Arriving at the Port of Felixstowe

A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felixstowe (on the Suffolk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself trying to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for directions at the security gate (where the men were very friendly and helpful), several lorries came and went, apparently disappearing into the unending stretch of the Port ahead of me. What goes on in all that space? I wondered, so a couple of weeks later, my friend and I joined the ‘ship-spotters’ at the Landguard Terminal viewing area. I had no idea what a pleasure that could be! You can watch the ships arrive into port (with the help of a marine pilot and tugs), ‘park’ (a process which looks especially tricky), and after a few hours, leave again with a different cargo (or with empty boxes given the discrepancy between imports and exports in the UK). It’s hard to grasp the sheer expanse of the site from any vantage point on the ground – at close to 200 hectares, it’s the size of about 185 football pitches. Still, after driving along the perimeter fence for about 10 minutes and seeing little other than containers (and not a single person!), I did get a sense of this space of the physical redistribution of goods in ‘a flow of dispersion-concentration-dispersion’ (Mark Harvey et al, 2002: 202–5).

It’s worth giving some details about the Port itself to begin to understand its significance, locally and globally. Privately owned by the Hutchison Port Holdings Group, according to the Port of Felixstowe website, Felixstowe is the largest and busiest container port in the UK, amongst the largest in Europe, and ranked 33 by container traffic in the World Port Ranking (2008). In one year, it handles over 3 million TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units – containers are either 20 or 40 feet long), 4000 ships, and over 40% of the UK’s import and export trade. It’s hard to overstate the impact of containerisation which transformed cargo shipping in the second half of the 20th Century (Levinson, 2006). Felixstowe, with its offer of deep water next to the quay (up to 15m maintained by dredging) and its location close to the open sea, was just right for a container terminal (built in 1966). It usurped Liverpool, London and other urban ports in the UK, as those sites were less convenient and couldn’t handle the size of these new ships. (See Ports of Call for memories of the communities surrounding the Royal Docks in London.)

Transport connections

The minimal cost of transporting goods in containers means that it’s not only cheaper to produce a flat-screen TV in China, it’s cheaper to move it half way around the world to the UK coast than to deliver it from South to North within Britain for example (BBC4, 2010). The spatial arrangements of these complex global distribution networks reflect the current logic of commodity production and consumption where distance is no obstacle since space is overcome by time (David Harvey, 1992). The success of keeping things moving also relies on a broader infrastructure of rail and road and at Felixstowe, some rail lines are owned by the Port connecting with those of other Train Operating Companies in order that boxes can be directly loaded onto trucks or trains. So in addition to shipping lines, the whole process requires rails companies, forwarding and line agents, and logistics and distribution companies.

The history of containerisation is however also a history of the demise of the dockworker, a painful transition whereby metal boxes and software replaced the dockers’ hook and their physical labour. As Marc Levinson puts it,

‘The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of will-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories.’ (2006: 2)

In BBC4’s ‘The Box that Changed Britain’ which aired earlier this month, we see a single person overseeing a computer-allocated process of unloading and reloading by crane, doing what tens of thousands of men (and it is all men in these stories) previously did. This dramatic reduction of labour is also mirrored by the handful of men who now work on the massive container ships themselves.

Another representation of contemporary dock work can be seen in The Wire. Moving freight in containers that generally don’t get opened is a widely recognised opportunity for the informal economy – both in The Wire and in the real life presence of the UK Border Agency at Felixstowe with its designated spaces to examine the contents of the containers. The boxes are all uniquely coded, but at the same time, anonymised and opaque. In the police investigation into irregular practices in Baltimore in the second series of The Wire, it is the computer representation of their movement in space that finally reveals the ‘disappearance’ of boxes and their goods. Albeit a fictionalised depiction, it presents the understanding and practice of the work of managing the physical distribution of goods to the viewer as mediated by how it’s depicted on the computer screen.

Waiting containers

The current Port of Felixstowe is quite a setup, with around 40 shipping lines operating from the site. Open for business 24 hours a day, (almost) every day (see the sailing schedule here), there is a workforce of close to 3000. The range of what they do is striking: there’s lots of engineering of course, plus systems development and planning, rail operations, yard control and stevedoring. And the Port has its own dedicated police, fire and ambulance services. On the Port website (from which this information is taken), the list of ‘ancillary services’ also indicates the variety of associated work activities which wouldn’t happen without it – chauffeurs, marine surveyors and ship repairs, financial services, IT, and many more, plus of course all the domestic labour that must remain flexible to support a 24 hour operation. And the primary activity they are all there to carry out or support is to move things around. That’s really the thing that struck me most; the enormous amount of stuff there is in this ‘holding space’ — and one that many commercial organisations effectively use as a de facto mobile storage facility — that marks the landscape with its presence.

References
1. BBC4 ‘The Box that Changed Britain’, 9 May 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00scpzn.
2. Harvey, D. (1992) The Limits to Capital, Basil Blackwell (Oxford) and University of Chicago.
3. Harvey, M., S. Quilley and H. Beynon (2002) Exploring the Tomato, Transformations of Nature, Society and Economy, Edward Elgar.
4. Levinson, M. (2006) The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, Princeton University Press.

Since then, it’s fair to say that Sheppey has struggled. Although new industry has been established, Sheppey ranks highly on ‘indices of deprivation’ (health, poverty etc). It was hit badly in the 1980s recession, and the situation is mixed today. The steel mill remains a significant employer, as do the three prisons, but the local economy is now dominated by the import business – of cars and fresh produce. Overall, the picture is volatile with a high percentage of people employed in relatively vulnerable industries. Educational attainment is well below the average for the South East. And life expectancy is several years lower in some parts of Sheppey than it is in other areas in the borough of Swale and the South East more widely.

When Ray Pahl carried out research on Sheppey in the late 1970s and 1980s – published in what became a seminal sociological text, Divisions of Labour (1984) – he drew attention to social polarisation between households. Some combinations of work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal) allowed people to ‘get by’ effectively; others did not. There is ongoing concern that current developments (e.g. housing rather than jobs-led regeneration) may further reinforce social divisions across Sheppey.

The Living and Working on Sheppey project explores the recent history and changes in working lives on Sheppey in the last decades of the 20^th Century and into the 21^st. The project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England through its South East Coastal Communities Programme, is a combination of new research and secondary analysis of Pahl’s earlier data. A first strand is based on interviews conducted by local people with older members of the community about their memories of Blue Town (Sheerness) and the naval dockyard before its closure in 1960 and their experiences of changing times since. A second strand invited young people about to leave school to write essays in which they imagine what their futures will hold in terms of work and family life, a repetition of an exercise undertaken by Pahl 30 years ago.

A montage of Blue Town High Street by TEA

The project team includes Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman, and Clive Arundell (University of Kent), Graham Crow (University of Southampton), Jenny Hurkett and Alice Young (Blue Town Heritage Centre), the UK Data Archive, the artists group TEA, and Ray Pahl as consultant. The contribution of the artists group TEA is the creation of a short film of a ‘walk’ along Blue Town High Street based on a model constructed from archives, the ‘reality’ in 2010, and imagination — a montage of past, present, and future (as in the image above).

A workshop on Saturday 12 June 2010 at the Blue Town Heritage Centre will present the work of the project and invite comment and discussion about it. This event is free of charge but places are limited and registration is required. Anyone interested in attending – or if you would like any other information about the project – please contact Alice Young, Project Coordinator, Blue Town Heritage Centre, 69 High Street, Blue Town, Sheerness, Kent ME12 1RW; telephone: 01795 662981; email: seccproject@hotmail.com.

References

Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

A number of the images are portraits, including of people who are in the public realm, such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (who I happened to see going into City Hall just as I was leaving this afternoon!). In other portraits we can understand work by the context within the image, for instance the policeman standing outside Number 10 Downing Street, or workers posed amongst theatre props. In these types of photograph, the worker and the job are one (for now at least) and the portrait of the person in their working environment carries the idea of what it is they do in their working lives.

The composition of some of the photographs is stimulating for thinking about work sociologically. In one image, a Neon Light engineer, suspended alongside a building, is pictured from below, the sky becoming the backdrop to his working world. He looks alone up there, only tenuously connected to the world as he holds onto the light he is working on, although in another image, someone else appears to be keeping an eye on him from the ground. We can’t see exactly what the light engineer is doing so we don’t get an insight into the activity of work per se but we do get some sense of what his working life is like from seeing him in the sky like that. The stunning picture of the rope access abseiler cleaning the No 1 London Bright Building is equally evocative.

Although the image of statue cleaners is taken peering into a vehicle, what looks like a harness on one of the workers suggests that his work also takes him off the ground. His co-worker, seen snoozing in the background, is taking a moment out, and this draws our attention to the ways in which working routines include pauses, and are shot through with other activities and meanings.

The materiality of work is very present in the photographs too. The cinema projectionist at the Barbican is seen surrounded by and connected to his equipment, as is the fire-fighter, whereas the organ tuner at the Royal Albert Hall must quite literally get inside the object of his labour.

Work is not presented in these photos in the restricted ways we sometimes see it celebrated, mostly of men doing dangerous things, however fascinating images of these worlds are. Bell-ringers – presumably an unpaid commitment – are shown in perfect coordination in a space lit by what looks like early morning sunshine. The hairdresser in a centre for homeless people might be there on a voluntary basis or as an employee. Overall, the collection transcends rigid categories of work, including artisans, gardeners and protestors alongside teachers and engineers. These photographs encourage us to ask questions about the basis on which work is undertaken, and to recognise the enormous range of work that goes on in London.

Overall, this series is a refreshing look at what we do from a young woman photographer. Thank you, Harriet Armstrong.

I was staying in a B&B last night and found myself having breakfast this morning with a Hotel Inspector. He didn’t quite have the style of Alex Polizzi, pictured above (of the current Channel Five Hotel Inspector series) but it was still the most interesting early morning conversation I’ve had this week. I’m not sure which of the various organisations that bestow stars he works for but it probably doesn’t make much difference. So, during an especially well-presented breakfast, I asked: What exactly does a real life hotel inspector do?

To start with, he explained that he spends most of the week away from home. The glamour of his working life is already diminished in my mind. Some establishments, those with lower ratings, can be checked out in the space of a day-visit, he tells me, whereas others, hotels or B&Bs with high ratings, require an overnight stay. ‘There are a lot of services to sample in some places’, he comments — and lots of hidden spaces to investigate, it turns out. One visit last week led to the deregistering of an establishment after he moved the bed away from the wall and exposed ‘an inch of dust’. The appeal of his work has now completely gone for me. So I’m surprised to learn from the How to become a AAA hotel inspector webpage , that it ‘is a much sought-after job, with a limited number of openings’.

Maybe it’s to do with all the free dinners. I wonder though how it feels to eat in order to evaluate. Do you have to choose things you might not otherwise want? He is obliged to order room service, try out restaurants, and sit in bars. Not for the leisure we would normally associate with consumption in these places but to scrutinize the menu, and the manner and mood of waiting staff. His own experience in catering, from waiter to chef, goes a long way in helping him to judge what’s on his plate, and how it’s brought to him. Yet his current job has taken him to the other side of the bar or table. This places him in the curious position of knowing the trades he is assessing whilst having to act like a consumer in doing so.

Even when he retires to his room, puts on his pyjamas, and gets into bed after what might have been a long, hard day, his work is far from over. Is the mattress firm? Is it even across the bed? Do the springs squeak if he moves around a lot? Can you hear the people in the room next door? Restful, it isn’t.

As I finish my coffee, I ask him what he does for a holiday. I don’t suppose you want to stay in a fancy hotel? I say. ‘Not really’, he replies ‘I quite like self-catering.’

‘Christy, Southwest Airlines’ — Brian Finke

References
Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage.
Witz, A, C Warhurst, D Nickson (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization’ Organization, 10(1): 33–54.
Wolkowitz, C. (2002) ‘The social relations of body work’, Work, Employment and Society 16(3): 497–510.

Roger Barton

He said to call him the day before to confirm. ‘What time should I arrive?’ ‘Between 2 and 2.30.’ He means in the morning. I try to sleep at 9pm and set the alarm for just after 1am. With three layers of clothes, I arrive at the security barrier an hour later. ‘I’m going to work with Roger Barton,’ I say to the guard and we both laugh. I walk up the steps from the car park with the view of Canary Wharf behind – a very different kind of market. I go over to the stand. ‘Ali, give Dawn her coat,’ Roger says within a breath of hello. He turns to the others: ‘Tell her what we’re doing, show her, make her work!’

The so-called ‘new’ Billingsgate market (the site since 1982) is a covered hall with adjacent buildings for additional cold storage, as well as a shellfish boiling room and an ice-making plant! (see: www.billingsgate-market.org.uk.) There are 54 merchants in all, selling from stands organised along three back-to-back rows lengthways with several cross-cutting paths at intervals along them, and from shops around the edges of the hall. There’s nothing but fish and seafood on sale, broadly divided into so-called ‘fresh’ or ‘wet’, exotic, frozen, plus smoked and different kinds of seafood. The floor of the market hall is green and gleaming with water that reflects everything around. There is a whole network of pipes overhead which bring water hoses to the stands. There’s a phone at each stand and plenty of mobiles. In fact, there’s a lot of talking to the world outside. And there’s a lot of moving about. Porters are everywhere, each with their number, either working directly for a stand-holder or ‘freelance’, getting work according to the demands of the day. On the first-floor there are the merchants’ offices, some directly overlooking the market, plus the Clerk and Superintendent’s office, the Fish Merchants Association, inspectors, maintenance, police and first aid, as well as the Seafood Training School which offers courses in fish cookery.

The first thing that’s striking as you enter the market site is the smell, not bad, just there. Even the freshest fish in such quantities smells of something. It’s as if there’s an odour from all the wetness and cold too. At this time, the place is relatively empty, although the two cafes are already doing a good business. Roger tends to set up early, and it can take a small team of people a couple of hours. By the time I’ve moved a few boxes of prawns and look up, there’s already more going on. The activity creeps up on you with cries of ‘mind your legs’, ‘… your legs!’ and the rumble of trolleys. It’s the porters’ space and it’s up to you to get out of the way. I’ve no idea what time it is most of the time I am there. At one point it is still only 4am, at another it is suddenly 7.30.

Everyone works very fast. I know this because I am trying to keep up with them and it’s a struggle. There are a lot of boxes of prawns, at least 7 sizes, all 2 kilos. Some have different coloured labels, sometimes the labels are the same colours but the size is different. You have to read them then put them in the right pile. I find it hard to see where the size is written and keep getting it wrong.

‘Give Mike a hand with the congers,’ Roger says. Yeah, right. 30 kilos a box. I can’t shift them an inch. So someone tells me to lay out the snappers. I start by trying to pick up a 3 kilo fish. By the tail with a hand around its slippery body. ‘Pick the fish up through the eyes,’ I get told. I hesitate for a moment but once I get beyond the idea of it, it’s actually quite easy. You can get a firm grasp though the sockets, the bones are hard there and can take the weight. But only two fish in, I put my bare hand – ‘did you bring gloves?’ Roger had asked like I was supposed to know – into the ice and catch my thumb on the razor sharp gills of the snapper. My coat is no longer white and pristine.

By the time I come back from finding a plaster, the snapper are all laid out and I’m directed to help Jo with the prawns. ‘You need a knife and a marker for this job,’ says Roger. The marker is like a chunky black Pritt stick and the knives are varied. I use the one with the smallest blade and try to imitate the others by making a cross in the plastic packaging which I then tear away. I feel moderately helpful doing this. Then Roger says to take away the rubbish, next to the cold storage area outside. It’s piled on one of the pallets with a hand-held steering device underneath. It’s simple if you know how. I don’t so just pick up an armful of rubbish. ‘Leave it to me,’ someone says immediately. I feel useless again.

There are two clear sections to the stand. One end is run by Billy, Roger’s right-hand man. This is where most of the large fish are – halibut, grouper (brown and spotted), all sorts of snapper, tilapia, red bream, conger eels and salmon. Plus some fish from the Indian Ocean, pomfret and other things I’m not familiar with, such as doctor fish and rabbit fish. At the other end, which faces one of the exits, there’s a big selection of other smaller fish and seafood. That’s where the squid are, and smaller farmed sea bass (10 for £12), plus sardines and all sorts of other things. The effect is of abundance. Between the two is the section with the prawns, then there’s another stretch before Roger’s ‘office’ (a space to write orders underneath the phone) and the ‘till’ (a drawer!). This is my patch for the day.

Everyone sells actively. ‘I want to hear you selling,’ Roger says, ‘not waiting for people to ask you things. So, what’s your pitch?’ Now I’m comfortable, I can do this. There’s a lot of cod, £3 per kilo. ‘I want to see all that gone,’ he says. Then there’s wild sea bass, £12 but I can go down to £10, I’m told. Next to that are chunks of tuna, £12, swordfish, £10, and marlin, £9, all vacuum-packed in clear plastic. In front, there are lobsters, £16. On the side, there’s a pile of razor clams, £5, and along the top, clams, £18 for a 2 kilo box, scallops (out of the shell, £18 for a 1 kilo tub, £29 for a 2 kilo one), dover sole (small, £7, and medium, £12), and packets of crabmeat, £2, and smoked salmon, £5 – but £25 in Harrods as Roger is fond of saying. I write out the prices either on the back of one of the boxes, or on a polystyrene lid as a reminder.

When the customers come, I talk about the eyes and where everything’s caught. I spot the middle-class people and tell them that the sea bass is wild, what a treat it is. I aim the cod at the Londoners, emphasise how it’s a bargain. The quantities are not small. I talk about how you can feed a lot of people with this fish, and realise that I’m saying that more to the tired-looking white middle-aged women and young and middle-aged black women. I emphasise sociality and play on their roles of being a host or provider. None of this is planned, this is what comes out, what I find myself doing when I’m not thinking about it. Of course it’s young and not so young men who want to flirt. Three people say they want to buy me. Yeah right, I reply flatly.

Lots of people seem to buy second time around, after checking out other fish and prices at other stands. A French couple buy the largest Turbot on the stall for £50. Then they come back for 2 kilos of scallops, £29. They know what they want, and don’t treat me as if I might be a source of knowledge. Others do, however. ‘What do you do with those [razor clams]?’ ‘How do you cook a sea bass?’ Now I am really in my element![1] I offer recipes and wise-sounding guidelines: ‘With fish,’ I pronounce, ‘the principle is always not to do too much’, and so on. I am getting into my stride and thoroughly enjoying myself. One man remarks, ‘You’re in the wrong line of work, you should be a TV chef!’ I’ve been laughing at that ever since.

When I think back on the day, I have a strong image of myself swinging a cod! I’m really getting the hang of it after a while and start to be able to feel the weight. ‘This one’s heavy, more than 2 kilos,’ I say to a customer. ‘Yeah, 2.4,’ Roger states after no more than a glance at the fish I’m throwing on the scales. He knows so well through sight and hold over the years he can now bypass the weighing altogether. He’s always right.

I get faster at mental arithmetic quite quickly. The first time something weighs 3.2 kilos I can’t calculate the 0.2. I’m embarrassed by this but own up and Roger gives me a calculator. Then I get the hang of how they round up and down and I more confidently let myself know the price, taking a few moments to check it in my head – or with the calculator if someone is buying several items – while I’m weighing the fish. No one challenges me. In fact, more generally, people treat me like a fishmonger assuming that’s what I do, seeing the role ahead of the person. I’m quite chuffed that I can carry this off, at least to the general public. I’m not selling to other fishmongers, Roger deals with them.

Roger tells me to tidy up at some point as gaps start to appear in the display. ‘Presentation is everything,’ he proclaims after getting out more tuna and swordfish, ‘line those up,’ he says. I do so then repeat the process with the cod and even reach under the stand to rearrange the sea bass. Water drips down my neck. I must smell of fish all through by now. By the end of my shift, the front of my coat and legs are soaked.

It’s gone quiet without me seeing it coming and I’m sorry it’s nearly over. Some of the stands are back to their bare metal frames as some merchants leave as soon as the market officially shuts at 8am. In other places there are large amounts of rubbish and people hosing things down. I’m tired now and a bit frazzled. Roger asks me to count up the money in his drawer, a pile of assorted notes and handfuls of change. At around 9am he says I’ve done enough. ‘So, what are you going to give me for dinner?’ I say. That was the deal. ‘Whatever you want,’ he replies and sounds as if he means it. I end up with 2 large cuttlefish, 4 dover sole, and a kilo of scallops. This feels like a good exchange. I drive home very happy. And grateful that I don’t have to do this every day.

In tune

I recently went to the workshop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was taking his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and otherwise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attending to the finish rather than the sound. Apparently there is value in layers of varnish and Roger is cautious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘reading the wood’ as he looks at the instrument, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of changing something. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he concludes.

Waiting

The workshop is an extraordinary place for an outsider. There are pieces of instruments all around the single room, sections and strings and bridges and necks, and a pan of glue on the boil on an old camping stove. I can’t take it all in, and I can’t see how Roger manoeuvres his way through the arrangement of objects. As well as making new instruments, what he does here is to work on things produced through the craftsmanship of others, undoing and remaking them. It takes a careful eye and a trained ear, an understanding of the whole process of creating a double bass, a lot of patience and dexterity, and a kind of respect it seems to me. He’s not an old man but he’s been doing this for a long time already. Several years ago, he decided to take a break. ‘I tried being a driving instructor,’ he said. ‘I lasted a year.’ When he was doing his apprenticeship, the man who taught him had already told him his future: ‘You’ll never do anything else.’ And here he is, in his own workshop, in tune with his instruments.

International Visual Sociology Association: http://www.visualsociology.org/

British Sociological Association Visual Sociology Study Group: http://www.visualsociology.org.uk/

Visual Sociology, A Field Guide: http://visualsociology.wordpress.com/

Sociological Images: http://sociologicalimages.blogspot.com/search/label/work

Josh Packard’s take on visual sociology: http://joshpackard.com/research/visual-sociology/

Visual Collections and Photographers

LastStop! is a visual record of the London Routemasters’ final months, including images of workers, workplaces and passengers: http://www.routemasters.co.uk/

Lost Labor is a collection of photos from the US from 1900–1980 of jobs that no longer exist: http://www.lostlabor.com/

Images from the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike: http://www.strike84.co.uk/

Masters of Photography: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/

V&A Exploring Photography: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/index.php

Issue magazine: http://www.documentography.com/issue/

Rogan MacDonald: http://www.roganmacdonald.co.uk/

Paul Halliday’s London project: http://www.paulhalliday.org/

London Independent Photography: http://www.londonphotography.org.uk/

Maurice Broomfield’s photographs of industrial Britain: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2f60ef04-1b6c-11df-838f-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html

Places and Projects

The Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University includes material on worker portraits and working-class literature: http://cwcs.ysu.edu/

Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London; http://www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/

The online Gallery of the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, contains images and information about projects on work: http://www.workinglives.org/gallery/gallery.cfm

Discussions

The Case for Working with Your Hands: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1

Other Interesting Stuff

Exhibition: Striking women: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Press/Pages/StrikingWomen.aspx

New occupations in 2020: http://sciencesowhat.direct.gov.uk/future-jobs/future-jobs-what-might-you-be-doing

Left leg

Glue and silicon, paint and varnish, grout and wood-filler. Traces on his clothes. The trousers especially tell the story of my friend’s most recent jobs. There was that shower to fix urgently in Hackney one night last week, and the bathroom to sort out after a would-be plumber with too many tools and too few skills had been let loose in Hampstead. At the ongoing job in South London, he’s supposed to be doing the plumbing and not general building work, but it’s hard to keep the boundaries firm once on-site and when the other guy is not so confident. And working on his own place in the meantime means more varnish and paint than usual.

Right leg

The photos show the sides of his trousers, where his hands reach his upper leg. The marks on them are more than evidence of what got spilt or dropped. They indicate gestures of work. And how the right side (yes, he’s right-handed) takes the strain. And how if you’re going to do stuff like this, where you can’t help yourself wiping the residue of the materials that fix and cover and generally hold things together in houses and bathrooms, well you wouldn’t want to have the wrong trousers for the job.

It came from a friend of mine who used to work as a navvy.[1] One of the most demanding things they had to do was to stretch the rail. It’s important to make sure there’s no give left in the rail to prevent it from expanding then buckling in the summer heat. You get less than 10 inches from a quarter of a mile of track, but still, that’s enough to realise the malleability of it. At the same time, the stubbornness of the piece that was left over, cut off, and is now in my house, makes it hard to believe it could be anything other than rock-solid.

Sitting here now, what it reminds me of is the sheer physicality of the work that goes into maintaining the track; and the sheer materiality of the track. Of just how much work continues to be done in the world through the strength of bodies and hands. And how much stuff there is around us that’s discarded material itself produced through work.