Martin Argles/Guardian: Downing St political staff

In the first photograph, there are three members of staff huddled round one phone. Argles tells us they are listening in as Brown speaks to Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems. “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the palace”, Argles reports hearing (Guardian, 13th May 2010: 21). I’m fascinated by that huddle, it speaks of the hunger, urge and delight to be in on the moment that characterises the political aides and correspondents I’ve met. They are seduced by an everyday proximity to power to imagine that nothing else matters as much, and that hearing things second hand is almost worse than not hearing them at all. Look at the woman hovering behind, one ear turned inwards and her own mobile in hand: it matters so much to be there, to be listening in on an event that matters for just this moment.

I like the ordinariness of the rest of the scene: the big metal cupboard with its fire safety certificate, the Downing Street screensaver on the right of the shot, and at the back, the colleague involved in a very different sort of phone call.

Martin Argles/Guardian: The war room in Downing Street

In the second shot, we see a wider perspective, a layered modernity. Chandeliers, wood panelling and a fireplace point to a Victorian refurbishment of the original Downing Street building, although the lights are now electric and the fireplace is surrounded by desks. Confronting this past is the detritus of the modern office: screens, wires and swivel chairs; coffee cups, iphones, and men in ties. The carousel of MDF desks are paper-free, though an enormous briefcase in the centre of the shot has a wadge of documents shoved in it: this is the last day of work, and this room will soon come to be taken for granted by a different sort of political animal.

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.

Before students are allowed to touch a patient, they get a set of false teeth caked in fake plaque to hone their scraping technique on. I thought that the hard part would be dealing with the teeth at their dirtiest, but it turns out that scraping is more of a challenge as the teeth get cleaner. This means that the students start with few skills but an easy task. Who makes these dirty fake teeth?

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.