Memory Maps, is a project first launched in Essex between the University of Essex and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The project involves noticing where you are in a deep and involved way and capturing it primarily through creative writing. It is about people and their relationship with a place or a particular area. Some people respond to places through painting and as part of the Memory Maps project the V&A has published 150 works by artists who were inspired by the Essex landscape. The works range from classic English landscapes by John Constable in the eighteenth century to popular scenes by Barbara Jones. Her watercolours formed part of the 1940s Recording Britain project. This was a Second World War scheme to record landscapes, buildings and ways of life that were thought to be under threat and, because of its closeness to Europe, Essex figures strongly. Visit the website of the V&A Museum to find out more details about the project, to read many more contributions from other well known Essex artists and to view the paintings.
Well known Essex writers such as Billy Bragg, Marina Warner, Ken Worpole and Robert Macfarlane have made their contribution to the project. We want to share with you their experiences, responses and memories.
Marina Warner's works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols. Marina writes about Francis Bacon in Wivenhoe, his friends and the James Bond connections with this small town in Essex.
To read the article published in the Essex visitor guide please click here.
To read the complete article visit the V&A Museum site.
Visit the website of Marina Warner.
Singer and songwriter Billy Bragg, renowned for his blend of folk, punk-rock, and protest music recalls one of his fondest memories of his childhood. It concerns the time his father let him drive his green Morris Oxford very, very slowly across the field that served as a car park behind Shoeburyness beach.
To read the article published in the Essex visitor guide please click here.
To read the complete article visit the V&A Museum site.
Visit the website of Billy Bragg.
Ken Worpole recalls the times he spent at Mersea Stone. For him its the perfect place for watching the Blackwater Estuary change before your eyes and the complete transformation of the horizon as the tides rise and fall.
To read the article published in the Essex visitor guide please click here.
Visit the website of Ken Worpole.
Ken and Jason Orton walked together the Essex coastline producing the book 350 miles - an Essex journey. They walked the ramified creeks and its strange relics of redundant military or industrial uses, discovering open spaces, skies and landscapes that will stay with you long after a hundred pretty villages scenes inland have blurred into one another.
Click through to the article 350 miles - an Essex journey.
Robert Macfarlane is a travel writer, cultural historian, and literary critic. His memory map talks of a September night on the sea-wall at Dengie, when he watched the thousands of migrating birds being sent up in sudden clouds by big waves, and then raining down again onto the sluiced mud.
To read the article published in the Essex visitor guide please click here.
Why not create your very own Memory Map? Visit the many places that have inspired so many writers and artists of all kinds in the past and the present. Walk through the countryside, sail the rivers and estuaries, notice the environment, respond to the urban world and its rich history and cultural diversity, drive the roads and lanes, wander on coastal paths or on some of the several long distance footpaths, be a social geographer.
Be inspired and capture your Memory Maps by contributing your own writings, photographs, and images about Essex. Check out the Memory Maps webpages, email your written submissions to memorymaps@vam.ac.uk and leave something for future generations.
