The Sea Beneath: sensing history in new ways in Hastings
As Mary-Lynne began to tell us about her map markings, I realised we were in for an exciting few hours on the rainy streets of pre-lockdown Hastings last December. Mary-Lynne and other members of a local dowsing club are helping us scan, sense and divine unseen and forgotten features under the streets of the America Ground, in the centre of town. What did we find? Possible plague pits, potential underground passages, signs of a new alignment of foundations of a chapel, and in one particular place, a hint of a grave site.
We are all here for a pilot workshop for an arts and heritage project called The Sea Beneath by Hastings arts agency, MSL Projects. What’s the project about? It’s about taking a new view of how we remember the past, mixing human-centred methods of searching places with more scientific approaches. Our core focus is on finding forgotten flows of water under the America Ground, which was once part of an ancient harbour area. We also want to explore where the coastline once extended across the town, and, working with climate experts and environmental scientists, where the coastline might be in 50 years time.
This project involves a mix of instinct and science, art and mapping. It will include artist and writer commissions, responding to what we find during our exploratory work with dowsers and also with environmental scientists and geographers. There will be a Discovery Day, where we will open up our findings for all to see — and given the current lockdown in Tier 5, this might become a virtual event.
The project is funded by Arts Council England, and also by the Trinity Triangle Heritage Action Zone, which is led by Heart of Hastings Community Land Trust.
The Sea Beneath isn’t about discovering definitive truths about places and the past. We are keen to see if we can unearth and re-present parallel stories about place — I see it this way, you see it that way. Both might be valid. This way of seeing history is a nod in the direction of the de-colonisation debate in mainstream museum communities.
Our first Sea Beneath event on December 13, 2020, involved a small team of dowsers, some invited artists and helpers, and a cast of friends and funders who have helped develop the project. Much of our time was spent making the event COVID-safe, which was particularly difficult, even though Hastings, at that time, was in Tier 2. To ensure we could control COVID safety we decided not to make the activity open to the public, as capping numbers is key in this regard.
We wanted the event to be participatory, so MSL had provided dowsing rods, and the MSL team included volunteer helpers cleaning rods after and before use. We had the use of a side-room at Bullet Cafe as a base, which was very useful indeed for the hour and a half-long activity.
To start the activity, Mary-Lynne and her colleague Pat showed the basic practice of dowsing, including a quite dramatic demonstration of the forces involved when the rods are in action. Dowsing is not the fringe activity that many might imagine — it is frequently used by utility companies to find lost water pipes and many other authorities use it to check underground features of all kinds, such as archaeological remains.
After a wet and windy hour exploring Trinity Street, Claremont Street and Robertson Street, the dowsers and our guests assembled in groups in Bullet Cafe to collate the results. At the same time, MSL’s archive specialist Julie Gidlow talked to dowser David about his findings, which included finding a potential grave site.
Alongside reporting his findings to Julie, David showed her how to use a pendulum to remotely dowse from a map. David told us he always felt he had an ability to dowse — it is just something that feels very natural to him. Among our group of attendees were a number of other dowsers, including Zelly, who will spend time in early 2021 exploring the Trinity Triangle streets to find out more hidden and forgotten features.
Bearing in mind that the first Sea Beneath event was a pilot activity, we were all surprised that Mary-Lynne, Pat and David all found what they thought were signs of historic activity and potential features under the streets. Mary-Lynne and Pat had a head start, as Mary-Lynne had been working for several days before the event, dowsing remotely using a map of the area. Working in Trinity Street, they sensed features aligned diagonally across the street which appeared to be connected to the Church. It was thought this could be remains of a previous building, possibly a chapel.
Whilst working in Robertson Passage, at right angles to Robertson Street, Mary-Lynne thinks she can detect quite substantial underground passages, and also another plague pit. Robertson Passage is the site of part of the former Ropewalk, where ropes were woven and entwined by hand in the days of sail and Lord Nelson.
While we were debriefing the dowsers and trying to get warm in Bullet Cafe it became clear that, whichever way you explore it, there is much more under the ground than just water. Our initial exploration shows that we need to work with local archivists and historians, as well as geographers and environmental scientists.
So how can all this subterranean richness and curiosity be captured, reclaimed, or challenged? In the same way that museums are now beginning to ‘re-curate’ collections, trying to understand different meanings of the objects they thought they knew so well, we want to give people in Hastings the chance to make a different historical map of the town.
Initial findings from The Sea Beneath activity will be collated into a new map of the America Ground, showing our collective results. We won’t try to present fact as fiction, or fiction as fact — but our new map of historic Hastings might be a mix of perspectives from a diverse group of people. It could become an imaginary map of the town, or a map of stories or dreams about the town — a map of the psycho-geography of Hastings. It will certainly involve tracing the rising waters beneath our feet, and projecting the shape of the coastline in 50 years time.
The next step — a Creative Caucus
MSL has been working at a local and national level in digital heritage and outdoor arts projects for most of the past decade. Learning from this experience, within Hastings, we would very much like to work with a broader range of creatives and artists of all kinds. We now plan to open up The Sea Beneath programme to anyone else in the town (and potentially beyond) for discussion. We’ll do this through a Creative Caucus meeting on January 21; this will be a virtual conversation with anyone interested in other ways of exploring history, place and environment. It will also be a chance to hear about how other people in the town are managing their creativity under lockdown, and possibly a chance to develop some informal peer-to-peer support.
