towards our project?
Katrina: My role for ‘Turning the Tide’ was on a different scale to our short residency. It lasted for two years, 1999-2000, and involved collecting stories and quotations from local residents, providing research for information panels, writing lines for Michael Johnson’s sculptures at Seaham, and creating poems for an exhibition and book. But that was not the beginning for me. My grandfather was a miner in East Durham and my mother’s family still lived there when I was a child. My memories are of a deeply conflicted landscape, still largely agricultural: the windswept beauty of the Magnesian Limestone grassland, ancient lanes deep in hawthorn, old farms and secret, garlic-smelling wooded denes, contrasted with towering pit-head gear, blue heaps and soot blackened red brick rows of impenetrable villages. The coast itself was a hellish no-man’s-land of black slurry dumped from endless overhead conveyors. The landscape seemed brutalised. The people I knew there were conflicted, too: proud to belong to a mining community, but determined that their sons should work elsewhere.
We used to visit my widowed Nan, and my mother’s sister, who married a miner and had a daughter a little older than I. We played on the black cinder path which ran between two villages, the miners’ pigeons wheeling overhead. I remember feeling very loved and safe there. What I didn’t know was that the Council had designated many of the villages ‘Category D’, which meant that they were actively encouraged to die as the coal ran out. The impact this had on people’s lives was tremendous. In my mother’s family that was especially true for the women. My mother and her sister had qualified for grammar school but, as girls, could not go. Nevertheless, my mother left the village, became a nurse in Durham, married a doctor. I grew up with many more advantages and became the first person in my mother’s family to go to university. I felt an unbridgeable gulf between my own experiences and a community that I viscerally loved, and that depended on an industry whose effects on people and landscapes I loathed. At the same time, there was for me a suffocating intimacy in the close-knit mining village. Here was another tangle of contradictions. We do not talk much about class these days, but it is deeply written in the DNA of this country.
When it came to our residency, I wanted to explore what a new generation carries forward from such a strong cultural identity when the industry at its very heart is gone. Phoebe, you are of a post-coal generation yourself. You and I both see in the Durham landscape a microcosm for processes which might help heal aspects of the greater environmental crisis and open up what you call ‘an ecologically sustainable future’. I have long believed that human culture and society are an inseparable part of ecology, and I particularly agree with what you say about the miners’ ‘embodied’ sense of landscape. That is so true. I wonder, then, what you think a writer’s place is in relation to this ecological crisis, either at a local or a global level – our moral responsibility, if you like?
Phoebe: I found the Durham Coast a helpful subject to think through these issues because of its specificity: of place, of people, of history. Poetry, for me, creates meaning through attention to concrete detail. Rather than trying to predict the future or make generalisations about what is going on with our relationship to the environment, I want to identify the particular, without judgement, and present it for the reader to draw her own conclusions. My emphasis on heterogeneity – what you call ‘all the contradictions’ in your poem, ‘Wildlife’ – tries to present tiny, subjective and partial fragments of the picture in a way that is true, rather than resolved. One of the reasons for this approach is to make room for hopeful, genuine narratives of our capacity for wonder and co-living in our ecosphere, without losing sight of what has been exploited, and why.
Katrina, your sequence draws on the experiences of many young people, our ‘big sisters’, ‘granddaughters’, Brownies and bairns. Some might have ‘no word for bluebell or cowslip’, while their granda’s mining lexicon feels prehistoric to them, fast fading from use. On the one hand they represent a technological future, concerned with Insta, apps and emojis. Yet in your final poem, it is the cameras that help Holly to stay still, teaching her ‘how to look’ at the butterfly, and in different ways these children are as embedded in their landscape as their grandparents. I wonder if you could talk more about why it felt important to bring in young people’s voices, and how you view their relationship with previous generations?
Katrina: Like you, I approach poetry from listening. Our commission asked us to ‘look beyond’ recent history, so I wanted to hear the views of children and younger people, to find out what matters to them in their place, and how they see their future. As well as the Youth Group we visited, making banners for a miners’ picnic where there were no miners, I spent a morning in a primary school in Horden, and an afternoon at an arts centre with Easington Brownies and Guides, who had been working with a photographer on a marvellous heritage project. My own background is in history, and I am aware of how deeply social and cultural identity were damaged in the coastal villages following the 1980s strike and subsequent pit closures. But for small children, as for nature itself, places are not about the past. They accept the world as they find it, the starting-point for their onward momentum. So there was a lovely freshness in the children’s point of view.
This is a perspective that was deeply important to Romantics like Wordsworth; but it is complicated. For all of us, as we grow up and become more aware of history, what we do with it matters. It is important to use the past constructively, neither to ignore it nor to wallow in nostalgia. What I loved about the banner-making project was that it allowed a group of children to connect with their cultural legacy and reinterpret it through their own creativity. Similarly, the heritage project allowed another group to understand their past through their own small discoveries in the physical landscape, using, as you say, cameras. By reinterpreting the past through such personal encounters, the children were carrying a common cultural identity forward. That can be a restorative process, and landscape, nature and place are completely central to that social and cultural healing.
So, yes, I agree with you that the children I met are as embedded in their landscape as their grandparents. But I would qualify that by suggesting that, as they grow into their teens and young adulthood, for most, that vital physical connection with nature diminishes. The teenagers I spoke to remained strongly part of their community, identifying as ‘belonging Horden’ or ‘belonging Easington’; but that community, or extended family, seemed less connected to its physical landscape. You quote one boy, with a slightly ironic sense of the commonplace: ‘Kids these days, they’re always on their phones.’ The miners’ outdoor pastimes, like allotment gardening, competitive leek-growing and pigeon-keeping, are not taken up by the young. The old ‘pitmatic’ dialect names for birds and plants are disappearing. As Robert Macfarlane noted when the Oxford Junior Dictionary replaced words like ‘bluebell’ and ‘acorn’ with ‘broadband’ and ‘chatroom’, without the words, it is difficult to see the things.
It would be unwisely Romantic to suggest that the ‘tiny lights’ of rare glow worms in a wooded gill are ‘better’ for people than the brilliance of a smartphone screen, when that screen connects us all to a whole world of information. Of course we need both. I tried to use my writing to explore these knotty connections – between the personal and the common, between landscape, history, language, nature and technology – not to disentangle them, but simply to bring them to attention. I tend to do that through multiple time-frames or perspectives, and this is an approach that you and I share. I am interested in how differently our work takes shape from it, Phoebe. Your writing has an admirable lightness and freedom of approach. I like the way you include your self as a character. I love your impressionistic evocation of litter picking, using space on the page to suggest process, and how your prose-poetry spills over into verse in moments of intensity. Would you like to say more about how the form of ‘Once More the Sea’ suggested itself to you?
Phoebe: I experimented with lyric poems before settling on the style you see here, based predominantly on prose. When starting a new project, I try not to get too bogged down in issues of genre. For me, the boundaries between verse and prose, or narrative and lyric, can be fluid. I see line-breaks, sentences, spacing, narrative, metaphor etc. all as possible tools in my writer’s briefcase, but rhythm is probably always the bedrock. I am influenced by mixed forms such as haibun, first developed in late 17th century Japan by Bashō. In haibun poetry, prose narrative flows into haiku verses, so a description of sequential events might gather focus at a moment of high lyric intensity. Rhythmically, I find this combination exciting: it resists the experience of a single poem as an isolated or self-contained entity. The passage of time is clearly an important aspect to this commission, both in relation to the way the coast has changed throughout history, and also in the way we experience it in space. In my case, for example, I travelled from one end to the other over a series of days – often on foot, since I don’t have a car. Each section of my sequence is a stop along the way. I think the journal-like aspect to this was also a way of including myself as a ‘character’, as you say. Not being a local, I wanted to gently fix my own subjectivity in the scene, in order to emphasise that my observations are limited, partial, and peculiar to one visitor’s viewpoint at a particular time, rather than being in any way definitive.
My personal perspective as a woman also informed my experience and interactions at the coast. It’s as safe as anywhere, but I was aware of travelling alone in a strange environment, occasionally getting lost in quiet back lanes, and avoiding the denes after dark, for instance. This caused me to reflect on whether women really feel free and able to explore the outdoors to the extent that men do, or within what parameters. What do you think the women who live in the area would make of this, Katrina? Are there differences between the ways in which men and women feel able to access the coast on their doorstep?
Katrina: A generation ago, nobody in East Durham would have gone to the beach for pleasure. Today, in spite of its transformation, many people I met still considered it ‘Not a proper beach’. Of course, I’m not a ‘local’ either, and my experience during this residency was also limited. Although I walked the whole coast from Seaham to Crimdon, most of my interactions took place between Hawthorn Hive and Castle Eden Dene, and most of my conversations in the villages of Easington Colliery and Horden. I was interested to discover how differently the females and males I talked to seemed to perceive the beach. That was true of all ages. In spite of the glorious views and abundant evidence of wildlife returning, many girls and women still spoke of the beach as ‘dirty’. Access can be difficult and although, as you say, it is as safe as anywhere, some reported feeling unsafe or uneasy. I agree that these attitudes affect female access to nature and the outdoors. That is true everywhere, not just on the Durham coast. Among older girls and women, I found there was often at best an indifference to the beach. As Mark observes in your piece: ‘some mums...don’t actually like nature themselves, they find it boring.’ At the same time, in direct contrast, I saw many female and male runners and dog walkers on the coast path; and I was really moved by the number of small shrines along the cliff top. For both men and women, there is a powerful sense that the coast – especially looking down at it from on high – connects us to a deep spirituality. You touch on this in your conversation with Bob and Michael.
So the unresolved contradictions in people’s responses to the landscape seem to remain. They exist within and between younger and older people, female and male. These binaries are real, in the sense that the people I talked to would consider them so. Perhaps partly as a legacy of a male-dominated heavy industry, there is still a strong distinction between male and female society in East Durham. I wonder if you could say something finally about your own reflections on this in the course of the project, Phoebe? Your piece takes its title from a line of Lord Byron’s, and one section recalls how he ‘bullied’ his wife, Seaham lass Annabella Milbanke. Do you see this as a metaphor for how extractive industries have treated the land, and perhaps also people?
Phoebe: Streets in Seaham are named after Byron; he is claimed as a source of cultural capital for the local tourist industry. And yet there is an irony to this, since in reality he only spent a few months here in 1815, expressing dislike for ‘this dreary coast’ in his letters, in a marriage which seems to have been doomed from the start. Looking further into the details, I was appalled by the way in which he abused Annabella and other women – emotionally and physically – before his wife instigated a formal separation within the year, and Byron left for Europe. It therefore felt important to complicate the image of Byron as the area’s poster-boy. I’m interested in your reading of his misogyny as connecting in some way to industrialisation. Certainly, shortly after Byron’s role in its history, Seaham Hall came to represent a new form of profit and power, when the Londonderrys bought the property from the Milbankes in the 1820s and opened the first collieries there.
Like you say, the experience of the coast is still very much a gendered one for those who live there today. Yet, in contemporary conservation activities, such as cleaning up coastal litter, all kinds of power structures perhaps feel less acute, as people unite – albeit briefly – in a common purpose and the inter-human conflicts can seem less relevant – just us and the beach. I see this – the opening-out from the human scale of things – in your work, too, as in ‘Painted Ladies’, where both mam and daughter are identified with, and somehow released with, the butterflies. The ends of your poems often gesture outwards to the wider ecological picture in this way, as the coal begins again underground, the sea continues its ineluctable erosion and the world re-makes itself again and again. That’s what, in the end, makes the Durham Coast such a hopeful and even humbling environment, and will stay with me as its guiding image – the constant sense of the tide returning to erase and renew human activity.
Sea Change is out now and available here. All artwork featured in this interview is by Rose Ferraby and was created especially for Sea Change.