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.