ORFORD NESS

The concrete body attempts total immersion into the bulk of the spit, but without success. Metal ribs, once roof supports, give away its presence as they fail to slide into the tons of shingle mounded up against bunkering walls that won’t be destroyed.

Roof cover, long gone, not a trace of it lying on the crater littered land. Designed to yield in adversity, the roof now invites into the space it once covered an opportunity to move from a history we can only guess at, to a role we are challenged to make for ourselves.

Bars and metal grills make difficult entrance into the structure...

A brick wall, the North Sea pounding at its periphery, makes a continuous horizon broken only by a portal at the bottom of a flight of stairs. The wall is aquamarine and forms a subterranean pit ten metres in diameter. The pit is the basement level of a two-storey structure, the upper floor beginning where the aquamarine meets a sun washed-yellow. Flat metal boxes hang between upper floor and lower pit, their yellow pockmarked by corroded browns. The space is denuded, no insight given into possible past use...

Entombed in thirty feet of shingle, the place is silent.

Entrance is beneath a vaulted canopy. Stones once covering the steep roof now spill back to re-join the shingle of the spit that spreads through the sea curving away towards the mainland further down the coast.

Eyes shut to the sea; the face of the submerged concrete bunker closes in upon itself. It cannot see anyway – blinded by a fire of unimaginable intensity that blackened the entire windowless interior, from which the vaulted space never recovered...

Two meters high, made of thick sheet metal blackened by the corrosive power of a salty atmosphere, four cruciform have been incorporated into the concrete wall of the vibration test pit. This wall rises another three metres above these metal icons.

A cushion of lichen finds a space on the floor of the pit. Soft grey-green, light as dust, spun flattened fibres woven together in a loose filigree, the lichen’s matrix traps nourishment from a damp atmosphere that blackened the crosses penetrating the wall...