Water, water, everywhere | 28 March 2018

‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens transcribes the sound of 1,200 men building the first iron-clad frigate Achilles at the Royal Dockyard, Chatham, in the 1860s. A Chatham boy, Dickens lived to see — and hear — the age of sail turn into the age of steam, when the creak of ropes, the flap of canvas and the ding of bells gave way to the hiss of steam, the chug of motors and the shriek of whistles. As soundscapes go, both strike the modern imagination as more musical than the roar of road traffic. So they must have struck the imagination of Richard Wilson when he composed ‘1513: A Ships’ Opera’ for foghorn, steam whistle, hooter, siren and cannon, performed by the parade of historic vessels during the Mayor’s Thames Festival of 2013.

Wilson’s witty working drawings feature in a new exhibition, Powerful Tides — 400 Years of Chatham and the Sea. In the week Nigel Farage dumped dead haddock into the Thames in protest at our lack of control over our territorial waters, the exhibition felt more elegiac than celebratory, but its intentions are good: to enlist the imaginations of artists, historical and contemporary, in reconnecting the 80-acre museum site with the waterways it was once part of. Unfortunately, it gets off to a shaky start with Catherine Yass’s ‘Bridge’ (2014), a pair of lightbox transparencies of the empty piers of the old Blackfriars Bridge built to carry the London, Chatham and Dover Railway in 1864 and dismantled 60 years later. A connection broken.

Chatham has a truly glorious history. It was out of the dock now occupied by the second world war destroyer HMS Cavalier that HMS Victory was floated in 1765, 40 years before carrying Nelson to Trafalgar.