Cement

After viewing Shaun Morris' 'Stolen Car' exhibition, my friend Dave and I strolled around Rugby in search of photo opportunities, (which included some nice hazard stripes and a pleasingly mundane goods yard).  However, the real treat lay in wait as we drove away on the town's by-pass.

Rugby is another of those workaday Midlands towns, possibly like Loughborough, that enjoys a split personality through the presence of a 'prestigious' educational institution.  Many people know of its public school through its associations with 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' and William Webb Ellis. Superficial research reveals it is one of Britain's oldest bastions of educational privilege and may have also been implicated in a fee-fixing cartel of independent schools in recent times.  There's no doubt it allows a superficially mundane town to find room for the occasional up market tailor's shop and incongruously tweedy young man amongst generic shopping centre units and bellowing teenagers.  We even wandered into what felt like a more verdant 'posh end' of town on our short walk.

However, down here in the 'real world', Rugby's economy, and what employment opportunities may exist, are mainly fuelled by engineering and, most famously, cement.  We'd glimpsed the town's cement works peering over the town centre roofs and elected to drive out of town that way.  Whilst sensing the possibility of a little industrial eye candy we were unprepared for quite such an imposing visual statement.

The plant is huge, (one of Europe's largest and now owned by the massive Mexican-owned Cemex corporation, I discover).  Skirting the perimeter, I was struck by its uniformity of colour with all the buildings and complex structures sharing the same putty-grey colour.  However, this isn't dust, but rather paint, perhaps chosen to disguise what cement residue may actually adhere to its surfaces.  If that's the plan, it's successful; the site actually appears surprisingly clean.

On a bitter, grey afternoon, with light beginning to fade, this colouration, along with the lack of any dramatic movement within the complex, lent an industrial edifice of such substantial materiality an eerie, ghostly aspect.  This impression of stillness, of being uninhabited or even autonomous is something I've observed before in such locations.  We traditionally associate industrial activity with exactly that, - activity, but technological and economic realities dictate that significant industrial and commercial processes are now often overseen by a minimal human work force.  I'm reminded of Patrick Keiller's intriguing, subjective documentary film 'Robinson In Space', [1.].  in which the protagonists visit numerous seemingly abandoned but fully operational ports and industrial complexes in search of Britain's hidden economy.

The plant is best viewed from the hillside above, adjacent to the by-pass and main railway line.  From here, you can view the entire complex, as it appears to build pyramid-like towards the central tower and chimney that dominate it.  The alienating, high security atmosphere of this environment struck me.  It's a world of high fences, barbed wire, security lights and prohibition signs.  Keiller has described such industrial fortification as almost 'S&M'. [2.]  A public footpath threads between the factory site and railway line, where regular trains hurtle past, but this is a strange place for a country walk indeed.  Across the road a dammed quarry lake with man-made islands has been reclaimed for wildlife, although it resembles a singularly alien landscape.  A little way up a track that leads towards its perimeter, discarded beer cans and a scorched mattress indicated bleak leisure activities.

Leicester, 2013

It seems appropriate that, having viewed Shaun's depictions of a marginal concrete world, we should find ourselves observing the source of so much of that cement on the fringes of another town.  I also can't help noting that the mechanics of cement supply is becoming something of a subsidiary theme within my photography.

[1.]:  Patrick Keiller (Dir.), 'Robinson In Space', Koninck/BFI in Association With Channel 4, 1994

[2.]:  'A Conversation Between Patrick Wright & Patrick Keiller', In 'Robinson In Space', Reaktion Books, 1999