Six days left to see Ghost Station

Rachael Marshall, Documenting Blocks C and D II, Bletchley Park, Ten projected photographs, 2010-2012. 

The Ghost Station exhibition will be closing this Sunday, 30th September. However, Station X, which includes my photographs, will remain in Hut 8. 

Ghost Station features the work of 23 artists, all inspired by different aspects of Bletchley Park and its wartime work. 'Gustav', a film about a wartime pigeon by Dennis Da Silva, will be shown at 2pm on Sunday, as part of the closing party for the ArtHertz show. 

It was great to meet many of the artists on the opening night. Here's a list of them, with links where possible: 

Hannah Elizabeth Allan
Hannah Rae Alton 
Angelo Cerantola
Al Croseri
Dennis Da Silva
Elizabeth Dismorr
Bradley Hayman 
Birgitta Hosea
Lloyd Hughes
Hannah Hull
Esther Johnson 
Adrian Lee 
Gemma Marmalade
Fleur Melbourn 
Catrin Morgan 
Paul Matosic
Ingrid Plum 
Julia Roach 
Colin Turner 
Station X (that's Caroline Devine, Maya Ramsay, Luke Williams and me).

Station X in the Teleprinter Room at Bletchley Park

Rachael Marshall, Creep, Block C, Bletchley Park. Acrylic mounted photograph, 16 x 24 inches. 2011.

Station X is now installed in the Teleprinter Room in Hut 8, Alan Turing's hut. It's currently part of Ghost Station, the ArtHertz exhibition for Milton Keynes Heritage Open Days, but will remain in the room on a loan to the Bletchley Park Trust's collection. 

Thank you to everyone who attended the Private View last night, including Councillor Catriona Morris, Mayor of Milton Keynes. It was great to meet some of the other 20 artists who are showing work inspired by the unique history of Bletchley Park. Also huge thanks to all the staff and volunteers of Bletchley Park, ArtHertz and everyone who assisted us with the tricky installation; securing artworks and AV equipment in a listed building is not easy! Special thanks to Dad, whose first post-retirement project was plinth-making, Pete, for stepping in with various tools, Gary for loan of equipment (and a tutorial in using it) and Mussy for last-minute help with wiring and nerve-calming.

Also, huge thanks once again to our supporters PMC Speakers and the Milton Keynes Community Foundation: installing Station X at Bletchley Park could not have happened without your help.

We've already had some lovely comments from people who saw the show last night - a testament to what a strong team the four of us are. Me getting stuck inside one of the projector plinths was just one of many funny moments from this week. Luckily no-one took a photo of that.

Finally I have a chance to catch up with the rest of the country and watch The Bletchley Circle! 

Review of Station X

Rachael Marshall, Locked, Block D, Bletchley Park. Acrylic mounted photograph, 16 x 24 inches. 2011.

From a review of Station X:

"The combination of the, at once familiar, yet other worldly, sounds and atmospheric photographs of dust, cobwebs and the odd decaying bird, along with the physical ‘casts’ of the walls themselves all give a very peculiar overall feeling."

Read the full review on Paul Caplewell's blog.

The exhibition opened last Thursday and runs until May 27, 2012. 

 

Pigeon fancier

German Camera Pigeon, WWI, licensed under Creative Commons.

 

Poorly pigeon in Block D, yesterday. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

We've got to know the pigeons of Blocks C and D quite well while working at Bletchley Park. There's a group of three, one brown, one white and one grey, that is always in the room next to the 'rat room' in C, on a ledge in a corner that gets a chink of sunlight through gaps in the window hoardings. You get used to them flying around and scurrying unseen in ceiling voids above your head and I like to to think they're used to our visits. 

Inevitably some floors in both blocks are pigeon toilets and graveyards. We really have to watch where we're putting our feet and tripod legs. Tiny eggs, mostly broken, are scattered around too. The deterioration of the dead birds is fascinating once you're over any squeamishness. Yesterday I found a near-perfect skeleton in a corridor, arranged as if it was in flight. The beautiful full-feathered wings of a white bird looked like they'd been left behind by an angel. 

Caroline told me about the little chap in the photo above when I arrived yesterday. He'd been in the same spot for a few hours, barely moving, just blinking and panting. Later on in the day a shaft of sunlight came through the skylight and this seemed to revive him (or her?) a bit. He moved around a bit and reacted more to my presence. I doubt he'll live long and it was awful to see him suffering.

Pigeons were crucial to intelligence operations on both sides during the first and second World Wars. Bletchley Park has an exhibition about them in Hut 8 and you can read more and see some photographs inside Hut 8 here, on Alan and Pat Machin's site. Perhaps the pigeons of Blocks C and D are descendants of the wartime birds? 

(Bletchley Park staff are aware of the poorly bird - seemed a bit daft to tell them when the place is littered with bodies, but horrid to see an animal struggle).

Caroline at work in Block D

Caroline listening to Block D. Photograph by Rachael Marshall. 

A rather vocal pigeon was skittering along some trunking near the ceiling, its calls echoing around the room and occasionally being answered by another bird. 

Tuesday at Bletchley Park was blessed with bright sunshine and lots of visitors. Have you visited yet? Did you know that the Alan Turing exhibition is on the shortlist for an Art Fund Award? Cast your vote and see the other nominations here: Art Fund Prize.

Come and check it out!

'Come and Check it Out' - Graffiti in Block D, Bletchley Park. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

(Wouldn't recommend it without a flashlight though). 

The Rat Room in Block C, Bletchley Park. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

The buildings are so hazardous that I have to be accompanied by someone and this time my 'chaperone' was Maya Ramsay, an artist that I first met at the Florence Trust Open Studios back in February. I saw a piece of her work before I actually met her, and immediately thought of Bletchley Park. We call this part of the northern end of Block C the Rat Room.

More photographs from this visit are on Flickr.

Interior of entrance to Block D

Block D entrance. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

The history of the unused buildings is with the people who worked in them and their stories, yet the buildings somewhow reflect, or hold, or symbolise this value. If this wasn't true why keep the buildings? Why honour them with rebuilding and refurbishment? 

Station X : Home of the Codebreakers

A fire-damaged room in Block D. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

On October 31st I began documenting the unused buildings of Bletchley Park, also known as Station X. The eclectic mansion on the site was chosen to house a team of code-breakers in 1939 because of its excellent rail connections to London, Oxford and Cambridge, and because it was owned by the head of MI6. 

At its peak, 11,000 people worked at Bletchley Park in complete secrecy. Tour guides of the museum still occasionally meet couples who have only recently revealed to each other that they both worked at Bletchley during the war, although the site's wartime work was revealed to the public in the 1970s. The majority of code-breakers stayed in lodgings nearby, not on site.

The museum opened in 1993 and occupies only part of the huts and blocks that were built to acommodate the code-breakers and their equipment. Apart from the museum, some buildings are now occupied by the National Museum of Computing, the Radio Society of Great Britain and other collections. 

However, the majority of the huts and blocks are unused, or used only for storage, and it's these that I'm photographing for the Bletchley Park Trust. The buildings are listed and are in various states of repair, from dry but shabby to squelchy, vegetated and odorous. Kennedy O'Callaghan Architects' proposals for bringing the huts and blocks back to life are underway. My task is to document the buildings before, during and after the works. 

Switchboard near the entrance to Block D. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

First visit to Bletchley Park

The vegetation outside Block C is nearly matched by parts of the inside but I didn't know that when this was taken. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

Through a window of Block C. Photograph by Rachael Marshall.

Growing up not far from Bletchley, the name of this small town in Buckinghamshire only meant one thing to me: the pyramid swimming pool with wave machine and flume where sis and I practiced swimming as low as we possibly could for as long as we could, tummies skimming the tiles at the bottom. The pyramid is now gone.

I'm not sure when I first heard the Bletchley Park codebreaking centre. I'm pretty sure I'd heard about it or read about it before the film Enigma was released in 2001 but wasn't aware that it was open to the public until the museum was mentioned at work, and that's when this project began. A colleague put me in touch with the architects (Kennedy O'Callahan) and the project really began when I first stepped inside Block C at the end of October 2010.

Before this my parents and I visited and had an nosy around the exteriors of the buildings, peeking through dusty, cobwebby windows of Blocks C and D. We enjoyed sausages and mash in the cafe and had a good look around the collections in the museum with handwritten labels. The mannequin wearing an old Girl Guides uniform in the war-time room-set still amuses me.