adventure

whilst online yesterday i noticed that the tide @ london bridge was low, the 2 websites i checked disagreed by about an hour about the exact time of lowtide but one was just after 5, the other just after 6, so as i was finishing at 5 i thought it was worth checking out the adventure i've had planned for a little while...

just west of southwark bridge on the north side of the thames there is a building that juts out into the river. at hightide the water comes up almost to the walkway beside the building, but at lowtide you can see pillars holding up the building with a space underneath that obviously fills with water as the tide rises...

an early draft of harbour walls had a line about a lowtide reality... which i guess was written around may/june 2004, that space amongst those pillars is that lowtide reality... so the desire to investigate that space has been with me at least since then, if not before...

i had my new camera with me so i left as quick as i could after 5 and trekked over to the river, crossing the thames at the millenium bridge, (this picture i've posted here taken from there), coming down from the thames path to the beach by some quite scary wooden steps, obviously submerged every tide and looking a little worse for wear... a film crew were down by the waters edge when i got down, but my film subject was away to the left...

the biggest shoot of digital film so far for me, the folder containing all the files is 291Mb, maybe i won't always be so snap happy but this was worthy of recording...

quite scary approaching the pillars, a grey day by now and me still ragged after the bank holiday, also the awareness that i had to be careful of the time, being trapped by the tide down there would be very scary indeed although there was no real risk of that so long as i didn't fall asleep down there...

so i checked it out, took quite a bit of shaky lowgrade video, concieved of a very scary thriller that could be shot down there...

the water being channelled by different walls of concrete made really nice patterns of ripples, if a boat went past the waves would come in from one end, then come in a little later from the other, meeting in the middle... the sounds of the water rebounding in that concrete space, mixing with the traffic of southwark bridge right there... eerie stuff...

i want to make a video to which i'll write some music and perhaps this will be that video, clumsy and lo-fi as it will be... strange the odysseys we choose for ourselves, i'll be returning there at some point, maybe with a better camera, someday when the tide is low enough and i'm in the area...

but it's great to have checked it out, this, like the view from the top of the trellick tower that i've wanted to see for so long, long held desires to see the world from certain places... related to the walks i used to take on blewburton hill when i was younger...

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