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26/04/2014

History at my feet

Sea tumbled bricks and stone.
Round edged.
Sea defenses. 











After the bombing of Liverpool during the Second World War bricks and rubble from people's damaged houses and damaged lives, were swept up and piled on the sands of Crosby beach. This 'waste' was being put to good use as a sea defense. Now more than half a century later the debris of history is still protecting the coastline from the ravages of winter storms.

We had parked above the beach and wondered at the stones and bricks as we picked our way down to the sands. Himself enlightened us to the details and I immediately felt different. This rubble was not just well - rubble, but it was little chunks of stories - homes and houses, sadness and war damage. We knelt down and looked a little closer. Pieces of kitchen tiles, corners of belfast sinks, bricks, tumbled clumps of concrete filled with pebbles and gravel. We didn't find anything outstanding - like some of the items shown here on the 'Collateral' blog - please follow the link and see some amazing photos, however, just knowing where these little lumps of detritus came from - made it all the more poignant.

Later, in the 1970s, more building spoil was added to the 1940s blitz damage. I searched on the internet about this little monument to post war survival and was saddened to read a lot of comments indicating how little anyone knew about them. A lot of folk thought that it was dumped rubbish. Fortunately after a lot of digging, I found some wonderful sites explaining the real reason behind these sea washed bread roll shaped bricks.


That little brick stump that Youngest is photographing now lives in his room with his cactus. I couldn't resist taking a picture of him taking a photo of 'his' brick.


9 comments:

  1. How very interesting this is Hawthorn, I hadn't heard it before! Thanks so much for your fantastic pics, once again! Happy Sunday to you and yours, Joy xo

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  2. Really clever photography, I too hadn't heard about this before, very interesting.

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  3. Amazing to think they were homes where people lived - what stories they could tell. Lovely pictures again. xx

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  4. What an amazing story!! Horrible occurrence turned to the good. Love the photos, as usual...full of art and thought. Youngest is getting a bit tall on you :-) Sweet that he collected the rock...I do that too from places I visit. However, I think his has much more history than the ones I've schlepped home. Hope your week is splendid! Best, Vicki

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  5. Great story, sad but uplifting. On other beaches I too have seen bricks that have been eroded into wonderful shapes but I never thought to think how they got there. Thanks for the history lesson and I will try to be more questioning in future!

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  6. an interesting story and photographs :)

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  7. You are so right - I'm from Liverpool and I didn't know about this I'm ashamed to say. I used to live near Crosby Marina about fifteen years ago and would regularly walk or jog along the promenade, but never on the beach as it was filthy dirty and very smelly. Thankfully today it's so much cleaner there so I'm going to take a trip there to investigate. The 'Collateral' blog is very interesting, and I will pass this info on to my father-in-law who I'm sure will also be very interested to see it. Thanks for sharing this, and I really love the way nature has sculpted that piece of brick.

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  8. How fascinating, thank you for sharing this, the history and the stories.

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Hawthorn x

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