Thursday, February 09, 2006

The road is paved with good intentions


I set out to keep a regular flow of photos on this blog but events have conspired against me.

Today's picture is a companion to 'Lost Horizons.' Both were taken at the same event, a 'Fayre', (dis) organised by a now defunct environmental trust, who were later dumped, unceremoniously, by their parent organisation, Groundwork.

The event was ambitiously spread over an area the size of half a dozen football pitches. The mist came down, the local radio station's helicopter was grounded and those few who did turn out to participate were simply lost in the empty space.

To me it summed up the vacuous nature of the 'environmental regeneration' that was taking place, a bandwagon that minority political organisations were riding to death, and still are.

The stall in this image is fundraising for the 'Nationalist' Mebyon Kernow, a political organisation with an irrational separatist agenda.

It is not surprising that, with the introduction of Regional Government, there are genuine fears of a loss of identity among some communities. With respect to the 'environment' the fear raised by 'regeneration' is that even the landscape will lose its identity. A process the artist Andrew Lanyon calls "The Surreyfication of Cornwall".