20th February 2010

The Guardian

Jane Gardam on bringing poetry to the streets of Sandwich

'Late one night we set out with ladders and lanterns (poetry should be subversive), looking for lamp-posts.'

Last September I telephoned an old friend in Devon. He had just published his beautiful book on Devon churches, and far off in Kent I had just published my novel The Man in the Wooden Hat. We were waiting for reviews and I asked him how he was passing the days. He said: "With street poetry."

"What is it?"

"Sometimes it's called random ­droppings."

Harland Walshaw came up with the idea years ago, long before Poems on the Underground or the National Trust were attaching good poems to trees to be come upon casually in the grounds of country houses. In Yorkshire, working for a poetry festival, he took to commissioning poets not then famous: Roger McGough, Patricia Beer, Peter Redgrove. He displayed them on hoardings all over north Devon – beautifully printed, laminated, poems old and new, putting them up most of the year, without explanation, around his village of Lympstone.

I haven't been to Lympstone. It is the string of lights you watch across the estuary of the River Exe from the train as you travel to Exeter from London. Lympstone is a village of around 2,000 people but very much ­visited in summer – and, thanks to Walshaw and others, the visitors are the sort who understand poetry and history and the arts.

I wondered whether we could randomly drop poems into a very different place – the market town of Sandwich, where I live in Kent. Its visitors tend to live in second homes and are involved in the Royal St George's Golf Club, a mile or so across the sand dunes.

With a friend in Fisher Street, who is a teacher and writer, we began to prowl the town. Sandwich is small and compact, and almost every street is ancient, quiet and beautiful – half empty except at times of tournaments. It is a Cinque Port (pop circa 6,000), has three massive medieval churches, an ancient quay and a narrow, sluggish tidal river, once one of the waterways of the nation. There is a small supermarket built over the old slaughter-house, near Blood and Guts Alley, a couple of doctors' surgeries, some rows of very good little shops, a police station quite often open, and an Elizabethan-style bus shelter. At one time the railway station waiting room was a delight, like something from old ­Russia, with potted plants, a writing desk and paperback books – but these have been banished.

 

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