Not so very long ago, Whitstable was an industrial town. At its heart, a harbour handling coal and aggregates, boat building and repairs and, most famously, a fishing port renowned for seafood and oysters. It was also a place that encouraged visitors. The world’s first railway season tickets were introduced to encourage people from Canterbury to visit the town regularly via the “Crab and Winkle Railway”.
Most of these industrial activities continue in the town today, but, for many people Whitstable is first and foremost a holiday destination. People flock to the town all year round, from the UK and abroad, with many escaping urban environments, to enjoy a day at the coast. But visitors can’t escape Whitstable’s industrial past, because on East Quay, in the harbour, at the very centre of the town, looms Brett’s aggregate coating plant. The plant’s tower is visible from all over Whitstable and beyond, yet the postcards and pictures for sale in the souvenir shops ignore it, electing to show the customary views of beach huts, fishing boats and sunsets.
36 VIEWS sets out to address this imbalance and encourages visitors and residents to reconsider Whitstable’s townscape. In the spirit of Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji we present thirty-six views of Whitstable – a series of paintings and photographs that embrace the town’s past and present – and celebrate it.
The artists
Read the artists’ biographies:
Paintings: Andrew Todd
Photographs: Gordon Butler
How 36 Views came about
36 Views began, like so many of the best ideas, with a chance conversation in a pub.
Bumping into each other one evening in The Tankerton Arms, it emerged that next-door-neighbours Andrew Todd and Gordon Butler had, over the years, been simultaneously creating images featuring the same distinctive Whitstable landmark: the Brett aggregates plant on East Quay, in the harbour. From this conversation and inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, came the idea to bring together a collection of their images for an exhibition and book.
Andy and Gordon both grew up with industrial landscapes – Andy in Kingston upon Hull and Gordon in Sheffield. They both share a love for industrial buildings and their heritage and the way industrial buildings become sentimentally embedded in local communities. Maybe not surprising then, that in searching for a particular local visual theme, they both had ended up choosing the exact same subject as a pivot point.