Estuary: Out from London to the Sea
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- q1666
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Hamish Hamilton
- ISBN
- 9780241142882
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Following Lichtenstein’s earlier studies of East London (including Brick Lane [2007] and Diamond Street [2012]), Estuary: Out from London to the Sea gives literary form to a ‘new way of thinking about the Essex coast’. A form of creative non-fiction, the book may be situated within a recent British literature of place, and the ‘need to interpret contemporary landscapes anew, particularly hitherto neglected areas such as the Thames Estuary’ (108). By contrast, however, to the poetic re-enchantments of place pursued in the work of W.G. Sebald or Iain Sinclair (with whom Lichtenstein collaborated on her first book, Rodinsky’s Place, 1999), Lichtenstein’s writing is more directly research-led, combining archival work, oral history and on-site walks and journeys, so as to give form to the singularities of place. Partly framed by a similar voyage narrated by Joseph Conrad in Mirror of the Sea (1902), Estuary is formally organised around the first-person narration of Lichtenstein’s own often hazardous journeys along the Thames, set against a collective chorus of past and present voices from the area’s inhabitants. In this way, the narrative’s movement through the ‘in-between place’ of the Estuary also becomes an archaeological uncovering of the different social-historical layers that give meaning to this distinctive landscape that is ‘[p]art industrial heartland, part wild marshland’.
Research for the book included more than 50 interviews with fishermen, sailors, mudlarkers, local historians and other river workers, as well as extensive archival research in the Bishopsgate Institute, National Maritime Museum, Southend Museum and numerous smaller collections. This was also embedded within a larger series of research activities, including Lichtenstein’s curating of the Shorelines Literary Festival (2016) and Arts Council-funded film, A Study for the Estuary (shown at the Quadrangle Film Festival and as a Guardian podcast), which are themselves incorporated into the construction of the book.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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