I Asked About 2012. They Asked Me to Leave.

 

Feed the Moths | Jenna McKendrik | Filed under: Kingsmouth, Things That Should Not Be Forgotten, Someone Is Reading My Notes

I pushed too hard.

I know. I know I know I know. You're not surprised. I'm not surprised. The only person who would be surprised is someone who has never read this blog, and if that's you — hello, welcome, this is probably not the best entry point but here we are.

I pushed too hard, the cheerful veneer cracked, and I found out some things I'm going to have difficulty unknowing.

Here's what happened.

 

The West Side

The street that doesn't appear on current maps is called Waites Lane.

I found the name on an older council document — pre-2013, pre-regeneration, pre-whatever-you-want-to-call-the-period-after-the-fog. It's a short residential street running parallel to the harbour on the western edge of town, tucked behind the old cannery building. On foot it takes about four minutes to walk end to end.

It did not get the bunting treatment.

The houses on Waites Lane are not derelict — someone is maintaining them, keeping the gutters clear, stopping the gardens from going fully feral. But they have the quality of places that have been maintained rather than lived in. Tidy in the way that empty things are tidy. No shoes by the doors. No bikes against the walls. Three out of seven houses with curtains still drawn at eleven in the morning, and not the curtains-against-the-sun kind of drawn. The other kind.

Except one.

Number four had its curtains open. Had a light on in the front room. Had, on the doorstep, a very old tabby cat who regarded me with the profound indifference of a creature that has seen things and filed them away and moved on.

I knocked on the door.

The People Who Remember

Her name is Dottie. She's in her seventies, she made me tea without asking if I wanted any (I did), and she has been living on Waites Lane since 1987. She was here in 2012. She was here in 2013 when the regeneration started. She has, in her words, "watched this town put on a costume and pretend to be somewhere else."

She wouldn't go on record. I'm not naming her surname. These are the rules and I agreed to them over the tea.

But here's what she told me, in broad terms, in the order she told me:

The fog in 2012 was not a weather event. This she states as simple fact, the way you'd state that the sea is salt. She doesn't elaborate because she doesn't think it needs elaboration.

The people who died — and people did die, whatever the official record says about accidents and a regrettable gas leak — were not all accounted for in the way the official record suggests. Some of the names on the memorial are wrong. Not fabricated. Wrong. Misattributed. She won't say more than that.

The regeneration funding arrived fast. Within six weeks of the fog clearing, there were surveyors on Waites Lane. She remembers it specifically because they came to her door and asked if she'd be willing to sell. She said no. They came back twice more, with incrementally better offers. She said no both times. They stopped coming, but she noticed that every other house on the street went quiet — owners relocated, she assumes, though she never saw any of them actually leave.

She doesn't know what BlackGlass is. When I mentioned the name she looked at me steadily for a moment and said: "That's new. They're usually better at staying nameless than that."

I wrote that down.

She noticed.

The Memorial

The 2012 memorial is in the small park at the top of Harbour Street, opposite what is now a very pleasant artisan bakery.

It's a good-looking memorial. Clean granite, well-maintained, a small garden of coastal plants around the base. From the street it reads as tasteful and appropriately sombre.

Two things, when you get close.

First: it faces north. Away from the harbour. You cannot see the water from where it stands, not even a glimpse between the buildings. In a harbour town, for an event that was centred on the harbour, this is an interesting choice. The park has clear sightlines to the water from three other positions. Someone chose this one specifically.

Second: the wording.

In memory of those lost during the events of October 2012. Kingsmouth remembers.

That's it. No names — there's a secondary plaque on the reverse with names, but the primary inscription is just that. The events of October 2012. Not the storm. Not the accident. Not anything specific. Just the events.

Kingsmouth remembers, says the memorial.

Kingsmouth is also working very hard to stop remembering, says everything else about this town.

The Building

This is where I pushed too hard.

Based on what Dottie told me, and on the contractor reference KM-2013-04 from the BlackGlass plate, I had a working theory that the groundworks weren't just for the harbour office. The project number suggested a wider scope. I wanted to know what else they'd been doing in 2013, and specifically whether any of it was on or near Waites Lane, where the surveyors had been so keen to buy up property.

The planning office on Marsh Road holds the full development records. They're public documents — technically accessible to anyone who submits a formal request.

I went in and asked.

The woman at the desk was professional and pleasant and found my request in the system within about thirty seconds, which told me it had been requested before and the response had been pre-loaded. She told me that the records for the 2013 groundworks project were not available for public access as they contained information pertaining to an ongoing infrastructure review.

I asked what infrastructure review.

She said she wasn't able to provide details.

I asked who I could speak to for more information.

She said she'd need to check, and would I like to take a seat.

I took a seat.

After about four minutes, a man came out from the back office. Not the planning officer — someone else. He was wearing a jacket that was slightly too good for a council planning office on a Tuesday morning, and he had the particular energy of someone who has done this specific thing before. Polite. Measured. Very clear.

He told me that the records I'd requested were subject to an exemption under the infrastructure protection provisions of the relevant act. He told me that if I had concerns about the development history of the area, I was welcome to submit a formal FOI request, which would be responded to within the statutory timeframe. He told me that he hoped I was enjoying my visit to Kingsmouth.

And then he held the door open.

Not aggressively. Not rudely. Just — held the door open, in a way that made clear that the conversation was over and my presence in the building was now, politely, concluded.

I left.

That Evening

I came back to the rental — a little place above a gift shop on the main street, very clean, very neutral, absolutely nothing wrong with it — and I sat down to write up my notes from the day.

My notebook was on the table where I'd left it.

The pen was on the wrong side.

I'm left-handed. I put pens on the left side of whatever I'm writing on, every time, without thinking. It's not a thing I decide. It's just what I do.

The pen was on the right.

The notebook was closed, which is how I'd left it. The contents, as far as I could tell, were undisturbed — nothing torn out, nothing added. Same notes in the same order.

But the pen was on the right side.

I sat with that for a while.

Then I photographed the room, packed my bag, checked out early, and drove until I hit the interstate.

What I Think Is Happening

Someone is managing the story of Kingsmouth, and they are good at it. They are so good at it that the town itself has mostly bought in — not through coercion, or not only through coercion, but through the gentler mechanism of making things nicer and hoping that people choose not to look too hard at the cost.

BlackGlass — and I'm more certain than ever that this traces back to Orochi, even if I can't prove the chain yet — was not just doing groundworks in 2013. They were doing something that required buying up a residential street, that required planning records to be sealed, that required a man in a good jacket to be available at short notice to show a blogger the door.

The fog is gone. The town looks fine. The memorial faces the wrong way.

And whatever was in the harbour wall cracks — whatever I photographed on the first day, whatever the council maintenance team cleaned off so efficiently on the second — I don't think it was left over from 2012.

I think it's new.

I'm Going Home. For Now.

I have photographs. I have notes that someone else has also read. I have a project reference number — KM-2013-04 — that I am going to pull on until something comes loose. I have a name, BlackGlass, appearing now in three separate investigations, and I have a very strong suspicion that the Black House files and the Lost Broadcast metadata are going to look different when I go back through them knowing what I know now.

I'm going home. I'm going to sit with everything I have, lay it out properly, and find the shape of it.

But I want to say one thing clearly, for the record, before I close this out.

Kingsmouth is not fine.

The bunting is lovely. The chowder is excellent. Dottie's cat is a treasure and I hope he lives forever. But underneath the fresh paint and the artisan preserves and the memorial that looks away from the water, something is still there. Something that BlackGlass came to manage in 2013, that they are apparently still managing now, that leaves traces in old harbour walls and in planning records that can't be seen and in the very specific quality of silence on Waites Lane.

The town decided to be fine.

That's not the same thing as being fine.

I'm going back.

Because someone in Kingsmouth is managing a story — and they care very much that I stop asking questions.

Which means, obviously, that I can't.

© Feed the Moths | All content Jenna McKendrik | The pen was on the right side. I know where I put it.

Who Paid for the New Kingsmouth?

 

Feed the Moths | Jenna McKendrik | Filed under: Kingsmouth, Orochi, Corporate Weirdness, Things I Probably Shouldn't Have Noticed

Pretty towns cost money.

That sounds obvious, but think about it for a second. Kingsmouth in 2012 was not a wealthy place. It was a working harbour town with a declining fishing industry, a slightly cursed reputation, and the kind of infrastructure that suggests the council hadn't had a meaningful budget since approximately 1987.

And now it has repaved streets. A new harbour office. Restored civic buildings. Bunting. A mural that must have cost someone a genuinely uncomfortable amount of money to commission.

So I started asking the obvious question.

Who paid for all this?

The Official Story (Such As It Is)

The Kingsmouth Regeneration Initiative — which is apparently what they're calling it, with the kind of name that sounds like it was generated by a committee specifically to be un-googleable — has a very tidy public narrative.

Regional development funding. A coastal communities grant from somewhere federal. Private investment from "local business interests." An anonymous charitable trust established in 2013, the year after everything, called the Solomon Island Community Foundation.

It all sounds perfectly reasonable.

This is, in my experience, the first warning sign.

I've spent enough time poking at things that are meant to be left alone to know that legitimate funding is usually messy. It's council minutes and competing grant applications and someone's name spelled three different ways across four documents. It's boring and human and slightly chaotic.

The Kingsmouth regeneration paperwork is clean. It's almost elegant. Everything traces back neatly to the right places, every reference resolves, every grant has a corresponding acknowledgment plaque on the appropriate building.

It looks like a paper trail that someone built rather than one that grew.

The Noticeboard Outside the Planning Office

I want to be clear that I was not doing anything unusual here. I was standing on a public street, looking at a publicly accessible noticeboard, through a window that was at street level and unobstructed.

The planning office for the harbour development is in a converted building on Marsh Road — new paint, new signage, a logo that manages to be both nautical and corporate in a way that takes real effort. The noticeboard inside the front window has the usual assortment of planning notices and consultation documents, the kind of thing that's legally required to be visible to the public.

 

I was reading it because I'm exactly the kind of person who reads planning notices on holiday, yes, thank you, moving on.

Most of it was routine. Permitted development. Drainage consultation. An application for external signage on the new café.

But tucked in the lower left corner, slightly behind a flood risk assessment, was a contractor invoice. Or part of one — the top was obscured. What I could see was a line-item breakdown for groundworks on the harbour office project: materials, labour, site clearance.

And at the top of the visible section, where the contractor's details would normally be, a company name.

The name on the invoice was Meridian Groundworks (a BlackGlass Company).

I took the photo, put my phone in my pocket, and walked very calmly to the bench across the street, where I sat down and stared at the harbour for a while.

So Here's Where Things Get Weird

BlackGlass.

If you've been following this blog for a while — and specifically if you read the Black House posts from two years ago, or the Lost Broadcast material from last year — that name is going to do something to your stomach. The same thing it did to mine.

It appeared in the Black House investigation as a partial document header. I noted it at the time, couldn't place it, moved on because there were about forty other things demanding my attention in that particular rabbit hole. It showed up again in the Lost Broadcast material, in the metadata of one of the audio files that got pulled before I could do a full analysis. I flagged it in my notes and then the notes got complicated and BlackGlass ended up in a folder called follow up eventually.

Naturally, I had to investigate.

Here's what I found, which is not very much, which is itself interesting:

BlackGlass does not have a website. It has a Companies House registration — or the American equivalent, depending on which jurisdiction you're looking in, because it appears to exist in several — with a filing history that is perfectly maintained and almost completely uninformative. The registered address is a law firm. The listed directors are two names that resolve to nothing useful when you search them.

It is not a shell company in the obvious sense. It pays its taxes. It has employees — you can find LinkedIn profiles for people who list it as an employer, though the job titles are all variations of consultant or project manager with no further detail.

It is a company that exists entirely to not be noticed.

And it did the groundworks on Kingsmouth harbour.

The Harbour Office

The new harbour office is a neat single-storey building at the end of the repaved waterfront. It has large windows, a very clean logo on the door, and a small garden bed along the front that someone is maintaining with real dedication.

On my second morning, I walked past it slowly on the way to get coffee. (There is a very good coffee place now. I'm still suspicious of Kingsmouth but I will give them the coffee.)

On the right-hand side of the building, at about knee height, half-hidden by the garden bed, there was a small brass plate fixed to the render.

The kind of plate that contractors sometimes affix to buildings they've worked on. A quiet credit. Most people never notice them.

This one said: BlackGlass Infrastructure Division | Project: KM-2013-04

I crouched down and photographed it. Then I photographed the building. Then I went and got my coffee and came back.

The plate was gone.

Not removed messily — no drill holes, no raw render where fixings had been pulled out. Just gone. As if it had never been there, except that I have a photograph of it on my phone, timestamped 8:47am, in which you can clearly read every word.

I have looked at that photograph a lot.

What I Think I Know

I want to be careful here, because I don't have enough to make a definitive claim and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What I have is this:

A company called BlackGlass, which appears in the background of at least two previous investigations into things that were very much not normal, has a documented presence in the Kingsmouth regeneration project. They did groundworks. They had a plate on the harbour office. Project reference KM-2013-04 — which means they were here in 2013. The year after the fog. The year the cleanup, whatever that looked like, would have started.

Orochi Group has a lot of subsidiaries. Most of them have sensible, forgettable names. Meridian this, Atlantic that, Pacific something-or-other.

BlackGlass doesn't feel like those names. BlackGlass feels like something you name a project when the project isn't, technically, about groundworks.

"BlackGlass Infrastructure Division."

Infrastructure. Right.

I'm going back through the Black House files tonight. And the Lost Broadcast metadata. And whatever else I have in that follow-up folder that I should have followed up on months ago.

One More Thing

On my way out of Kingsmouth this afternoon I drove past the stretch of old harbour wall. The one I photographed on my first day. The one with the wrong shadows.

The dark substance in the cracks — whatever it was — is gone. The wall looks like it's just been cleaned. There's a council maintenance van parked nearby, two workers packing up equipment.

I slowed down. One of them looked up at me.

I kept driving.

The Black House posts and Lost Broadcast investigation are in the archive. I'd suggest reading them before the next post.

I'm going back to Kingsmouth.

There are people there who remember 2012. And at least one of them is ready to talk.

© Feed the Moths | All content Jenna McKendrik | BlackGlass is not in my head. I have the photograph.

Kingsmouth Got a Lick of Paint. I'm Not Convinced.

 

Feed the Moths | Jenna McKendrik | Filed under: Kingsmouth, New England, Places That Should Know Better

So here's the thing about Kingsmouth.

I've been putting off coming back for about eight months. Not because I was scared — I mean, obviously not because I was scared — but because I'd built up a very specific picture of what it would be like, and I wasn't ready to have that picture complicated.

I expected fog. I expected peeling paint and empty windows and that particular flavour of coastal decay that Kingsmouth used to do so well. I expected to feel the wrongness of the place the moment I crossed the town line, like I did last time. Like a pressure change. Like something noticing.

What I did not expect was a farmers market.

 

"Welcome to Kingsmouth! (Please Enjoy Our Artisan Preserves)"

They've got bunting up. Actual bunting. Little triangular flags strung between the lamp posts all the way down Marsh Road, in alternating blue and white, snapping cheerfully in the sea breeze. There's a chalkboard sign outside what used to be a very sad-looking hardware store, advertising something called The Saltbox Kitchen and their award-winning chowder.

(Award-winning. In Kingsmouth. I have questions about the judging panel.)

The harbour front has been repaved. The boats look maintained. There's a mural on the wall of the old cannery building — a big, bright thing, all blues and greens, fishing boats and wheeling gulls and a sunrise that is, I promise you, physically painful to look at in its cheerfulness.

I stood in front of that mural for a while.

I'm not sure what I was looking for. A crack in it, maybe. Some evidence that underneath the fresh paint, the wall remembered what 2012 felt like.

The Smell of Fresh Paint and Something Else

Here's the thing about Kingsmouth that the bunting can't quite fix.

It's quiet in the wrong way.

Not empty-quiet. There are people here. Tourists, even — a couple with a pushchair, a man eating a pastry on a bench, a group of women doing a walking tour with little printed maps. The town is producing the correct amount of human noise.

But underneath it, there's another quiet. A held-breath kind of quiet. The kind of quiet that a place makes when it's concentrating on something.

I noticed it most on the side streets. The ones that weren't quite on the main drag, that hadn't quite got the full renovation treatment. The shop fronts still look new enough, but the colour choices are a bit off — slightly too deliberate, like someone picked them from a 'reassuring coastal town' mood board rather than, you know, just painting their shop. And if you look at the upper floors, above the neat window boxes and the freshly painted sills, some of the windows are still dark. Still boarded, but with boards that have been painted to match the render.

Cheerful boards. Very convincing, from a distance.

I only noticed because I was looking.

 

Talking to People (A Study in Conversational Redirection)

I tried talking to a few locals. Not in a I'm investigating your town way — just chatting, the way you do when you're a stranger somewhere and you want to get a feel for a place.

It went like this:

The woman at the market stall selling jam was lovely. Absolutely lovely. Told me about the new community garden project, the council's regeneration grant, how the school had just been repainted. When I mentioned that I'd visited before — back in 2012 — she smiled and said "Oh, things are very different now," and then found something urgent to do with her display of raspberry conserve.

The man running the kayak hire hadn't been here in 2012. Moved up from Portland three years ago. Loves it. Great community. Very friendly people.

The elderly gentleman sitting on the harbour wall had definitely been here in 2012. I could tell because when I sat down next to him and said I'd been reading about the town's history, he looked at me for a long moment and then said, very quietly: "It's not gone. They just can't see it anymore."

And then his wife called him for lunch and he left.

So. That was useful.

The Wall

This is the part I keep coming back to.

At the far end of the harbour, past the new paving and the mural and the very nice new harbour office, there's a section of the old sea wall that hasn't been touched. It's maybe thirty feet long, tucked around a slight curve in the waterfront, and I think the plan is probably to renovate it eventually — there's a faded marking on the ground that might be a contractor's annotation.

But right now, it's original. Unchanged.

The stone is dark with waterlogging, or something like it. The tideline is higher than it should be given the conditions today — you can see it clearly, a distinct dark band across the lower third of the wall. And growing in the cracks, or not exactly growing, more like present, is something I can't identify. Dark and slightly glossy. Not seaweed, not lichen. Something that doesn't have the right texture for either of those things.

I photographed it.

I took about fifteen pictures from different angles, different distances. The light was good — clear afternoon sun, nothing complicated about the exposure.

Here's what came back:

The wall is there. The stone is there. The tideline is there.

The light isn't right.

I don't mean it's a bad photo. I mean the shadows are falling in a direction that doesn't match the sun. Not dramatically — you'd miss it if you weren't looking. But I was looking, because I always look, and I've been over these photos about thirty times now and I cannot make the shadows behave correctly.

Anyway

The Saltbox Kitchen does a genuinely excellent chowder, for the record.

I ate it sitting by the harbour, watching the cheerful boats and the cheerful mural and the cheerful tourists, and I thought about what the old man said. It's not gone. They just can't see it anymore.

I've got one more night here. There's a street on the west side of town that I haven't walked yet — it showed up in some older satellite imagery I was looking at before I came, but it doesn't appear on current maps. Probably a data error.

Probably.

Next post: I started looking into who actually funded all this cheerfulness. The answer is more interesting than I expected. And I've seen one of the names before — somewhere I really didn't expect to see it again.

You know me. I couldn't leave it alone.

© Feed the Moths | All content Jenna McKendrik | Don't go to Kingsmouth alone