SIX SEASIDE LITHOGRAPHS :II
This is the second of a summer series of lithographs of the Kent and Sussex seaside by Alan Powers, entitled Views of the South Coast. The series has been commissioned by the Spectator and will be available for sale as a signed, limited edition. More details will be announced in later issues.
Dungeness
From Hythe the coast road loses sight of the sea behind the sea walls protecting Romney Marsh. Bungalows and caravans punctuate the progress through Dym- church and New Romney. From Littlestone to Dungeness is all Shingle, with plenty of fishing boats and tarred huts on the seaward side. The Buildings of England condemns 'the scruf- fy shacks that sprawl for miles', but Dunge- ness, innocent of architect or planner, has a quality of its own. It is one of the best Places left for seeing railway carriages Converted into dwellings in the Twenties and Thirties, a rare memorial of the world ?f Rowland Emmett. He too is the presid- ing genius of the Romney, Hythe and
Dymchurch railway, with miniature steam engines each about the side of an old Btagatti puffing along the shingle to no- where and back. Lupins and yellow sea poppies grow beside the track. Dungeness Lighthouse, built in 1904, was a favourite subject for painters in the Thirties like John Piper and Eric Ravilious. Then it was a lone landmark with a prominent midriff of white. The strange circular house on the left is the remains of Samuel Wyatt's original lighthouse of 1792. Both have been superseded by a concrete lighthouse of 1959 which broadens toward the top for a change. They all share in the salty functionalism which Piper called the Nautical Style. Now the non-nostalgic painter ought really to look just out of the picture to the right, where the twin nuclear power sta- tions are as incongruously gigantic as the railway is miniature. They contribute to the quasi-surrealist genius of Dungeness, and from Winchelsea or Fairlight they wink whitely against distant stormclouds.
The Ness used to be growing rapidly with accretions of shingle. It shelves steep- ly into the sea, leaving a deep channel for shipping near the coast. The Ministry of Defence has bagged most of the shore from Lydd to Camber, where the sand returns abundantly across the boundary into Sussex.
Alan Powers
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