The harbour wall #2

Another in my ongoing series of images featuring the harbour wall at Cullercoats.

As I’ve described before, there’s just something about this harbour wall in Cullercoats that I love to photograph. Cullercoats Bay is one of my favourite places to photograph, sitting below a curved cliff with RNLI lifeboat station on the edge of the beach as well as the Dove Marine Laboratory, which is quite an interesting building too.

The surrounding coast is also lovely—Longsands beach and King Edward’s Bay to the south are also favourites—and the constant changing conditions you get on the coast always provide something new to photograph. 

And yet, it’s this wall that draws most of my attention when it comes to a scene I want to keep going back to with purpose. I’m yet to really figure out what it is I like about it so much but it’s partly the simple, unchanging block of the wall (and the detail of the little speed limit sign) that acts as a kind of anchor for the changeable conditions around it: low tide, high tide; stormy sea or calm; kids tombstoning off the end in summer and paddle boarders floating by all year round.

The framing of today’s image is nearly identical to the last photograph I shared of the wall, and it’s this composition that I really like and want to keep on photographing in different conditions to build up quite a focused series (the first time I’ve ever wanted to do such a thing photographically). I am also collecting a wider portfolio of images featuring the wall, and I’ll eventually put it all together in a book when the collection grows big enough.