When the sea strikes fragile coastal cliffs, once permanent houses lining the periphery of the country often succumb to the forces, and bit by bit fall to the beach below. Those bits remain there, slowly bathed in tidal forces, turning what was once domestic into abstracted forms, laying lumpen like an accidental Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth.

There seems to be a few of these washed up deeper inland, secreted behind a 1920s Town Hall in the Portslade area of east Brighton. This part of the city had grown and developed over late 19th century seaside-tourism expansion, which carried with it new residential and commercial expansion. This included the nearby Ronuk polish factory, who commissioned local architect Gilbert Murray Simpson to construct the building as a social club for workers. But how did these pieces of industrial seashore detritus wash up a mile away from the water’s edge?




The forces that resulted in these pieces to end up in Portslade, sitting between the Town Hall and two new blocks of 42 new council homes, designed and built by Brighton and Hove County Council, are more artistic than natural, the outcome of a collaboration between artist Felicity Hammond and the architecture and ideas studio CAN. The three forms are called Forecast, and it speaks to the locality’s past as well as a future of the region and other coastal sites.

There is something uncanny about the forms, not least their shiny exterior which poetically responds to the neighbouring neo-Georgian building’s former use by the polish makers. They also have steel framing seemingly placed to wrap around the pieces to stop them drifting off to another place. The brick acts as a connector between the historic building and the newer blocks, a constant material bridging the century, and reminder of architecture’s ageing processes, while also referencing the area’s historic brickfields, large tracts of farmland which turned into clay quarries, leaving behind broken land which covered the area Ronuk built their club, with other expanses becoming the cemetery and parks which neighbour the sculptures.





Just as the whole landscape here was devastated by industrial processes, but has since softened through architecture and landscape over time, so too the solidity and geometry of Forecast’s brick appears to have softened and worn down, questioning permanence of place, purpose, and form. The three lumps act as warnings to the region’s shifting coastline, and manmade exacerbation of those forces, the steel elements like contorted ranging poles used to measure archaeology and history, but here having to distort their logic to understand the aesthetic changes. The sculptures themselves are made of cement mixed with aggregate formed of waste bricks from the council homes’ construction, and so this conversation over material mutation is embedded into the very making of the piece.

Of course, as with all conceptual art, there was dissent. Though a discreet, small, and gentle tryptic of brick might seem fairly innocuous, commentors on the local news site posted the mundane and expected cliches: “pretentious twaddle … this is why my council tax goes up every year … anyone know how much it cost?” and then the nonsensical, illogical, and racist “That money could of been spent on are homeless . They would been better off going to France and getting on a rubber boat and getting a hotel with full board.”

But, idiots are going to idiot. Of course, art won’t be and shouldn’t be liked by everyone, but as public sculpture goes this subtle and unobtrusive poem on changing places (which, incidentally, was remarkably cheap at £26,000) seems an odd thing to attack. But as time passes, people’s anger, views, and rage will also soften, and these abstracted forms will no doubt pick up nicknames and appreciation from the local community.