Gates of Eden

As an artist and urbanist working on the built environment and landscape, Paul has collaborated with a number of friends, curators and academic colleagues on what he describes as “walking dialogues’. Sometimes these walked landscapes are familiar, particularly so in the case of London and the South Coast, but not quite so in the case of his perambulations around the South East of England, between 2010 and 2022. Having visited Margate and the Kent coast since the age of five, Paul explored the relationship between city and sea, both in terms of geographic proximity, and in terms of histories and psychological imagination. He says: 

“I didn’t really know this was going to be a body of work when I started the walks. The main reason for going on photo-walks was driven by the need to get out of the city, or explore areas that were related to my own autobiographies of space. When I visited the Kent coast, all sorts of memories flooded back. I remember going to Cliftonville for day trips as a child with my mum. Back then, the place was absolutely packed, and the lido was busy and in good working condition. Now, the area is almost unrecognisable, as the double tensions of poverty and gentrification play out in the landscape. The memories I have from these places are utopic in the sense that even in the face of environmental and architectural dereliction, the power of memory works like a kind of overlay. It’s one of the weirdest experiences, walking down a road or through a cut in the cliffs and being aware of deeply buried memories bubbling to the surface of consciousness.”

As Paul walked through these areas, he spoke to locals, friends, and colleagues about how the landscapes had changed, and he noted that barriers and borders seemed to be present wherever he walked. The coast was intimately linked to geographies of distinctiveness, and in some areas, many local people spoke about how they saw the new reality of the UK having left the EU. This became a theme that informed Paul’s way of making and thinking about his photographic and urban practices, and based on these conversations, further walks were undertaken to discover how memory might function as a form of place-making, and even in the face of unanticipated changes, how we might possibly find our own Eden.