Abstract
Orford Ness is an isolated 1551-acre shingle spit facing the North Sea, off the Suffolk coast of Great Britain. On the one hand, the place offers a distinct and spectacular experience of humanity’s relations with external nature. The site is about 2000 acres in size and is a rare but fragile environment for rare bird, plant, and insect life. Avocet, hawk, redshank, oystercatcher, and many other migratory waders all breed there and it is the largest vegetated shingle spit in Europe with a very wide range of rare plant life (National Trust 2003). It is now protected as an Environmentally Sensitive Area, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
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Notes
- 1.
This protection includes the exclusion of attempted organised tourism to the site. During one visit to Orford, I witnessed the warden trying to stop a Spitfire fighter plane flying at a very low level over the site. The plane, which is now privately owned and used for tourist purposes, was carrying a passenger over this wartime site at considerable speed and, in the process, scaring off many nesting birds, one of the site’s chief attractions.
- 2.
Well before the Second World War, a form of ‘military-industrial complex’, one which incorporated academics as well as representatives of industry and state, was being made in Britain. Professor Robert Hanbury, a radio engineer from the University of London, was recruited by Sir Henry Tizard into a new team including Sir Robert Watson-Watt who was then Professor of Physics at the University of Dundee (for further details, see Heazell 2010). The new forms of weaponry and surveillance developed at the Orford Ness site were largely conducted by government. But they were also created in close conjunction with the growing, privately owned, armaments-based, industrial economy. The aircraft used for testing this weaponry, should the need arise, for bombing Germany were designed and built by private capitalist companies. Similarly, a whole new group of ‘V bombers’ was later created with the express purpose of carrying the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. The designers were again private sector enterprises; Vickers, Handley Page, and Avro, but with heavy financial backing and support from government (Hamilton-Paterson 2010). The weapons tested at Orford enabled record profits to be made by the private aircraft and armaments manufacturers operating well beyond Orford. One indication of the private sector’s ‘success’ at this time is that in 1939, the Inland Revenue found that the Society of British Aircraft Producers was making an average profit of 10 %, a rate set to increase in later years. But government remained loathe to tax these profits on the grounds that such a move would be ‘a shock to business confidence’ (Heartfield, p. 36).
- 3.
A useful official, and until recently secret, account of the Cobra Mist project is given in Fowle et al. (1979). This paper also shows the extent of this surveillance project, covering not only the Soviet Union but also the East European countries in the Soviet bloc.
- 4.
For an account of how artists and musicians have represented Orford Ness as a place of positivity and creativity, see National Trust (2012) and MacFarlane (2012). Furthermore, local primary school children are now contributing to understanding this place as a ‘space of representation’. With the aid of models made of pebbles and driftwood they are, with the assistance of their teachers, representing alternative ways of rebuilding and reusing Orford Ness (see Tribley 2013).
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Acknowledgements
My thanks for the comments and patient assistance given by James Ormrod. Also thanks to members of the Festschrift Symposium discussing my work held at the University of Brighton on 3 July 2013.
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Dickens, P. (2016). Society, Nature, and Experience: Jouissance on the Margins. In: Ormrod, J. (eds) Changing our Environment, Changing Ourselves. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56991-2_9
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