living by quarries

Alan Bennet wrote about visiting Temple Newsam, a 17th century house just outside Leeds, when he was nine or ten, in the London Review of Books, 8 November 2012 :
Visiting Temple Newsam was always a treat, as it still is more than half a century later.  Back in 1947, though, with the country in the throes of the postwar economic crisis, the push was on for more coal and the whole of the park in front of the house was given over to open-cast mining, the excavations for which came right up to the terrace.  From the state rooms you looked out on a landscape as bleak and blasted as a view of the Somme, an idyll, as it seemed to me then, irretrievably lost, and young though I was I knew this.

This is the Ordnance Survey Map for 1945-1947 that shows Temple Newsam: clearly the house sat on the top of a hill, surrounded by woods and collieries and remarkably close to the sewage works, canals, and railway line of Skelton.   

BT Ordnance Survey Map, 1945-1947, sheet 44Bennett continues:  But of course I was wrong.  It wasn't irretrievable and to look at the grounds today one would have no idea that such a violation had ever occurred.  And it had occurred, too, with even greater devastation at other country houses south of Leeds: Nostell Priory was similarly beleaguered, as was Wentworth Woodhouse, both …, smack in the middle of coal-bearing country…

Yorkshire has lost more large houses than any other English county — 253 and mostly in the 1950s, usually by fire or insufficient wealth.  This is yet another back story, or rather future story, behind Downton and all the lovely dresses.

Denys Lasdun: modernism deeply dyed

Denys Lasdun. Royal College of Physicians, London, 1960

Lasdun felt his best building was the 1960 Royal College of Physicians, set into the Georgian terraces of Regent's Park, London.  We don't get this kind of outside space anymore, noir-ish, uncompromising, heroic: terraces for the dark life of the soul.  Instead, having looked at an archive of drawings over the last year of contemporary civic public space proposals, according to the renderings, we must all gaily trip through our cities in full colour, casual clothes, balloons flying, children laughing.  

The public spaces of modernism were adult spaces. They weren't spaces of power but of public access, and that was, given the history of European property ownership and display, a serious business.  History wasn't interesting – it had caused two ghastly wars and in the 1960s the tall capacious houses of Regent's Park were likely to either be offices or carved up into a dozen cheap bedsits.  The bones of the elegant curved terrace could be honoured, but not much else.  

Denys Lasdun's son, James, seen below in an excerpt from a talk at the New York Writers Institute in 2009, speaks about the fierceness of the modernist tenets he grew up with.  Ironically, especially when he says that postmodernism was anathema to Denys Lasdun, James has recently published a book, Give Me Everything You Have, on the ultimate postmodern crime: he has been cyber-stalked since 2006 by a student he once taught at NYU.

David Nash: wood

Anne Purkiss, photographer. David Nash in his studio, 1999.

Anne Purkiss started in 1985 to photograph members of the Royal Academy of Arts.  This one, of David Nash was probably taken in 1999 when he became a member.  He is in his studio next to a mining tip in Blaenau Ffestiniog, a Victorian slate mining town in Gwynedd, Wales.  It is no surprise that with the decline of the use of slate, there would have been many industrial spaces surplus to requirements; many of which would make capacious studios.  

His material isn't slate, it is trees. From wikipedia's description of Wooden Boulder: 'begun in 1978, this work involves a large wooden sphere carved by Nash in the North Wales landscape and in 1982 left there to weather. Over the years, the boulder has slipped, rolled and sometime been pushed through the landscape following the course of streams and rivers until finally it was last seen in the estuary of the River Dwyryd. It was thought to have been washed out to sea but, after being missing for over five years, the boulder reappeared in June 2009. Indications are that it had been buried in sand in the estuary.'   

How heroic.  

David Nash. Wooden Boulder, 1978-2009

The opening image for Call the Midwife, a BBC drama about nursing at the beginning of the NHS.

The opening of Call the Midwife shows a liner at the end of the street, Saville Road, Silverton, East London.  

There is something so graphic about emigration here: this was the connection to the world, for all those people in East London, who were  completely despised until the 2012 Olympics made everyone realize that here was some prime real estate, cheap. This ship was probably going to Pier 21 in Halifax, below, also visible at the end of a number of streets, such is eighteenth century planning.  

1935: Pier 21, ocean liner, the Nova Scotian Hotel, the combined CNR and CPR railway station, all seen from Cornwallis Park. courtesy Nova Scotia Museums.This aerial, below, shows Pier 21, the Nova Scotian Hotel and the CP/CNR Station lines, angling in at the far right, a triumvirate of immigrant distribution.

Stan Barstow

Stan Barstow, 1928-2011. author

I came across this photo of Stan Barstow  whilst tracking down something else.  Looking like a young Orwell, he actually was the author of A Kind of Loving, published in 1960.  He was born in 1928, thus the officer's moustache which he was too young to qualify for.  This is, perhaps, one of the things that made that generation angry.  They couldn't help being born in 1928 and so being only 17 when WWII ended – they'd missed it all.  And angry they were, John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Britain's 'angry young men' writing in the late 1950s, gritty portrayals of postwar northern urban life that cracked the tin ceiling of the working class.  

I'd read these books, because my father was a librarian and they were all around the house, and then in the early 1960s they were all made into films – black and white, wonderfully bleak, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Room at the Top, A Taste of Honey – all seen in grade 8 or 9 at the Capitol Theatre in Nanaimo.  I fell for it all like a ton of bricks, as they say.  Profoundly passionate, hopelessly romantic within the tough strictures of working class morés; clearly I wasn't reading Virginia Woolf – that came in grade 10, nonetheless I absorbed it all, as a 14 year-old will do.  It didn't have anything to do with a life in Canada, but that's the thing about reading books, one is transported. Completely.



Thinking of re-reading Barstow, I find the Calgary Public Library which lauds itself for being the most active in the country, has none of his books. 

Zoë Keating: frozen angels, 2011

Rebecca Horn: les amants, 1991

Les Amants, 1991, Photo: Attilio Maranzano © 2009 Rebecca Horn. Les Amants consists of two glass funnels, ink, wine and motors of some unspecified sort that must spray the liquids about. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

Donald Kuspit's review of Rebecca Horn's drawings, both by hand and by machine, indicates something of his desires, found in Horn's sexual subtext: all the machines are metaphors for the coming together of bodily fluids.  Well, maybe; it is called Les Amants —is it blood, or is it wine?  However, one might also see in the desperate, cross throwing of ink in the corner of a room, the fan of a musical score there but ignored, les travails des amants.

Kuspit does say 'her drawings are written by her machines': does the machine write, or does it make the marks it is designed to make?  In Alan Storey's drawing machines, below, does he build them to literally make the marks he already has written, or does he make them to make marks as an autonomous act?  He assigned up and down to wind force, not immediately a logical choice, so he must have wanted his recordings on the paper to register elevation, rather than planarity — biblical, this, every mountain and hill made low: the crooked straight and the rough places plain.  And then comes the wind.

Alan Storey: climatic drawing machine, 1991

Alan Storey. Climatic Drawing Machine drawing, 1991. Power Plant, Harbourfront, Toronto

Hard to get a good set of images made from the Climatic Drawing Machine, unless one wants to buy one.  Part of a series of machines that make marks on paper, this one uses a wind vane to register the direction of the wind, and the strength, which moves the recording drum up and down.  This was installed at Power Plant on Lake Ontario in 1991.

In all Storey's machines the lines are lovely, they skitter across paper in a way a line made by the hand never does.  With abstract marks, which these aren't — they are evidence of a mechanical set of relationships — one almost automatically reads one's own visual desires into them.  Sorry, but these are so like storms over either water or prairie that it doesn't surprise me that they have been drawn by wind.   There is a base: land, which is actually a mild breeze, that then gets all agitated when the wind turns fierce.  Which it does in real life.  

Basquiat: Six Crimee, 1982

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Six Crimee, 1982, Acrylic and oil paintstick on masonite, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Scott D. F. Spiegel Collection, © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society, New York

Man Ray: underground planets

Man Ray. London Transport poster, 1939. Photo: London Transport Museum

Cape Breton coal mines

In 1978 when this NFB snapshot was made, Cape Breton coal mining was already being memorialised.  But the song is jolly, full of optimism.

Canada Vignettes: Men of the Deeps, Cape Breton by Sandra Dudley, National Film Board of Canada

By 2009, this performance at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Cape Breton coal mining has become a tragedy.

diamond mines

The Ekati diamond mine is located near Lac de Gras, is about 300 km north east of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. To date 314ha of tundra habitat have been used for construction of the mine and 611ha of the total lease area of 10,960ha has been affected by the operation.

Volcanic pipes are formed by deep volcanoes that rush magma to the surface from deep within the earth's mantle where it solidifies into either kimberlite or lamproite, both heavy with magnesium.  Kimberlite is where diamonds, garnets, spinels and peridots are found, formed by carbon under extreme heat and pressure. 

The volcanic pipe that indicates kimberlite at Ekati was discovered by geologists Charles E Fipke and Dr Stewart E Blusson who have a 10% holding in the mine. BHP Billiton, which held the rest, has recently sold it to Harry Winston Diamond Corp, a partner with Diavik Diamond Mines, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto. 

From The Province in 2010: 'Much of the aboriginal employment at Ekati is a result of impact-benefit agreements signed with four First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities whose traditional territories are located around the mine site.  The confidential IBAs – which were signed before construction began at the mine – includes agreements on preferential hiring, cash payments, scholarship funding, business opportunities and travel to and from the community and Ekati.'

Well then. This was Diefenbaker's dream, that northern development would be the saving of Canada.  And as the north is aboriginal, it is seen as the saving of First Nations, Metis and Inuit – a source of revenue and employment.  However, rarely are any of these mines Canadian-owned.  We are merely the hewers of wood, drawers of water and miners of resources.  The big benefits are exported with the diamonds, or oil, or whatever it is. 

uranium mines

The Rabbit Lake uranium mine, near the Dene/Cree community of Wollaston Lake in northern Saskatchewan.

This image is from the Graham Defence site.  John Graham is from Haines Junction, Yukon and was an activist against uranium mining. He is currently in South Dakota State Pen in Sioux Falls for the 1975 murder of Anna Mae Aquash. There is a tradition of the FBI extraditing First Nations men from Canada, famously Leonard Pelletier, based on evidence aimed at breaking apart the American Indian Movement.  Graham's is a truly terrible story in its details, but ultimately appears as the borderless reach of the FBI into activist social movements.
In May and June 1984 John Graham did a European speaking tour organised by European anti-nuclear and environmental groups, focussed on native rights and the problems of uranium mining in Canada.

Uranium itself is an element, U; unstable isotopes make it slightly radioactive.  It is dense and occurs in small amounts in soil, rock and water.  Uranium 235 is a natural fissile isotope which can transmute to fissile plutonium 239 in a nuclear reactor.  If I understood more of this process I might be able to understand what Iran is, or is not, doing.  Fission is produced with fast neutrons, and slow neutrons can be speeded up and concentrated to sustain nuclear chain reactions, generating heat and material for weapons.  Depleted uranium is used in armour, as in tanks, because of its density.  Depleted uranium dust released when exploded, during war, releases significant doses of radioactivity.

Uranium City, SaskatchewanUranium city was a 1952 company town for  Eldorado Mining and Refining, a crown corporation that opened a number of mines (52) in northern Saskatchewan.  It was based on the plan for Arvida, Québec, a 1927 ALCAN town.

Uranium mining, like almost all surface mines, come with associated toxic effects for water and people from tailings, which in this case have some residual radioactivity. 500,000 tonnes of waste rock, 100,000 tonnes of tailings, 144 tonnes of solid waste and 1343 m3 of liquid waste produces 25 tonnes of uranium fuel, so reports David Thorpe in the Guardian.  Historical evidence places life expectancy at 20 years after becoming a miner in a uranium mine.

potash mines

A potash mine in Rocanville, Saskatchewan. 2007. photographer Troy Fleece for The Canadian Press

What is potash?  The word covers potassium salts, such as potassium chloride, KCl, used in fertiliser.  It was found in Saskatchewan in 1942 while drilling for oil – a massive formation covering most of southern Saskatchewan.  It wasn't successfully mined until the mid 1960s, mostly because there are water layers that make sinking shafts difficult.  The Saskatchewan Mining Association informs us that Sylvite was made Saskatchewan's mineral emblem in 1996, something not obviously part of the living skies campaign.

Potash does well on the market, not that I understand such things, but Saskatchewan is in the throes of a boom the like of which only Alberta and Newfoundland understand.  

Potash is marine in origin, formed by the evaporation of sea water.  In Sask the layer is 1-1.5km below the surface, deposited during the Middle Devonian Prairie Evaporite formation which also extends into Manitoba and North Dakota.  New Brunswick also has a potash industry, of which we hear little, however its capacity is 2 million tonnes; Saskatchewan's is 20 million.  Potash is the third largest mineral product shipped from Canada.

What makes KCl a necessary ingredient in a good fertiliser?  It improves water retention and general yield in food crops.  Because of population growth and the need for more food, more potash is needed, thus the boom, which evidently has abated since 2008 and the global financial crisis.  In 2009 it was $872/tonne, 2011 it was $470.  Saskatchewan, beware.

salt mines

Crews work on a new salt crushing unit, deep in the Sifto Salt -Compass Minerals mine in Goderich, Ont., Thursday, December 18, 2008. The Sifto mine, already the largest salt mine in the world has begun a $70 million expansion as the demand for highway deicing salt increases. photo: Dave Chidley

Sifto Canada: produces road-salt, has enough stored and last year laid off a fifth of its workforce because its salt is transported by boat, and a harsh winter meant shipping was difficult.  Sifto's cellars were filled, mining had to cease for the season.

Sifto is in Goderich, Ontario and provides road salt mostly for the Great Lakes region.  It is a Kansas-owned subsidiary of Compass Minerals International, with salt mines in Cote Blanche, Louisiana and Cheshire, England.  Of course.  Nantwich was the salt producer for Victorian England, and Cote Blanche sits in Holocene coastal marshes full of salt domes.  A salt dome, thank-you wikipedia, is formed 'when a thick bed of evaporite minerals intrudes vertically into surrounding rock strata'.  Evaporite: crystallisation by evaporation, in this case, salt.  Oh, it is interesting, the layer of salt is put under pressure where it begins to flow, being 'more buoyant than the sediment above it'.  Eventually it breaks through the layers of sedimentary rock above it and forms excrescences — salt diapirs — at the surface where it can become a salt glacier.  Gosh.
Salt domes, being impermeable, can trap oil above them — the source of most of the oil reserves along the Gulf of Mexico.      

Nantwich salt was used by the Romans; 'wich' means a brine spring and Nantwich's pre-Roman Celtic name indicated a sacred grove.  Do we want to know how old Nantwich's salt reserves are? yes. They are Triassic, 220 million years ago, formed from salt marshes.

Goderich's salt is Silurian (443 million years ago, since you ask), discovered in 1866 by a petroleum exploration crew, 300 m below the surface.  Today, the mine extends over seven square kilometres 500m below Lake Huron. 

asbestos mines

The Jeffrey mine in Quebec's Eastern Townships had mostly shut down by 2010 but was to be revived with a $58-million loan from the Quebec government. It is looking more and more likely that Canada's last remaining asbestos operation will never resume. (Jacques Boissinot/Canadian Press)

The Jeffrey asbestos mine is next to Asbestos, Québec, east of Trois Rivieres, south of Québec.

The Jeffrey Mine, Asbestos, Québec. ⓒ 2013 Cines/Spot Image, Digital GlobeAsbestos: silicate minerals in long fibrous crystals. Used for its sound absorption, fire resistence and its otherwise inert insulative properties. And it is cheap. And it has been added to concrete, asphalt and other materials to extend structural capacity for building applications. And it is deeply injurious to lung tissue.

Here is a very good essay by John Gray and Stephanie Nolen on the complexity of the asbestos issue:  'Canada's chronic asbestos problem', The Globe and Mail, Nov 21, 2011.  Chillingly they say that although there is still much asbestos in the region it is relatively expensive to mine compared to 'lower-cost and comparatively unconflicted industries in Russia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, China and Zimbabwe'.  The pits at Thetford Mines have been quietly closed, asbestos has been renamed chrysotile, OECD-G8 Canada insists chrysotile is fine, Québec is cross that the asbestos industry is so maligned, probably given that it is so freely accessed in Zimbabwe.  What is wrong with that sentence?

Here is Asbestos when it was a few houses; a company town. As one can see in the google map aerial above, Asbestos is still a small town glued to the edge of the excavation.  Someday hence, will we wonder what people were thinking of, to throw whole generations into such danger?

Asbestos : V. Dubois, phot.-édit., [1918 et 1928], bibliothèque et archives nationales du québec

copper mines

The Kemess South copper mine. A second mine, dubbed Kemess North, was stopped by the Tse Keh Nay First Nations before Amazay Lake could be turned into a waste dump. J P Laplante, photographer

The Kemess South mine site in northern BC is a large porphyry gold and copper open-pit mine that was scheduled for closure in 2011.  It is near Mckenzie, at Highway 97.

In looking up Highway 97, I find it is so-named because it connects to US Route 97 at the border at Osoyoos.  It ends at Watson Lake, Yukon, 2000 km north.  The last 965 km is part of the Alaska Highway, built during WWII to connect Alaska with the United States.  The rest of the Alaska Highway sets off to the west, through Whitehorse. Another section of Highway 97, just before Highway 16 going west to Prince Rupert, is part of the Highway of Tears.

In the 19 years the mine was worked, 7.5 million tonnes of ore produced 2.4 million grams of gold and 9.7 million kilograms of copper, roughly speaking. BC Ministry of Energy describes it thus: The Kemess South deposit is hosted by the Early Jurassic Maple Leaf intrusion, a gently inclined sheet of quartz monzodiorite. The ore body measures 1700 metres long by 650 metres wide and ranges from 100 metres to over 290 metres thick. A blanket of copper-enriched supergene mineralization, containing native copper, overlies hypogene ore and comprises 20 per cent of the deposit.
There is much more in this line here.  Kemess south includes both argillite and graphitic argillite.  In my childhood there used to be a great trade in argillite carvings, something which seems to have disappeared. 

Mining areas are rough, topographically and socially.  There is money to be made, but it is exported before it hits local ground.

coal mines

The exceptionally provisional sitting lightly on the exceptionally huge.

Coal mine near Fernie, British Columbia, at Coal Creek, 1898. George Dawson, photographer. From the collection of the Geological Survey of Canada.

Tim Buckley: Dolphins, 1974

This song was written by Fred Neil in 1966.  Neil spent much of his life in dolphin preservation, but there is another layer in the lyrics about war, which would have been Vietnam. 

The early 1970s were an agonized time, a war had gone on too long for unsupportable reasons, the environmental movement realised just how quickly species were being lost and saw climate change rushing towards us like a dust storm. And poets picked up guitars.

Adrian Mitchell: tell me lies

The earliest filmed version of Adrian Mitchell performing his poem, To Whom It May Concern (tell me lies about Vietnam) at the Albert Hall, June 11, 1965:

And a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce of Mitchell reciting Tell Me Lies just before his death in 2008.  He constantly adapted the last verse to pull the poem into the continual present, for about war some things never change.