This month Pete used a new clanger, in memory of his friend Tim Fleming. Sadly there will be a pause in Moser's tour of bell sites, as he has upcoming operations on his knees.
Pete Moser's salute to high water springs on March 4 2022. His grand tour has been delayed a bit - but it will definitely happen.
Here is Jon Best's contribution to a number of poems written by the Poetry group in Par.
Saturday March 5th 2022 saw much fruitful work by Richard Parks, chair of the Friends of Par Beach. All to the backdrop of a half-bell just delivered by Marcus Vergette, currently in Cornubia, the local venue encouraging social enterprise, encouraging creativity and promoting healthy living.
The first of the tour. Shame about the baseball bat.
One of the key things about the Morecambe bell is that your feet stay dry no matter what the state of the tide. That applies to the London one too. But the others....
It seems I have undertaken to play all of the bells this year! Oops!
I live in Morecambe and for the past 2 years I have played our Tide and Time Bell on the
highest tide of every month. I love it ! We started putting films of these improvisations
online and there are now thirteen on the Morecambe Artist Colony (MAC) you-tube
channel, played in all sorts of weather.
Random musical adventures like this are such fun and so this plan to travel the country on
train and bike seems like a great idea…
Will the bells sound different ?
Who will I meet in each place?
How will it help to highlight the issues around the climate crisis that are at the core of the
whole programme ?
Today the tour started on our Bell at the 12.47, 10m high tide with my friend Ben McCabe
from More Music, filmed by Graham Dean from MAC.
Now I am planning a trip in two weeks time to Camaes on Anglesey to play their Bell at
12.22, a 6.72m tide. I am going a few hours early to play it when I can actually walk across
the sand and rocks because at high tide I will have to swim out to climb up onto the
structure to play the bell. The first adventure!
Then Appledore, London, Aberdyfi, Mablethorpe and … the Isle of Lewis ??
These are the mallets!
NASA has made a rather weird video of the tides from a global perspective, based on data from satellites. The fact that the UK is squashed into the top right hand corner is frustrating!
Pete Moser ringing the bell on a chilly day at High Water Springs, January 5 2022.
In October 2021 we presented a half-bell to the Mayflower School, which is near where the bell will finally be sited at the Lower Lighthouse. Much enthusiasm!
On a windy day in Morecambe, Pete Moser rang out the bell for COP26. The same day that Barack Obama arrived in Glasgow....
With grateful thanks to Sue Atkinson here is an impression of the bell to be installed to the West of the Rotunda (itself hiding a sewage pumping station). It isn't installed yet - it just looks like it.....
Here's the view in the other direction (taken on a sunnier day).
This month Pete Moser is accompanied by Ben McCabe. For the non-initiated, Springs (the opposite of Neaps) is the highest tide of the month.
The wonderful performance we commissioned from Prodigal UPG has been touring to a few locations, including the Eden project, during the summer of 2021. The aim is that it should be performed at as many bell sites as possible in 2022. Here is a brief trailer.
Everything is connected. In May 2013 Transition Town Louth held the Louth Festival of the Bees, an art exhibition, conference, operatic concert and more, which connected bees and wildflowers, arts and science, to promote aspects of the environmental crisis that humanity faces. The Festival brought us into contact with sculptor Marcus Vergette who was looking for an east coast site for another Time and Tide Bell. Soon Marcus was with us, scoping locations along the Lincolnshire coastline.
Our beaches are a contrast to the other Bell locations, wide open expanses of sand and big skies, a deep history of shifting coastlines over centuries and millennia and a future whose only certainty is deep uncertainty. The Time and Tide Bell produced an opportunity to start conversations about our relationship with the seas, back into unfathomable time and forward to the time from which we have no evidence, not so much as a stone tool or bone fragment, because it has not yet been.
The past is the history of ice ages and sea level changes, to which people have adapted. The future will be the product of human influence, global heating and sea level rise. Our ability to adapt will be tested. The Bell looks out over Doggerland, the vast plain that, in Mesolithic times, was home to countless people, its lakes, rivers and shores, providing rich resources. The uplands of that plain are once again being built upon but now with wind-farms, substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy.
The gas pipelines that cross the beach near the Bell are now shut down, the southern North Sea gas fields emptied of their methane, burnt in our homes and factories, the carbon dioxide vented to the atmosphere. This has contributed to changing the air’s composition from 280 to 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We need to revers that. It is not enough to reduce our carbon emissions; the damage must be undone.
To install the Bell on our beach we formed the Lincolnshire Time and Tide Bell Community Interest Company, but that was just our first objective. Our continuing task is to create a programme of art exhibitions and events that engage people with aspects of the natural environment, fusing the arts with the sciences and using the arts as a tool to promote mitigation and adaptation to the consequences of global heating.
Our major events so far and planned:
- May 2018 Across the Seas. Art exhibition at The Sam Scorer Gallery, Lincoln, investigating migration, past, present and in the future.
- August 2018 #200Fish. Art exhibition at The North Sea Observatory drawing attention to the over 200 species of fish found in the North Sea.
- November 2018 By the Sea. Art exhibition at The North Sea Observatory inspired by the coastal environment.
- June 2019 Installation of the 7th Time and Tide Bell on the beach within the Saltfleetby-Theddlethorpe National Nature Reserve.
- August 2019 Warming Bells. Art exhibition at The North Sea Observatory, drawing on the cultural heritage of bells to sound a warning about the climate emergency.
- March 2020 Faces of Climate. Art exhibition at The North Sea Observatory, portraits of climate scientists and activists.
- November 2020 Doggerland. Symposium and art and archaeology exhibition at The North Sea Observatory, exploring the flooding of Doggerland and future sea level rise.
In winter the site is very exposed, with enormous seas during storms; the clapper is disconnected for the season, to avoid damage
The unusual installation of this bell took place in challenging weather in February and March of 2019. After extensive engineering work to the Stone Jetty, undertaken by VolkerStevin, the bell was hoisted into place and final adjustments were made by Marcus Vergette - shown in the photo.
This is a project of the Morecambe Artist Colony. Much of the work was undertaken by Sian Johnson, to whom profound thanks.
More photos of the installation:
In mid 2009 Marcus approached me with his wonderful idea to locate his bells at suitable waterside locations. As Trinity Buoy Wharf is dedicated as a home for the arts and creative industries we were pleased to welcome the bell as a piece powerful of sculpture. Particularly as each rising tide would activate the bell and mark the natural rhythm of the life of the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf.
Marcus’s concerns about climate change are highlighted and particularly focused at TBW as the Thames Valley in London is at clear risk from rising water levels.
The Thames was the mainspring of London and is vitally important to everyone.
The bell helps to attract visitors interest while ringing out a warning that we should not ignore.
Eric Reynolds, Founding Director, Urban Space Management
On March 4th 2020 about 20 people assembled at the Ferryboat Inn (many thanks to Golden Sands Holiday Park for lending it to us) to explore Citizen Science possibilities. As with our other meetings this was very ably led by Jack Sewell of the Marine Biological Association.
The beach in Mablethorpe has rather different features to the sites of the two previous workshops; above all, there is a plethora of shells, which made for a fascinating comparison.
The aim of the game was to develop ideas, inspired and put forward by the local community, for projects that could be explored by all age groups. Plenty emerged - and after a process of distillation the results will be shared with whoever wants to engage with them. Stand by...
On March 3rd 2020 about 20 people gathered to spend the day in the Platform, the splendid venue based on the former railway station near the Morecambe seafront. It was a grey day, and rather a damp one, for the session outside exploring the marine life near the bell (fortunately it was low tide).
There was an excellent briefing on the subject by Jack Sewell from the Marine Biological Association. After the session exploring the foreshore near the bell the afternoon was spent developing ideas for a citizen science project linked to the bell.
As with the meetings in Appledore and Mablethorpe a number of very promising ideas were put forward for a programme of Citizen Science activity, which will be considered, distilled, and shared with whoever from the group who is interested as soon as possible.
Most people reading this will probably know that there is a substantial, growing and deeply committed group of artists whose work aims to have a focus in some form on climate change. Whether it can be read as a cry of pain (e.g. the observation that ‘scientists can shout, artists can scream’) or as a more measured, nuanced or intellectualised response, there is a vast range of work that has a bearing on the subject.
In 2005 I started out in this field, forming an organisation eventually called TippingPoint, inspired in part by Bill McKibben’s observation: But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?
TippingPoint worked primarily in the UK, but also across the world, holding events that brought over 2,000 artists into close contact with climate researchers of one type or another, all with a view to stimulating conversations, collaborations – whatever would help inspire new work. We had no prescriptions or expectations of the people who attended, we simply wanted to create an environment in which new ideas might develop. We also commissioned over 25 new pieces of work, mostly theatre pieces.
My original hope for TippingPoint was that we would act as midwife, or marriage broker, to something that might emerge as a twenty-first century version of Silent Spring. After a while I concluded that given the cacophonous media times in which we live it was unrealistic to expect a single piece of work to have comparable impact. So I settled on a lesser ambition, of helping to bring about as much work as possible that would contribute to a rising tide of insights, revelations – and screams – that would help wake us up to the subject.
And I think that has happened. Recognition of the severity of the issue is currently at an all-time high (let us hope, devoutly, that it is sustained); this is due to many factors, including the weather, Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, and much more. But I cherish the notion that what is often called ‘the cultural response to climate change’ has played its part, and this will continue. The countless artworks that have emerged don't, of course, tell the story simply, still less do they interpret or help communicate the work of scientists, as many of them wished; but they have created that rising tide.
I claim no part in the conception of the Time and Tide Bells, which is wholly due to Marcus Vergette. But he came to several of TippingPoint’s events, and it became clear to me that these are not only very powerful sculptures, but that the ethos that surrounds them, the fact that they are a gift, without strings, to the communities that host them, and that they have the capacity to stimulate further work of a broad range, tells exactly the right story for our times.
And I think that if you listen to them really, really carefully, you can hear the sound of the sea level rising.
Peter Gingold
February 2020
