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|  | | | | More about Helen Mark | | | | |
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|  | | Dickens' inspiration in the churchyard at Cooling. | |
It's to North Kent for Helen this week, to the Hoo Peninsula, fringed by the Thames to the north and the Medway to the south - an area shortlisted by the government for airport development. While supporters of the plan say it will bring jobs and money to the area, Helen hears the local voices raised in opposition to the very idea of an airport, and finds out which weapons are being used to drive home the 'No Airport at Cliffe' message.
She begins her visit standing in the churchyard which inspired the opening of Great Expectations - St James, in the village of Cooling. Dickens lived nearby and was very familiar with the marshlands of the peninsula - and his association with the area is proving to be useful ammunition for local people fighting proposals to build an airport there. To some eyes, it's a bleak landscape, to others, a beautiful one. Amongst the latter is Jeremy Clarke, for whom the countryside - a series of "horizontal lines", in Dickens words - is inextricably linked with the author and his characters.
But it's not just people who love Dickens who see the value of his connections with the Hoo Peninsula. Diana Barker (who herself finds Dickens a bit 'wordy') is a member of the Dickens' Country Protection Society, founded thirty years ago to fight plans for an oil terminal in this part of Kent. That scheme was thrown out, and Diana says that the society members had assumed that the area was now safe from development - until, that is, they heard that it was on the government shortlist for airport construction. Now they are mobilising protest against the plans by reminding the world of the area's literary connections.
Alan Parker has worked in the area for twenty three years. He's based at the Northward Hill RSPB reserve, from where Helen gets a panoramic view of the marshland. Woodland nearby is home to Britain's largest heronry - woodland which would be destroyed by the potential airport development. Little egrets, too, make their home there, and Alan finds it ironic which the bird which first inspired the founding of the RSPB should be threatened by these plans. Alan says the 'footprint' of any new airport on the site would have wide-reaching implications for birdlife on the Thames and Medway estuaries.
RSPB Reserves Page
Any resident of the Hoo Peninsula in the late eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth would have been familiar with the prison hulks, former warships used to incarcerate some of England's rapidly increasing number of prisoners. Stephen Nye, of the Guildhall Museum in Rochester, where a hulk has been recreated, tells Helen how the ships were crammed full, the conditions so terrible that there was not even enough oxygen to sustain a candle flame in the depths of the sleeping quarters. Dickens himself would have seen the ships from the shore - although some people were keen to get a better view, and parties of sightseers would be ferried out to sail round the hulks and see the prisons close up.
The Guildhall Museum, Medway
Finally to a real wreck, that of a ship rotting on the banks of the Thames near Cliffe. It's a sight which helped inspire photographer Denis and writer Priscilla Waugh to work on their book Searching The Thames - and it has an important place in their personal history, too. Arriving by ship at Tilbury more than thirty years ago, coming from their native New Zealand for what they thought would be a short trip to England, gave them their first glimpse of this flat, wide-skied landscape which they now love and which they say, as outsiders, they may well appreciate more than many people who have known it all their lives.
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