Drawing inspiration from Allan Sekula’s seminal work Fish Story, this project examines the Lancashire coastline as a continuous,charged threshold stretching from the shores of Pilling,through the Knott End estuary and down towards the Lytham coast.Across these connected landscapes,the sea is not simply a geographical boundary but a historically loaded space where fear,movement and control repeatedly converge.
At Pilling,local memory recalls the quarantine of the so-called Plague Ship:a vessel held offshore,believed to carry an invisible and uncontrollable contagion.Whether fully documented or not,the legend embedded itself deeply into the cultural imagination,establishing a long-lasting association between maritime arrival and catastrophe.The coastline became a defensive line — a place where danger was held at a distance rather than confronted.
Moving south along the estuary towards Knott End,this logic of quarantine and exclusion persists in altered forms.Here,the landscape is marked by slipways, posts,sea defences and tidal infrastructure — quiet remnants of control and regulation.These structures speak to a broader coastal psychology:the need to manage what arrives from the water,to regulate access and to externalise risk.The estuary itself becomes a holding space,a zone of waiting,uncertainty and suspended movement.
Further along,towards the Lytham estuary,the same patterns repeat at a different scale.The coast here reflects a modernised continuation of the same impulse — engineered barriers,managed shorelines and visual regimes that divide land from sea,safety from threat.Across centuries,the coastline has been shaped not only by tides and trade,but by fear projected outward.
Today,communities once again look seaward across cold,exposed waters and encounter a familiar narrative.Small,vulnerable boats arriving are framed as carriers of a new form of contagion — social,cultural,economic.Migrants and so-called‘boat people are positioned within the same historical structure of fear that once surrounded disease.The panic is not new;it is recycled.
This deeply rooted anxiety is continually exploited and amplified by contemporary media and political discourse.The fixation on migrant crossings mirrors the Plague Ship myth, functioning as a distraction from the real systemic force shaping these coastlines:the vast,anonymous flows of global capital. Container ships move freely through these same waters, eroding local labour,reshaping economies and generating the global conditions that force migration in the first place — yet they remain largely unchallenged.
From the sea defences at Fluke Hall to the estuarine boundaries of Knott End and Lytham,the English coastline emerges as a monument to a repeating cycle of misdirected collective panic.Until we stop projecting fear onto the most vulnerable arrivals and instead confront the structural systems that produce displacement,this coastal barrier will continue to stand — not as protection,but as evidence of historical amnesia.
This project brings together long-form photographic fieldwork across the Lancashire coastline,moving between Pilling,the Knott End estuary and the Lytham estuary.It combines slow,repeated observation of landscape with close attention to coastal infrastructure,tidal zones,defensive structures and traces of human intervention.
The work includes wide coastal views, mid-range studies of barriers and boundaries and close examinations of materials — concrete, fencing, timber, netting, and erosion as visual metaphors for containment,control and fear.Alongside photography,the project draws on historical research,local memory and critical writing to situate the images within broader discussions of migration,capitalism, disease and collective memory.
Rather than documenting events,the project interrogates atmosphere,absence and repetition asking how coastlines remember,how fear is spatialised and how the same narratives re-emerge across centuries in altered but recognisable forms.