Thanks to funding from Big Lottery’s Community Wildlife Fund, Same Sky is working with Friends of Tarner Park to create a camera obscura in the top of the tower and enrich the wildlife habitats in the park. This eye in the sky will be a view of the park and a way to look out for wildlife while enjoying a moment of peace and contemplation.
What is a Camera Obscura?
The camera obscura (Latin; “camera” is a “vaulted chamber/room” + “obscura” means “dark”= “darkened chamber/room”) is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen, wall or mirror. Traditionally used in drawing and for entertainment, it was one of the inventions that led to photography.
The most basic version consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with colour and perspective preserved. Using mirrors it is possible to project a right-side-up image.
As the pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole the sharpness again becomes worse due to diffraction. Our camera obscura uses a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus.
What will we be doing?
Artist David Watson will be installing a lens into the telescope of Mr Tarner in the door of the tower. This will project an inverted image overlooking the trees and the view of Brighton onto the back wall. In addition, a second lens will be inserted in a tube looking out of the south window into the lime tree. This will then reflect off a mirror and be directed down onto a table in the centre of the room. Seating will be added around the outside.
To encourage more wildlife to the park we will be replanting in some areas to attract more diverse species of birds and butterflies and placing bird boxes and a bird feeder in the neighbouring trees. Community Payback will be helping us paint the inside of the tower in preparation for the camera obscura and an exhibition.
Groups from Carlton Hill Primary School, the Creative Kids Club and Tarner Children and Young Peoples Project will be exploring the wildlife in the park alongside camera techniques and creating an exhibit for the bottom of the tower with artist Cynthia De Wolf.
We’ll be installing an interpretation board to show visitors what kinds of wildlife they might expect to find in the park and to explain the camera obscura. If you fancy undertaking a nature search, we’ll be creating some games and activities sheets you can download (from the Friends website and Brighton &Hove City Council website) and try out in the park.
We will then be inviting everyone (including you!) to come to a launch event on Saturday 7 January from 12noon-3pm. This will be an opportunity to explore the park and its wildlife, see the camera obscura for the first time and try your hand at some creative techniques to help you attract more wildlife to your garden. As it will no doubt be chilly, we’ll be serving hot soup and drinks. We hope that the Friends will help us welcome the public into the tower and camera obscura and show them around the park and its various wildlife habitats.
As a heritage project we are thinking about how we can preserve, reflect and present the past. We are looking at old things and retelling or discovering old stories.
As a community park we are thinking of what is happening today. We are also aware that the present and future we create will be other people’s past and history in due course.
Here are some huge conkers: They are made of Oak set on concrete foundation and held in place with a stainless steel pole. Left to their own devices and given no maintenance they will eventually break down. The shine will go first, then the wood will slowly loose it dye and eventually go a grey silver. They will start to crack and finally break apart. This will take over 10 years. It will mimic and follow the natural process of degradation and absorption.
Or we could prolong their lives. Before they were put in the conkers were given 2 coats of Cuprinol wood protector – to protect against wood spores and wood rot; 1 coat of wood dye to give the rich brown colour; 10 coats of pure tongue oil to protect against moisture and 2 coats of Danish oil to make the conkers shiny and reduce the colour loss of the dye. To prolong the life of our conkers we could treat with tongue oil every 6-12 months and Danish oil as and when the shine starts to go.
Our Tower is old. It has its own value because it is a piece of the past and it is interesting to find out about who built it and why. As well as intrinsic value as a physical entity, it is also a constant and solid feature which offers gravity and perspective to the stories and the life which has gone on around it. The Tower is concrete reality to anchor the ephemeral and fleeting passage of life.
Visitors to the park in 2121 might look at our conkers and appreciate them because they are 100 years old. There may not be conker trees in Brighton anymore; Grandparents may use them as a prop tell their disbelieving grandchildren tales of legendary conker fights – back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Or the conkers may be long gone – making way for something more needed by the people of that age. Perhaps they were just too expensive and troublesome to look after.
We can’t keep everything. All we can do is try to make the right choices.
The conkers were made by Brighton artist David Watson . He also created the fabulous furniture made from recycled, salvaged and reused items which is also placed around the park.
Why care about old stuff?
This question is (or should be) the watchword for every heritage project, and needs to be asked and answered constantly in many different ways. Who is it for? What can it teach us? Is it fun? Can it be about life today: not just death in the past?
Kensington Palace in London has the builders in and while it is being refurbished, rooms have been taken over by the acclaimed site specific theatre company Wild Works.
Their theme has been telling the tales of some of the princesses who have lived in the palace. Rather than presenting a direct life story with pictures/audio guide etc… they have taken fragmented aspects of the lives of these women, and built them around and within installations in the rooms of the palace which draw us in and engage us far more than a straightforward narrative history.
From the sadness of Mary in her blue room of bottles filled with her tears, through to the strictured and oppressive childhood of Princess Victoria in her ‘play-prison’ bedroom, to the oddly moving ballroom of Princess Diana, shadow dancing to Duran Duran, the exhibition gives us real toe holds and peep holes to examine these fragments of past lives, and the aspects chosen; love, fear, birth, play, death; are real and immediate enough for us to want to hold on.
Of course, Tarner Tower is a lot like Kensington Palace… well – perhaps not. But the commonality lies in seeking out stories and telling them in way which answers some of the questions raised at the start of this piece. Also in reaffirming the need to use creative ways of telling those stories – visual arts, poetry, sound of voice and music, performance, and especially keeping and developing links with the stories of the past to the themes and issues and stuff of today.
To start the story of our edifice, a few things need sorting out.
Properly it’s Tilbury. Although known as Tarner Tower, The Tower was built by Edward Tilbury. This plaque (a bit painty at the moment) inside the Tower attributes the building of the Tower and laying out of the garden to him in 1836, although some documents indicate the house and garden to have dated from 1810. The start of the Tarner association dates from 1836 when Edward’s daughter Lettitia married Edwin Adolphus Tarner. That the tower, park and surrounding neighbourhood bears the Tarner name, rather than Tilbury, is another story…
2. Timothy Carder was WRONG!! (*awaits lightening bolt*) As anyone who has considered the history of Brighton will know, Carders ‘Encyclopaedia of Brighton’ is one of the key reference works. Here is what is has to say re our favourite structure:
Clearly this is not our Tower. We do not have 70 steps. What was Mr Carder on about then?
It turns out there were TWO Towers! Although having a perfectly serviceable Tower in his new garden built by his father–in-law, the young Edwin decided to build his own, bigger, better tower just up the hill. Apart from reflecting on what Freud might have made of all this, had Freudian analysis been around at this time, this also raises a further question: What happened to the other Tower?
The Sussex Daily News in 1941 published this photograph. It is of Tower House, built at the top of Sussex Street, having 70 internal steps and a grand sea view. The reporter records …”It was because of the sea that Tower House was built. One good soul named Edwin A Tarner was responsible for its erection…”
The newspaper entry continues with the viewing ships at sea story which Carder attributed to the Tower in the park, and some of the confusion clarifies as it is apparent that the two structures have become conflated and intertwined over time.
Concluding the item the reporter comments “Strange there is little recorded about Edwin A Tarner …I have approached many prominent townspeople now well on in years, but my story has been pieced together from what I have been able to collect from the old folk in this back part of Brighton, an area speedily disappearing. I hope they will allow Tower House to remain” Sadly it was demolished in the 1960’s.
Tracking a story back 200 years in a changing community has its challenges. The brief foray above shows that even the best documented and most reliable sources, concerning the most high profile residents are full of holes, assumptions and confusions.
Best of luck to us I say!
(…or some of them at least….we hope…)
Welcome to our new blog and first post.
‘We’ are a mix of council staff, park users and anyone else we can persuade to join us to take forward a vision for Tarner Park and Tarner Tower. More detail is elsewhere on this site but the basic story is our quest to restore the Tower and research, present archive, enliven and share the history and heritage of the Tower, the park and this part of town.
Launching this endeavour on mass observation day is quite fitting - recording the tower as observations upon an observatory. This was one of the functions of the folly and will become one of its uses again. To create our archive, timeline and activities we want to work with artists, historians, community archivists and activists to help us put together a lottery bid to help make it all happen.
We went to the Park today, and here is our mass observation entry to be submitted.
Tarner Park at 11.30am today was hot, though cloudy and lots of young children were playing on the under fives play equipment with parents or carers smiling and chatting. Many of the shrubs in the Peace Garden were out in bloom and the new sculptural seating looked wonderful in the dappled light. Bits of wood and twigs could be found on most surfaces which is either testament to a recent strong wind or the fact that children make a mess when they enjoy themselves and by all accounts (talking to the after school club staff) children do love playing in Tarner Park.
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