At Pilling,the project begins with a line.
A line drawn across land and water,enforced through sea defences,warning signs,fences and inherited stories.The Plague Ship myth operates here as a localised memory:a single vessel,a single moment,a community responding to perceived threat by holding danger offshore.The coastline becomes a defensive threshold and fear is spatialised—kept at a distance,managed through separation.
But fear does not remain fixed to one site.
As the project moves south toward Knott End,the narrative shifts from a singular myth to a systemic geography.The estuary opens out.The line dissolves into channels,mudflats,slipways,posts, and tidal markers.What was once a boundary becomes a circulation system.The question is no longer what is kept out,but what is allowed to move and under what conditions.
Knott End marks a transition from the logic of the wall to the logic of the flow.
Here,the landscape no longer performs defence through enclosure alone,but through regulation, visibility and control.The estuary is a working space—shaped by tides,trade,transport and infrastructure.It is a site where ships wait,where goods pass silently,where memorial gestures appear in improvised forms: flowers tied to posts,lifebelts left to weather,benches facing the water.These gestures signal loss,but also repetition.The sea is not just remembered;it is continually rehearsed as a space of risk.
In this chapter,the Plague Ship myth is no longer treated as a discrete historical event.Instead,it becomes a template—a way of understanding how maritime fear is distributed across space and time.Knott End does not replace Pilling;it extends it.The estuary absorbs the earlier logic of quarantine and replays it at scale.Where Pilling speaks of exclusion,Knott End speaks of circulation under surveillance.
This is also where the project’s engagement with global systems sharpens.The estuary functions as a soft interface between local life and international movement.Container ships pass without ceremony.Labour disappears into logistics.Meanwhile,migrant crossings elsewhere along the British coastline are hyper-visible,politicised and framed as crisis.The same water carries radically different narratives depending on who—or what—is moving through it.
Knott End exposes this contradiction with quiet clarity.
The photographs here are less about barriers and more about structures of permission:slipways that allow certain vessels to launch,posts that guide navigation,signs that regulate behaviour,memorial traces that acknowledge lives lost without changing the system that produced the loss.The landscape becomes an ethical diagram—one that maps how fear has shifted from disease to displacement,from plague to migration,while retaining the same underlying logic.
This chapter therefore marks a widening of the project’s scope. The coastline is no longer a single defended edge,but a continuous,relational space in which historical memory, capitalist circulation and humanitarian crisis overlap.The move from Pilling to Knott End is not a departure;it is an expansion. The fear that once clung to a single ship now moves with the tide.
What emerges is a coastline that does not simply remember the past, but actively participates in its repetition.