In 2013 I set out to walk the banks of the Thames Estuary in search of an understanding of how the passing of time and presence of the past might be made manifest in the landscape. Here the tidal movements become exaggerated, space opens up and time slows down – the residue of an industrial, military and agricultural past litters the Estuary’s banks. Walking over marshland reclaimed gradually from the water since the 13^th century, it seemed to me that a whole history had been shaped by the inexorability of a natural phenomenon – nature and culture entwined in a melancholy dance of flux and stasis.An unresolved and fragmented landscape, the Thames Estuary exists just as surely in the imagination as it does in material reality and indeed, just as the point at which land ends and water starts eludes delineation, so does the landscape’s location in the gap between past and present.

All images ©James Dobson