Sheppey 29th July 2009

Pill box on the eastern end of the Isle of Sheppey. It must have started out on the cliff top but in some storm the cliff has given way and it has slid intact and undamaged on to the beach, resisting the elements against the odds for 50 years.

So now it isn't a defensive structure any more but more of an interactive sculpture. It rests at an angle which completely screws up your perceptions when you go inside it: water that slopes, stairs which try to throw you over backwards, a roof like a ski jump to launch out over the mud to the gently flooding tide creeping back across the beach.

In a different place this might have become a tourist attraction, a piece of military heritage to be marvelled at; or maybe a den for the local kids to get up to all kinds of nastiness inside, but this is the end of the Isle of Sheppey, a place which almost emerged from estuarine obscurity in the fifties, only to sink back again into the mud when a new generation of Londoners discovered that cheap flights to Spain could whisk them off to sunnier, sandier places.

So the pill box just sits there, visited by the tides and the gulls and the occasional rambler, a spot to linger in and drink tea out of a thermos, sheltered from the wind in the prematurely autumnal sunshine, and be thankful that even the kids can't be bothered to go inside and sully this strange little structure on the edge of the world.