Walk Two: Tinside

The second investigative walk undertaken was to the location of a diving platform next to Tinside lido in Plymouth’s sound. Following a long tradition of bathing on the Devon coast, the lido, a slide, and the diving platform were installed in 1935 on the edge of a natural cliff-face in close proximity to the city centre. Modernist living promoted sunlight, fresh air and exercise to improve the bodies and minds of the masses. Aided by the railways, coastal holiday resorts took advantage of health-driven leisure by constructing art deco lidos that were fed by filtered sea water and surrounded by extensive breeze-sheltered sunbathing terraces.

The ‘Diver’s Line’ charts the imagined sequential movement of a past person climbing, walking, diving off, and swimming from a structure that no longer exists within the present city. The solidity of the object contrasts the ephemeral nature of the diver’s movement thereby illustrating something that is intangible. An etched Perspex disk of a diver hangs above the Diver's Line, showing a delicate figure of a woman diving. The transparency of the Perspex and the negative space give the image a ghostly quality. The ability to see through her to the view beyond alludes to the impermanence of human lives in respect to place and yet, the material etched line signifies the ways in which past lives can be preserved, or persevere, through traces.