Twentieth-Century Ruins II: Hall Road, Crosby

The beach at Hall Road, Crosby, Merseyside, July 5th 2005

A stumble across the boulders near the car park, the wind cold and unexpectedly fierce. Giant white boulders, sharp this far from the sea, surrounded by a carpet of red bricks, smoothed by the sea into round lumps, corners chipped then sanded by the sea. Red eggs, the remains of whole streets of houses, gardens, out door toilets, sheds. A smashed beach of floor tiles, iron drainpipes, electrical fittings, bakelite, china, roof tile, a sea of smoothed red brick; a broken city brought here after the war and dumped on the beach to strengthen the coastline. The whole crumbling now, returning to the elements. A small stretch of hard clean sand, dotted with worn-smooth tiles and tiny pieces of sanded glass, hard beneath our boots on this raw day; a grey sky, the sea muddied, the horizon lined with ships. The crash and foam of the waves. The endless wind on our faces, more like cold October than July.

Further along the shore the remains are bigger. Fragments of wall appear, six or eight courses of brick still bonded together, pounded for fifty years by the sea, scoured with salt, untouched by lichen or weed. They are slumped in the rubble of brick and stones, giant fallen walls, rubbed and caressed into organic shapes, sleek and sinuous, boundaries shifting, shapes of brick seeming to swell and stretch, move and turn, twisted walls still eight or ten tons in weight. Here too are the edges of buildings, gigantic pieces of column and architrave, capital and frieze, hauled from the wreckage of bank or insurance office and dumped to protect the coast; today they might be rescued and sold to architectural salvage men, to find new homes as relics and garden ornament. Porticos and window frames, steps and the bases of columns.