The first part of Peacehaven in III Parts is a book called Passing Through. This work explores the notion that history is always more than one single story. By making transparent the process of evidence gathering it alludes to the temporality of history and the role of the visual image within that. By combining an archival style of evidence gathering and collecting mixed with photographs and scans of objects of the everyday this has the effect of resonating with official and unofficial knowledge. The narrative here is formulated using a mass of fragmented materials to suggest the temporality of history and the questionable nature of there being one ‘single story’.
In 1914 the town of Peacehaven was just a vision. It was one man’s dream to create a seaside resort to rival that of neighbouring Brighton. With its orderly avenues and grid based planning it’s expansion followed a style familiar to North American developments. It is unlike the ‘urban-sprawl’, which reflect the growth of most East Sussex seaside towns. Peacehaven’s scattering of cheap ‘homes for heroes’ expanded during the two World Wars. Arguably it was among the first ‘New Towns’ in the UK. Passing Through is a book about that town. Part family album, part archive cabinet, part diary; it is an explorative journey of discovery. By delving through collections of photographs, postcards, newspapers, town plans & maps, letters, articles and interviews, adverts & promotional materials whilst gathering new records this work re-represents the archive by embedding itself within a larger history. It presents a rich, diverse and multi- layered narrative where no single part is larger than the whole. With the benefit of hindsight Passing Through acts as an idiosyncratic case study exploring and rethinking how the history of a place is documented and represented. In the process of conveying one man’s vision of a ‘Garden City by the Sea’ Passing Through unearths a rich and unique catalogue of visual evidence. Looking back, perhaps Peacehaven never fulfilled its founder’s visions and dreams. But lives were lived and those that settled there created history and so it will go on with those there now and by those who will follow…
