Walk One: Millbay

Illustration practice-led research made during PhD exhibited at Penryn Old Bank Studios and Devonport Guildhall.

Each of the walks commence from the same site; the house that my grandfather lived in for his first eighteen years survived the destruction of the Blitz and so is a material connection to his youth in Plymouth. The familial link to me that was once within the house has long since vacated and so to enter is redundant. The house is an empty container and commencement site.

In order to grasp an idea of the pre-Blitz city by walking the current cityscape, I navigated with two Ordnance Survey maps that were accurate to Plymouth in 1939. Some fragments of the past city remained in accordance with their position on the map; however, at times, several past paths were blocked by younger walls. In walking the present city by following routes of the past, instances of resonance and dissonance occur. When buildings and roads matched with what is cartographically described I began to gain some understanding of the pre-Blitz city. However, this understanding would then be undermined by instances of difference that would highlight the impossibility of such understanding. It would force me to compare and account for the variances between the two cities and the two walkers.

I walked from the house in Peverell to the site of Plymouth Millbay railway station. This was the city’s first train station and it closed to the public less than one hundred years later after sustaining damage in a bombing raid. As the closer stations at Mutley and North Road were closed for track alterations in a major rebuilding scheme that had begun 1938, Millbay was the station that I imagined my grandfather used as a means to travel out of the city when conscripted to the RAF the following year.