THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

To your true lover of dockland there is no land quite like it.  More often than not its beauty must be sought for through vistas of mean streets of an incredible ugliness – through a network of railway sidings frequented by unexpected engines, among tall and grimy warehouses and factories belching forth smoke and evil odours, amid the deafening din of dry-docks and ship-repairers’ yards, and the ear-splitting racket of riveters at work.

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They come from dusty little Spanish towns between the Andes and the sea, from pandanus-thatched native towns of Malaya standing up on their leaning stilts like some queer kind of water insect, from lonely lumber-wharves on the Pacific coast, where the sawdust deadens every footstep, and the shrill note of the saws cuts like a knife the drowsy quiet of the summer afternoons, from old Dutch Java towns of marble and melancholy, from the Baltic, the Pacific, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Siam, and where the surf roars over the sandy bars at the mouths of African rivers.

Fox Smith/Sailor