Beyond the eastern edge of London, the Thames becomes a working river again. It is not furnished with the grand basins and warehouses of the Victorian docklands closer to the city. Instead a different environment has been created, inward-looking and ignoring the river that brings these uses there.
Bridges, refineries, logistics, chemicals, bulk ports and cargo ferries are here because they must be. To create modern life, we must put the back-of-house services somewhere. Operated by few people on tight budgets, they do not create real places as their forebears once might have.
This series documents a path along the Thames between Purfleet and Grays in Thurrock, an environment most people drive above or tunnel under at Dartford. It exists physically, but not in the imagination. It is a gap, existing between walls and fences, ducking under access ramps and pipelines, and both entirely apart from and deeply part of our modern world.
