Poetry, Painting and Change on the Edge of England

Abstract

In this article we discuss our creative research on and with a contested coastal community on one of the UK's last existing plotlands, the humberston Fitties. Plotlands can be briefly defined as places where individuals have historically self‐built holiday houses. This 56‐acre strip of land with 319 chalets is on the Humber estuary and lies close to Cleethorpes, a seaside resort, and Grimsby, a seaport now facing post‐industrial decline. Our cross‐disciplinary collaborative practice between poetry and visual art explores open, environmentally aware engagements and methodologies with landscape and rural place. We investigate the relation of social, environmental and energy politics, looking out to land and sea and back to the community. Our results include original art and poetry presented innovatively together in exhibitions and books, in addition to local people's responses to our methodologies and the work itself.

Lost plotlands: regulatory consequences of forgotten places

“…Perhaps the most recent research on these wider challenging issues is recognisable in the critique of the la guage used to des i e the plotla ds la ds ape fou d i Da id Matless o k o the o al geog aph of English landscapes in which particular references to Steers work is explored in connection to a broader moral history of mapping and planning (1996,1997). More recently, the exciting new collaborative community art project being undertaken at the Humberston Fitties (a plotland site of over 300 chalets built in the 1920s on former salt marshes on the Lincolnshire coast near Cleethorpes) highlights the need for continued and multiplicitous engagements with the human scale landscapes of the plotlands (Tarlo and Tucker, 2019). This unique and sadly still largely isolated project highlights the exciting potential for innovative models of research engagement with the plotlands, and the potential to recognise and value the unique people and places that make them.…”