Places, Faces, Spaces and Traces exhibition preview
Schedule
Sat, 01 Nov, 2025 at 03:00 pm
UTC+00:00Location
The Forum Southend | Southend-on-sea, EN
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You are invited to the preview of my exhibition covering six decades of voices and stories from Southend's underground and alternative press at The People's Gallery, The Forum, Elmer Square, Southend on Sea, 3 until 5, with drinks and chats after around the corner at Craftwerk Beers, Alexandra Street.INFO:
“Southend has always been a place where, if you scratch the surface, you’ll find there’s so much interesting going on that you don’t expect to find” - Adrian Green, ‘Bang’ Magazine
Mention Southend on Sea in casual conversation to anybody that doesn’t live here and it’s not unlikely that the response will be a condescending snigger about Essex Girls, White Van Man or reality TV show The Only Way Is Essex. But there’s always been more to Southend than these often grotesque stereotypes. Close enough to the heart of London to get there in under an hour on the C2C line, Southend is also far enough away to have evolved its own distinctive cultural heritage and identity.
The story of that ‘other’ Southend is told through the fanzines, people’s papers and community magazines made in the town over the last 50 years or so. Utilising typewriters, scissors, glue and Letraset and newly emerging word processing and DTP technology, these publications were independent, small circulation and self-produced, either by enthusiastic individuals or small collectives and community groups, and reproduced using whatever resources were to hand: Gestetner duplicators, stencils, screen printers, offset litho and riso presses, high street copy shops or the office Xerox machine when the boss wasn’t looking. They were often ramshackle, messy, irreverent and opinionated, but most importantly they were hands-on and democratic, unmediated by any external editorial constraints…
By definition these publications were of the moment, spreading the word about what was happening there and then. Given away free or sold for a few pence to cover production costs, they were distributed at gigs, in the street or in pubs, cafes, record shops and anywhere else that would take some copies. They were a transient medium, at the time intended to be read then discarded…
Today they provide not only snapshots of Southend’s youth and other (sub)cultures over the last five decades, but also a record of participants’ direct experiences of a ‘history from below’, unlikely to be documented in the minutes of Southend Borough Council meetings or the archives of the Evening Echo newspaper.
In 2022 I published ‘Southend On Zine’, a book documenting the alternative history of the city between 1971 and 2021 as told through these publications and the words of those that produced them.
During my research, I gathered a wealth of material including artifacts, oral histories and interviews, several of which I wasn’t able to use for the book, but which opened up many portals into an otherwise lost or undocumented non-official ‘other’ history of this city, capturing, amplifying and celebrating these hidden voices: the Places, Faces and Spaces otherwise lingering on only as memories and traces… Now is the time to tell these stories!
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Where is it happening?
The Forum Southend, Southend-on-sea, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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