The Hay Wain was painted close to where I live. The painting shows a cart for carrying hay crossing the river Stour at Flatford Mill. In the painting by John Constable a little dog watches on while a man and a boy sit on the wooden cart. The boy gestures towards the dog on the shore, perhaps encouraging it to leap into the water and cross over, why wasn’t it allowed in the cart? On the left hand side of the painting is Flatford Mill, in the background are the meadows that run along the Stour here. The scene is pretty much unchanged today, except for a national trust building which houses toilets and tea rooms for the guests that visit throughout the year. Downstream on the Stour the river opens up into the North Sea at Harwich.
In the 1859 Eugene Carless started a chemical company in Hackney Wick. The Hope Chemical Works he was the first in Britain to refine American Crude Oil into a fuel for motors, what he called ‘motor spirit’ or ‘petrol’ a name that entered into common parlance. His business expanded into producing other products derived from organic chemistry, even (rather frighteningly) manufacturing TNT during World War Two. Early in the twentieth century they had a monopoly on producing fuel for cars but as competition grew the business specialised into producing chemicals from the by-products left by coal which had been processed to produce town gas. When North Sea discoveries of oil and natural gas led to a shift away from coal carbonisation the business shifted accordingly to the East Coast and Harwich where they could now access the raw materials extracted from North Sea gas and oil fields.
Subsidiary businesses Carless Petroleum and Carless Solvent both continued to operate out of Harwich, and after a series of mergers and acquisitions now trade as Halterman Carless a business which incorporates a similarly old Hamburg based hydrocarbon refinery business founded by Johannes Halterman. Today when I take the train between Harwich and Manningtree along the Stour if I remember to look in land instead of at the beautiful river you can catch glimpses of the storage tanks of the Harwich instillation. The refinery processes 500,000 tons a year made up of Oil and gas condensates. There are pipeline connections running to Bacton in Norfolk and tankers of up to 14,000 tonne capacity come in and out of the Stour to deliver raw materials and take away the refinery’s products, and there are three railway sidings that also serve the refinery.
I mention this because they Hay Wain was recently the centre of a protest by the Just Stop Oil group. Two protestors pasted a re-imagining of the Hay Wain over the top of the original painting before gluing themselves to the frame. In the nightmare vision of the Dedham Vale the river had been paved over, aeroplanes flew low overhead, the trees and lost their leaves and in the background an oil refinery smoked above the trees, the Hay Wain cart itself carries an old washing machine – for some reason. It is undoubtedly a powerful image. The Constable painting with all its biscuit tin familiarity is a good target if you want to warn about the threat to the British fantasy of its own landscape. But when the North Sea oil and gas discoveries were made they were presented to the British public as both being a source of more British fuel and of inflicting less of a burden on the British landscape.
In a 1964 advert from the Gas Council appearing in The New Scientist magazine a field of wheat sways in the wind. Behind are undulating hills with the dark clumps of trees and hedgerows punctuating the landscape. Underneath the photograph is the line ‘A year ago the gas underground grid was laid through here.’ The accompanying text locates the field in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. It explains that the grid is being used to transport the gas that arrived into Canvey Island at the mouth of the Thames. It promises that soon as North Sea Gas discoveries are made that fuel will also be transported through this pipeline, all the way the ‘Placid English Field’ will remain unbothered. This new fuel is apparently uniquely sympathetic to the British Landscape, unlike Victorian coal there is no threat from natural gas, a fuel which much better suited to a more modern Britain. The advert ends with the line ‘In Today’s High Speed World… The gas industry thinks of tomorrow.’
At the beginning of a leaflet titled Britain’s Natural Gas published in 1971 the Gas Council tell their customers that ‘Britain struck ‘lucky’ under the seas on which she had so often relied for strength… thte nation soon realised that once again it had its own source of a major primary fuel, gas energy, on which to base a new prosperity’. The sense being that North Sea Gas is the fuel that will allow Britain, in the midst of a post-colonial malaise, to maintain its status and power in the world. Notably the same leaflet suggests that it was coal and not the empire which fuelled Britain’s ascendancy in the 19th century: ‘Britain’s rise to greatness in the 18th and 19th centuries was largely due to the fact that she seized the opportunity, given her by her vast deposits of coal, to industrialise ahead of the rest of the world’.
The idea of Britishness, and the idea of landscape were made central to the discourse surrounding natural gas, and particularly the discovery and transition to North Sea Gas that took place in Britain during the late 1960s and 1970s. The leaflet from the Gas Council tries to maintain to contradictory ideas at the same time, firstly that Gas is the technology of the future, and second that it will leave the British landscape undamaged and even reverse the damage caused by coal and its derivative fuels. The Gas Council promised “Natural Gas – cheap, pollution free, plentiful and our own – is rapidly modernising the homes and industries of Britain”.
This notion of gas being pollution free is an interesting one, at this point pollution was more widely thought of as a matter of toxicity and the science surrounding global heating was not widely understood. There appeared to be a belief, at least from the Gas Council, that natural gas would be, in their words: ‘a potent force to keep the atmosphere clean’. But this idea of cleanliness seems largely to have referred to Sulphur and to acid rain caused by sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere. There is also an association made with the toxicity of coal gas. Natural Gas does not have the level of carbon monoxide in it that previous domestic gas had. This is illustrated strikingly in a double spread in the leaflet which places an image of a statue eroded by acid rain alongside a chart demonstrated the reduction in deaths from gas after the conversion to North Sea gas. What could be more menacing to the British establishment than rain that destroys statues.
Natural Gas was being promised to the nation as a synthesis that managed the contradictory elements of British identity, a way to be both powerful and beautiful, a way to protect both the landscape and the position of the country in the world. A remedy to the loss of the empire had been discovered beneath the North Sea, a new source of maritime power for the British. The sense of triumph is palpable. Elsewhere in the same leaflet the North Sea platforms are presented with the most enormous sense of the sublime. A sort of imperial logic is reproduced as a source for plunder is uncovered closer to home: “The rig ‘Orion’ which has done much of the exploratory drilling for the Gas Council/Amoco Group, is typical of the new north sea leviathans … an immense floating platform with its legs in the air like an overturned table”. Such drama!
The Sun drops behind the platform, the orange sky is matched by the flaring gas. ‘How deep is the water? How high the waves? How strong the wind? What are the tides and currents? What kind of rig if any can cope with the answers to all these questions?’ reads the caption rhetorically. And of course such technological spectacle must be accompanied by a hero, on the next page we see a grubby but confident looking rig worker with the caption ‘The weather-beaten face of an American who has worked on drilling rigs throughout the world. The North Sea with its violent and unpredictable storms, is not one of the most hospitable exploration areas for the globe-trotting crew members, many of whome come from Texas’. Notably the North Sea is a uniquely tough challenge for these americans, even as we rely on their expertise they must face down the challenge of our uniquely rugged landscape. There is the sea fighting the corner of the island nation once again.
As Denis Cosgrove, the cultural geographer, established in his research into landscape painting, images of landscape are a potent means to assert power over a landscape. Many of the landscape images of the 17th and 18th centuries were commissioned by land owners so that they could display a likeness of their own property inside their drawing rooms. In the case of the North Sea images, and the field from the New Scientist advert this power over landscape is presented as being in the hands of the nation. The Gas Council as nationalised industry is working to sell this new fuel to the public as part of a new collective and nationalistic vision of the future. Whilst the imagery and the subject matter are of course very different there is a similarity with Constable in the evocation of patriotism.
Michael Rosenthal, the art historian, has reflected on the role of Englishness in Constable’s paintings. In particular he writes that The Hay Wain is an image of an English scene that represents the solidity of the country’s establishment and institutions. Rosenthal describes the painting’s ‘iconography that could not but induce pleasing reflections on the enormous superiority of the protestant religion and the British constitution that underpinned the social order and the husbanded landscape Constable represented’. The farm labourers peacefully going about their business, fulfilling the patterns of labour expected of them as year passes implies a static and conformist relationship to the rhythms of the year as governed by church, state, and land owner. Constable’s father, a corn merchant, was the owner of the mill that appears in the painting.
The success of the Just Stop Oil protest is not that the painting represents British landscape per se, but that it represents a conservative imagination of the landscape. But any suggestion that the painting might present a lost ideal is an error. The Hay Wain does not exist as an image of what our relationship to nature might be were we not to have plundered the land for wealth, instead it is an image whose iconography directly justifies such an approach to the environment. The sublime imagery and narrative used to herald the arrival of Natural Gas in the Britain’s Natural Gas pamphlet is a continuation of the patriotism of Constable. It is a narrative that claims that the British establishment is uniquely well positioned to steward the English landscape. The refinery on the stour is the twentieth century equivalent of Flatford mill, albeit at a different scale. The excitement surrounding North Sea Gas was based on the idea that it promised a solution to all of Britain’s problems. An economic, geopolitical, and environmental cure-all. Reading the pamphlet, rather like looking at the painting, I feel at once nostalgic for the clarity of belief, and saddened by the ever repeating hubris of the British landscape myth.
*correction* The building in The Hay Wain is Willy Lott’s Cottage which was opposite Flatford Mill.
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