60 Lines of Lido - Mike Sims

I’m working on a poem or a loosely connected piece of text inspired by a visit to Hastings and St Leonards, and specifically the site of the ‘lost lido’. I’m investigating the place and its history in combination with what I noticed, heard, picked up and put down (a pair of kids’ Spiderman crocs, the Dugout Café, the Sussex Cars frontage, bits of litter, weeds or wildflowers, graffiti) in and around the massive space the lido once occupied. The site has edges – a perimeter, the sunken area which is where the terraces and pool once stood, but is otherwise an evocative, permeable space, a kind of ‘invisible city’.

I did a day trip, wandering with Tom and Marcia from Warrior Square station (a place name that suggests demarcation) to Electro Studios, then around the West St Leonards area, looking around, making notes, trying to look closely and listen out for things.

I’m hoping to display the poem in wave-like strips, using some old watch trays I found. They’re tatty, black vinyl with nice cream interiors, divided into sections in which watches would have been slotted. I picked them up after finding them on a street because I like their formal square shapes, grids and recesses. A grid pattern is something I saw in a few places when I visited St Leonards (in a mains cover, the pink and white paving along the front, an area marked out with diagonal yellow lines). I wanted to make something loose or fragmentary that was also contained and had a system. I thought the boxes might be helpful.

They’re also a bit like printers’ trays or letterpress drawers and I’m very interested in type – I made a letterpress book for an earlier Ground Collective exhibition. At the same time, I don’t want the trays to contain the poem (our theme is uncertain edges) – I want the writing to fly a bit free – like someone hurtling down form the top board at the lido.