Remeberance for the poor old bones of Canvey
Now is all there is. We can live neither in the future nor in the past. History pours forward, a stream of pay-to-view costume dramas; an inevitable procession of those that won this war or that, those who took over this or that, historical remakes in these victors’ own image. Stories that make us laugh, desire and yearn for those colourful costumes and trinkets.
History is never over, never finished with; it just lies in ruins. And beneath this fictional rubble, in London, 25,000 of the poor, mad, and diseased of Bedlam Cemetery laid undisturbed for almost 500 years. £18-billion of investment in Elizabeth's line, dug them up and transported them along the Thames Corridor to Canvey. Their soil blanket, the shroud that kissed cold flesh half a millennium ago, shipped to Wallasea island to make a new nature.
Like the rest of us, now the dead are banished from that unaffordable city.
Let Canvey awaken from this pay-to-go coma and escape a history made against us. Let's record a multitude of heartbeats in remembrance of the poor, mad, rebellious and diseased that lay beneath us in Willow Cemetery. Let's reunite the soil of Wallesea with the Mass Grave on Canvey.
Let's pump each heartbeat into the ground so each worm sings the praise of the bones of the dead. Unforgetting rhythmic hearts, redeeming our past, provoking the present, to break with the silence that hides the violence hidden beneath a progress to nowhere.
Let's rescue Canvey's past from oblivion, listen in those heartbeats to the before, echoes of our footsteps on London’s streets all those years ago. Let's listen again to those who came before, the dead who anticipated our arrival.
Please donate your heartbeat for the poor old bones of Canvey?
We are collecting people’s heart beats for the project, an act of remembrance for those bodies reinterned 10 years ago from London's Bedlam Burial Ground to a site adjacent to Willow Cemetery, Canvey Island. The project will take place on the 28th and 29th June, during Estuary 2025 and you are all invited.