Stephanie Wynne
‘The Erosion’ Is a piece of research and a photographic exploration of how post WW2 the structural ‘waste’ of war was disposed of or reused.
This project began in 2021, it was then 80 years since Liverpool suffered the ‘May Blitz’ and here we are in 2024 - a general unravelling and multiple, dreadful, international, crises.
The work developed from a study of the beach at Crosby, which lies 5 miles north of Liverpool City Centre. Tonnes of rubble from the bombed homes and businesses of Liverpool and Bootle were dumped on a mile long stretch of the coast, post 1945. Partly pragmatically to bolster the ad hoc sea defences but to also remove from view, to clean-up, move on and forget. The photographs disclose a very singular landscape, a recumbent ruin steadily being revealed - shifted and eroded by the tide.
Covering and uncovering the debris, an archaeology - revealing more every year.
Across Europe huge quantities of rubble had to be cleared, this reverberates with the horrific current conflicts around the world - when or if a conflict is over, how does the structure of a city or landscape recover?
The past and present appalling loss of life is beyond comprehension, with every brick or piece of blasted concrete serving as a crude testament.
This now long past conflict is still relevant today as it can be said that much of the violence that we currently see around the world is still the aftermath of the political ‘solutions’ devised post WW2.
Was there any wisdom in the post WW2 rebuilding that we can apply to a future recovery?
The visible structural rebuilding of Europe post war was approached in different ways, often with destroyed buildings being piled up to create mountains such as, Teufelsberg in Berlin or Monte Stella in Milan. In Britain we used the waste to bolster the banks of our rivers and shores lines, or to raise land levels e.g. Leyton Marshes in London or used the rubble as ballast in ships headed for the USA; Bristol Basin in Manhattan was created from the war rubble of the damaged city of Bristol.
In Warsaw where 250,000 people lost their lives and the old town was raised to the ground, the solution to rebuilding was to recycle the rubble as a new building material ‘gruzboten,’ rather than disposing of it to modify the landscape. Currently in Ukraine architects and civil engineers are trialling similar techniques to rebuild their devastated homes. Here, at the University of Liverpool, researchers are creating new sustainable concretes that can reuse ‘waste’ rubble.
The pictures are not just about the unique shoreline at Crosby. The rubble is not just the remnants of people’s lives disposed of and used as a makeshift sea defence, they are the ruins of a relocated urban landscape, placed out of site, augmented and covered over further up the beach by the disposal of slum clearance during 1960’s, contaminated by asbestos, plastics and wiring etc. They sit alongside radioactive tin-slag (waste from smelting process and thought to be of low risk to the public), deposited there in the 1930’s to divert the River Alt.
The beach and estuary have been exploited, adjusted, bolstered and dredged over centuries.
Out into the water there are two 15-mile-long training walls, constructed in 1908, made from huge pieces of stone or ‘rock armour’ to protect the Crosby Channel for shipping.
Today the channel is continually scanned and dredged to keep the port accessible to the draught of ships.
The masonry from Liverpool’s grand Victorian buildings have created a new landscape for the shore, some are indiscernible from natural forms, populated by weed, they have become a habitat for intertidal sea life.
Many of the sea-washed bricks have eroded to the shape of cobble or shingle, their constituent parts dissolved into the sea. With long shore drift they move south, collecting around the ‘Another Place’ statues or rolling against and damaging the southerly concrete sea wall. However, there is a bifurcation at Crosby - there is also a local drift north. The rubble is shifted both north and south by tides and waves, consequently material is removed from the shore and the erosion of the low cliff is accelerated.
As a solution to stay the rate of erosion and to bury some of the contaminants, it is proposed that once more rock armour will be used , placed at the edge of the eroding, low, cliff to defend its integrity. The buried waste will, of course, eventually be eroded, once more risking contaminants leaching into the water. - An expediency; covering over some of the archaeology of industry, war and clearance, with another layer of human ambition to control nature.
It is a poignant landscape, man-made but sculpted by nature, it represents lives gone and horrific destruction but also our profligacy with the resources of the planet.
This work was exhibited as part of Look Photo Biennial and Look Climate Lab at the Open Eye Gallery Liverpool from January 2024 to September 2024