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