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Note on Depot

I didn’t want the oil refinery along the Thames Estuary, which I saw from the house of relatives in High Halstow, to symbolise anything, to be anything but what it was, a utility, a vital organ taken for granted.  I had to convey the feeling of a lonely construction in which there must have been people around somewhere but unseen by any viewer at a distance, as in an Edward Hopper painting, though that analogy occurred to me only much later.  Like similar establishments seen from afar—a chalk processing plant set into a half-stripped hillside, the hangars of a private airfield, a power station—this installation was striking for its air of commercial purpose (it clearly wasn’t derelict) yet that far away, across the water, I saw no activity, no life, not the tiniest figure moving.  Then suddenly at night so many lights came on that this oil refinery, an apparently empty steel city, looked like a populous town.

Alan Marshfield

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