Memories of Elsewhere: Westcliff Parade, by Dan Carney

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In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Dan Carney:

It’s a number of things that will keep Westcliff Parade in memory shortly after you’ve left, when venturing further than 500 metres from home will become an exotic and reckless act, and your mind will be constantly occupied by the newly inaccessible.

It’s the curious way it can feel windswept and deserted here even when the air is still and there are people all around. It’s the grand old Westcliff Hotel, brilliant white and offseason-empty, as well as the Cliffs Pavilion theatre just beyond, a strange but compelling blend of art deco and brutalism, a 1950s Butlin’s building imagined as a cruise ship from the near future. It’s the gentle decline, on one side, to the seafront between Southend and Westcliff, and the Cliff Gardens, a multi-tiered Edwardian pleasure garden set into the slope and stretching all the way along to the Adventure Island amusement park. A tastefully verdant point from which to take in the not quite unending view of the never quite empty sea; the first widening of the Thames Estuary, and the Isles of Grain and Sheppey. The Canvey Island skyline to the right and, to the left, Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world.

The gardens were designed by the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose other works include the palatial Rashtrapati Bhavan presidential residence in New Delhi, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, and the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Lutyens was also responsible for the memorial to Southend’s own Great War dead, a freestanding eleven-metre obelisk of Portland Stone that also resides here, further along at Clifftown Parade. His daughter Elisabeth, a prominent composer, had a similarly diverse career, pioneering her own technique of serial composition – an approach involving the equal usage of all twelve notes on the chromatic scale – scoring a number of 1960s Hammer horror films, and drawing admiration from Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, and Stravinsky. 

But what will make this short stretch linger, more than its panoramic views, impressive landscaping, or aristocratic architect-composer bloodlines, is the thing that has brought you here. Dad died two days ago, fading away peacefully – and expectedly - in a nearby care home, following a long period of illness. You’ve been here since, staying at the Westcliff Hotel, helping Mum with death administration and trying to provide general support.

Between you, you’ve been working down the list – getting the death registered, cancelling the pension payments, transferring the joint account into a single name, going through the production line notification of friends and relatives. There’s a bleak humour in how mundanely procedural a lot of it is, how the infrastructure of eight and a half decades of unbroken existence can be so easily dismantled or reassigned. There isn’t much humour, however, in how nothing either of you do or say seems enough to fill the new gap, a vast, weird expanse it’ll take time to explore and understand. For now, it’s less complicated to collect the certificates, make the appointments, and sign the forms, all rituals which - at this moment - seem to exist solely to enable the deferral of the more ambiguous stuff.

Even so, you spend a lot of time while you’re here wondering what’s going on. Even when death is foregrounded by decline and inevitability, a release when it finally comes, it’s still a punch in the chest. You’ve been standing on the track watching the train approach, able to do pretty much anything to prepare for impact, except get out of the way. And if it’s hit you hard then Mum, after 55 years of marriage, has been hit harder still. What it leaves is more than just simple sadness or loss. It’s a disorienting blend of the fluid and the fixed. Panic and permanence, everything rising and spinning around a monolithically immovable core. A contradictory thing which won’t settle or be made sense of, leaving you feeling like a switch waiting to be flicked, a punch yet to be thrown.

As if to reflect this, Westcliff Parade dissolves and reforms daily. In the mornings it’s a marvel of Edwardian seafront elegance, the gardens stately and welcoming, the timber- and glass-fronted houses inviting unhurried admiration. It’s not hard, in the bright mornings - even months before the summer crowds will arrive at the beaches below - to feel the energy and possibility that must have crackled through here in the 1800s and early 1900s, when Southend was an exclusive seaside resort, the destination of choice for well-heeled Londoners.

In the evenings, however, the desirability and bustle of years past are nowhere to be seen or felt, overwritten by darkness, dread, and decades of affordable overseas holidays. Westcliff Parade is the chilly precursor to hasty Wetherspoons meals, eaten late and alone in the cavernous converted post office off Southend High Street, before the trudge back to the hotel. It is yesterday’s place, shuttered and embalmed, offering no restorative views or palatable metaphors for death and grief. It doesn’t want you here, and it makes sure you know it. It watches disapprovingly, tallying your steps and keeping track of every minute you stay.   

On the last day you are here, the duties are mainly done. The morning is clear and crisp but the answers, unsurprisingly, are still to appear. You check out of the hotel and find yourself standing at the top of the Cliff Gardens in the rising wind, surveying the choppy estuary. You look across to Canvey, then down at the couple on the bench. In the months that follow, you’ll sometimes feel like you’re on your way through, but more often like an engine sputtering quietly to a halt, a box boarded under the floor.

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Dan Carney is a musician/writer from north-east London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also authored a number of academic research papers on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.