ATTACK AND DEFEND
I suppose it all began with Stephen Turner’s Seafort project which I followed in 2006 (http://www.seafort.org/) and then my project last year at The Redoubt Fortress in Eastbourne. Whatever the beginning, I have developed a fascination with unused or abandoned military buildings – something about their function of defence and attack – keeping a force out, and yet keeping another force in. And the solitariness that that somehow involves, heightened of course by the subsequent abandonment of these fortifications. I was interested then, on my visit to the Isle of Wight last year, to discover that the island is peppered with crumbling forts and batteries all around its coast, built as defences against possible invasion from the sea.
Other defences are obvious too all around the island’s coast. These ones are also crumbling in places, but continually repaired, replaced, upgraded and reinforced in order to defend the land in a war of attrition against the ongoing attack by the sea itself, which constantly threatens to wear away and eat into the edges of the land.
