“I really liked this book. The mix of forensic observation of people by Sykes and the sketches by the very talented Louis Netter makes for a very unusual book indeed. But it works, or at least it did for me. They travelled to all of the locations in the book together and they have a certain dynamic that works really well. These dual views of what was happening around them are expertly portrayed in the art and the words. If you want to read a very different travelogue of Britain then this is a brilliant place to start.”
Over the course of researching our book Coast of Teeth, my illustrator colleague Louis Netter learned much about the ecological perils facing the English seaside. Surging sea levels are triggering floods and toppling homes. Cruise liners, commercial ports and military-industrial concerns are puffing masses of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Sewage is being dumped on our shores by an unscrupulous company that should have treated that same sewage. There has never been so much plastic pollution along the English littoral. As eyewitnesses to these scourges, it would have been easy for Louis and I to have lost all hope about the fate of our planet.
Read on here at the fabulous Pens of the Earth website.
My PhD in Creative Writing was completed in 2018 and awarded by Goldsmiths College, University of London. I have just noticed that it has been downloaded 2,377 times to date. Why there was a spike of 200 downloads in September 2022, I am not sure.
On the train to Essex, I realise I know little about Essex. And that little is scrappy and second-hand. Growing up in the 1990s, I recall the ‘Essex Man’ media stereotype. He’d flourished, so this crude narrative went, under Thatcher by dragging himself out of the working class on the spoiler of a second-hand car. Dodgy motors – along with watches, jewellery, video recorders and discount clothing – were the sources of the entrepreneurial Essex Man’s income, which he spent on tasteless nouveau riche trappings like mock Tudor houses, gaudy shirts and white stilettos for his trophy wife (‘Essex Girl’ was the complementary – though not complimentary – female version). Both boilerplates must have been dreamed up by middle-class snobs, for the claim was that Essex Man and Essex Girl had grown up in the sooty, shabby East End of London before moving further east to cleaner, brighter coastal resorts like Clacton-on-Sea, where I am headed now.
Here I am reading a chapter from my new book with Louis Netter, Coast of Teeth: Travels to English Seaside Towns in an Age of Anxiety.
‘Depressed by all the rubbish we found on the last trip, we want to know what can be done about it. Our good friend and colleague at the University of Portsmouth, Dan McCabe is one of a rising number of beachcombers who help to clean the coast. ‘If we find plastic we pick it up and put it in the bin,’ he says as we trudge the green seaweed-carpeted shingle of Langstone Bay on a steaming June day. ‘A lot of people’s activities take place on land,’ says Dan, ‘and others, like sailors and surfers, operate in the sea. You hope they respect their environments. Beachcombers inhabit the space between land and sea and we have to respect it.’
‘An enjoyable read. The illustrations have a mutant Donald McGill vibe.’
Will Self
‘Sykes and Netter adopt a rather gonzo-ish methodology, imbibing a sample of what the locals imbibe, which is usually bibulous, immersing themselves in the often gauche ambience and bonhomie of it all. Sykes’ hyper-kinetic, densely detailed prose and Netter’s riotous celebration of the grotesque evokes the aesthetic of Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman, creating an English equivalent – “Fear and Loathing in Lyme Regis” perhaps.’
Dr Kevan Manwaring, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth
Amid suitably themed tunes from the Beach Boys and others, I gave an interview to Bob Bruce’s Morning Call programme on Victory Radio as part of the Portsmouth Authors’ Collective. We talked about beachcombing, plastic pollution, fish and chips and other seaside town-related stuff.
The show is available here, with my interview kicking off at about 26 mins 30. Enjoy!
Pleased that the writer and academic Kevan Manwaring has really ‘got’ what we have tried to do with Coast of Teeth. Read his eloquent review in its entirety here.
“Sykes and Netter adopt a rather gonzo-ish methodology, imbibing a sample of what the locals imbibe, which is usually bibulous, immersing themselves in the often gauche ambience and bonhomie of it all. Sykes’ hyper-kinetic, densely detailed prose and Netter’s riotous celebration of the grotesque evokes the aesthetic of Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman, creating an English equivalent – ‘Fear and Loathing in Lyme Regis’ perhaps.
“And yet this is not just a picaresque account of men behaving badly. It offers an unflinching charting of the worst and best aspects of English culture, not shying away from the casual racism, sexism, alcoholism, poverty, thuggishness, and squalid decrepitude of a former Empire firmly in its geriatric dotage; while at the same time celebrating the salt of the earth people, moments of kindness, and community spirit. Sykes avoids what could have so easily become a poverty safari – ‘often the angle taken by metro media types who condescend to hazard this far up from the Watford Gap’ – by charting the lives of ordinary people in a warm-hearted way.”
Here’s a recording of my discussion with the accomplished poet and travel writer Tom Phillips that took place on May 14th, hosted by Sofia University. Tom’s students were very welcoming and made some excellent contributions of their own towards the end of the gig.
We explored the blend of first-hand experience and academic research required for constructing travel narratives, the desire to write about aspects of reality in order to understand them better, the essential subjectivity of life writing, the ethical considerations that must come into play when representing real people and places in one’s travel writing… and much else.
Tom Sykes 