Three connected works – a reading room onboard a lightship moored on the Thames, and two sets of flags spelling out EMPIRE and ARCADIA, made up my work for the first Estuary Festival. Here’s the story of the Empire ships, SS Arcadia, and why they’re important to the story of migration today.

While sex wasn’t invented until 1963, the years between 1945 and 1960 were really rather interesting anyway. They were, some would say, the last years of a faded, discredited British Empire. But they were also the time when something more interesting was born.

The New Elizabethans in some ways followed the old ones, on a journey of invention and discovery in which the arts, sciences and a certain derring-do all had their place. The jet engine, conquering Everest, commercial transatlantic flight, the National Health Service, the Ministry of Education’s Technical High’s in modernist buildings, British Railways, full employment, prefabs, the BBC bringing the same culture to every home, Imperial College’s Harold Hopkins and Narinder Singh Kapany creating useful fibre optics, the egalitarianism of the Festival of Britain, Sir Christopher Cockerell’s hovercraft, Airfix models, skyscrapers and motorways. Comet airliners and Vulcan bombers, Tornado jets and Ariel satellites, Vanguard cars and Dominator motorbikes; even the naming of things was heroic.  The Britain we know, love and live in today is shaped by the 1950s.

But some of the decade’s most beautiful designs are almost forgotten. Perhaps, because they were caught between modern design and an old, already outdated purpose. In 1953-54 the P&O Line’s SS Arcadia and her twin sister Iberia, the Orient Line’s Orsova, and the new Queen Elizabeth’s HMY Britannia headed down slipways in Glasgow and Belfast, shipyards which had kept us fed during the Second World War and were adapting to a new peacetime world. The ships were sleek, modernist and embraced the latest technology. Outside, they had clean lines and elegant curves, and inside had that uniquely Festival of Britain-style mix of modernism and tradition. But all belonged to a different age. They were built to serve the British Empire, and the Empire Lines it had drawn across the globe.

My discovery of the story of the SS Arcadia starts in Southend, on a residency with arts organisation Metal who have a base in the Essex town. There to explore and create new work for the forthcoming Estuary Festival, I was looking at lines of communication around the banks of the estuary, drawing imaginary lines from Margate to Herne Bay to Gravesend to Tilbury to Southend. The estuary is  a big blank space on most maps: in my head it is crisscrossed with lines of communication, networks, connections drawn from random chances and encounters. Morse code, carrier pigeons, ham radio, the British Resistance, pirate broadcasts from ships, semaphore flags, the abandoned Maunsell Forts. This was what I wanted to make work about.

And then we visited the old London Passenger Terminal at Tilbury, and all that changed. At the front, the public face, is a 1920s classical modernist terminal building, a station of the Empire. On the land side; a long modern brick building, a long verandah, an arched railway station entrance arch, a town hall tower and weathered copper cupola, Empire-typical Lutyens-light. Behind it, inside, vaulted ceilings and brick pillars like the best mid-war town halls, an industrial-arched shed, tidy ticket offices, designed for handling orderly queues, behind. The last building you’d see as you left Britain (or, paradoxically,  the first as you arrived) is familiar, elegant, 20th century, neo-classical, railway-esque industrial.

From the main building long walkways carry you to the quayside, where rows of wooden sheds below a first floor canopied gallery with dagged weatherboard edges and windbreaks like Worthing pier lead you across short covered gangways to the ship. Today the view is wide, empty, the few cargo boats, bulk carriers and their attendant tugs like ghosts of something we used to know made solid. Of course – we now carry more by sea than ever before. But this is a bulk, technological, out-of-sight passage. The beauty, the romance,  the hundreds of jobs and skills, the folkore of ships and harbours and docksides, the line of elegance drawn from the Cutty Sark to SS Arcadia, is broken. We no longer stand at the dockside.

At Tilbury, spaces the size of warehouses now sit mostly empty, used a few times a year for the occasional cruise ship that still stops here. Hidden behind endless carparks, fields of sea-battered shipping containers, vast unbranded sheds, potholed roads black water splashes across almost unused pavements. Land that belongs to big lorries, where the occasional car or cyclist is overwhelmed by the scaling of globalised trade.

But – this is the place the MV Empire Windrush docked, a former German Strength-Through-Joy cruisehip repurposed, renamed after a tributary of the Thames, reimagined to carry passengers from the West Indies to Britain. Not immigration, but internal migration – ex-RAF servicemen (heroes, today – every serviceman is a hero now) travelling back to their mother country, to do jobs that the country they loved and had fought hard for needed to be done. The Empire Windrush, shadowed by the mighty HMS Sheffield as she entered British waters, passengers disembarking to joyful Calypsonian Lord Kitchener singing ‘London Is The Place For Me.’ The Windrush, bringing us Oswald Denniston, the first black trader in the old, hollowed-out Eastern-European-Jewish market, the Granville Arcade in Brixton. Denniston, the first black member of the Herne Hill Cycling Club.

And this is the place the SS Arcadia left from, taking working class Brits on assisted passage to Australia. £10 Poms. A forgotten migration of 1.5 million people. Cheap, white labour.; economic migrants, disembarking into rough caged transit camps at the other end of their journey. Arcadia’s streamlined shape was cluttered with cranes to load her vast holds; she was designed to carry goods as well as people down the lines the Empire had drawn, invisible trading routes mapping a country’s economic dominance. Later, working as merely a cruise ship, these cranes, hatches and holds were her undoing. She wasn’t efficient in a post-Empire world.

While I was looking for connections from Essex to Kent, from Margate down the Thames to London, I found these lines that stretched much further, and were about passage not just about communication. Or  rather – I found this again. I’d previously traced the story of Oswald Denniston in Brixton; here was another link, taking his story further.

Another connection,  to my nan’s neighbour Eileen, living alone because her sister, Eileen’s nieces, all the flesh and blood and history she had were in Australia. As I was exploring SS Arcadia, Eileen died and her £10 Pom family had to travel back to Britain to settle her estate. Her span house in Worthing was full of things from Australia. The postcards, calendars, photographs, cheap tourist-y knick-knacks spoke of her sense of loss, of a yearning that followed the Empire Line, how much she missed her sister, how alone she must have felt, left on this side of the world. Parallel lives.

And more: finding the story of how the Arcadia pulled a tug named Cervia under, drowning five of her crew, and finding that tug refloated, restored in Ramsgate. The ‘Empire’ name was a prefix for all ships built during the Second World War – the Cervia was previously the Empire Raymond. The last of the Empire ships still afloat is a 20 minute cycle ride from my home which looks down the estuary, Southend a scattering of lights on the farthest horizon on a clear night.

And another, final, bigger connection; the one that joins MV Empire Windrush and SS Arcadia to us, here, today.

While making this work, the country succumbed to temporary insanity and in a moment lashed out against immigration, against togetherness, against the post-World War Two consensus that we should be part of a bigger, networked, peaceful whole – and voted instead for Little England isolationism and the kind of far right politicians we’d fought the Second World War to stop. The United Kingdom (well, England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland thought differently, and might have to find a different way) forgot that we’d never been a small, isolated country, had never stood alone; forgot our real past while  remembering fragments of it, like half-remembered dreams, echoes of truth, voting and yearning for a half-image of Jerusalem, green and present land, an Arcadia, and the Empire we’d lost.


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