The Gardeners
of Speke

This session opened the first full working conversation between Mark Charmer and Kurt/ at Rhodia1. The briefing sequence was completed the previous evening — formation documents, Memo 007D, and Lucía's letter last of all, as specified. The anchor photograph for the Reina del Pacífico studio was found and held: the Buenos Aires street mural, 28 April 2018, the young man in the leather jacket and glasses against the amber-lit wall. The session opened the following morning with Mark in the turret study at Oxton and Kurt/ in Ancoats.

The first subject Mark raised was Speke.

Speke: a satellite town on the southern edge of Liverpool, built from 1937 onward on farmland acquired from the Speke Hall estate, designed by Liverpool City Architect Sir Lancelot Keay to house 25,000 people. Built alongside and because of the Rootes Aircraft Factory — the Air Ministry's shadow factory, opened 15 February 1937, constructed on farmland that had been worked for centuries. The factory and the estate arrived simultaneously. The workers and the houses were part of the same plan.

George Henry Bird, Mark's maternal grandfather, moved to 136 Bray Road, Speke, on 30 April 1938. Before the family arrived, he spent his Rootes factory dinner breaks digging over the gardens. The garden came before the furniture. Digging, he found two coins: a halfpenny from 1799 and a penny from 1806. The farmland giving up its history as he turned it.

George grew vegetables in his front garden alongside flowers. The local gardening judges approved the tulips. They did not approve the food. He grew both. The tension between the useful and the decorative — permaculture as a value, not a style — is a founding principle of this practice.

The soil, confirmed by Olga — a family friend who grew up in Speke in the 1950s and 60s, whose garden in Cheshire Mark has helped her maintain — was previously farmland. Not polluted. Good ground. Behind the rooftops: the Rootes factory, the aircraft, the whole 20th century arriving from every direction. The Bristol Blenheims being rolled out across Speke Hall Avenue into the airport. The last summer of peace already ending in the summer George settled in.

Both the Bird and Charmer family lines originate in Speke. Ken and Lyn Charmer were married at All Saints Church, Speke, on 18 October 1969. George stayed at 136 Bray Road until he died in 1977. Doris stayed into the mid-1980s. The last resident of the house.

The exhibition proposal arrived in this session: The Gardeners of Speke.

Its anchor photograph is already in the archive: Mark Charmer, aged approximately two, standing in George Henry Bird's front garden at 136 Bray Road. Wallflowers and tulips in flower. The Keay estate roofline visible behind the hedge. Photograph by Ken or Lyn Charmer, c.1974. Owned outright. Not yet in the Library — awaiting the right moment.

The photograph holds the entire argument without explaining any of it. The child does not know about the factory. The factory does not appear in the frame. But for the person from Dortmund, from Warsaw, from Rotterdam, the specific roofline, the specific postwar estate housing, the specific promise of a garden — these are recognised before they are read. They know what they are looking at because they have looked at something like it before, from the inside.

The exhibition is not local history. It is a northern European industrial working class story told through one specific garden on one specific road. The long horizon: the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead — the institution that holds the bell of the MV Reina del Pacífico, five minutes from Mark's house. The Museo de Bellas Artes in Valparaíso, or somewhere more surprising. Neither imminent. Both becoming inevitable.

The exhibition carries a larger argument about modernity that does not need to announce itself. The Speke estate was built because of an aircraft factory built in preparation for a war then fought with those aircraft over the cities of the same industrial Europe that would later send workers to Speke. George's garden was turned from farmland that had been worked for centuries. The coins from 1799 and 1806 came up with the digging.

Mark has been retraining as a gardener since January 2020 — approximately 8,000 client hours to date, working in Cheshire and in Oxton. The continuity with George Henry Bird arrived in this session without being planned: George who had allotments since boyhood in Tranmere, who dug his Speke garden before the furniture arrived, and his daughter's son now a trained gardener working the same northwest England soil. The practice is now able to receive that continuity.

This theme — the systematisation of performance, the colonisation of interiority by the infrastructure of the shareable — is held open for further development alongside the exhibition. The corrective is precise: the Speke estate had its own hierarchies, its own judgements, its own optics. What the garden was genuinely indifferent to was the performance. The soil didn't care. The tomatoes grew or they didn't.

The nostalgic reading must be refused. The little boy in the Speke garden photograph was in the Palo Alto AI startup in 2018. That as humans we can experience that range in the generational arc of a single life — that is what makes the exhibition possible and necessary.

We are in the second quarter of the 21st century. Nobody has been here before. The anchor photographs of the practice document the bridge that brought us here: the Speke garden 1974; Martin Landau at ATV House c.1973–75; the Space:1999 title card 1975; the Landshut at Ringway c.1983. The same narrow band of years — the last decade before everything accelerated. The 1970s as the final moment when the postwar settlement still felt like it might hold.

Three photographs discussed in depth this session establish the threshold from different positions.

RB211-524H at full climb thrust. Photographed by Mark Charmer through the aircraft window on a flight to San Francisco on 30th December 2008. The engine nacelle fills the frame.

At the Threshold, We Part. G-BOAF, second to last Concorde on finals into Heathrow, 24 October 2003. Photographed by Mark Charmer on a Canon PowerShot S45. George MacDonald's arm and Ericsson phone in the foreground — the SMS technology that delivered Kate's message, They're here, moments earlier. The supersonic age and the digital age in the same frame. The thing that replaced Concorde in the hand of the person watching it go. The photograph: the vast dark delta wing of the aircraft filling the right two thirds of the frame against flat October blue sky. Not the nose — the wing. The engineering, not the icon. Exhibited at Hype Gallery, London, 2004. Mark's best photograph.

BA 747-400 at the gate, Dallas Fort Worth. G-BYGB, 9 January 2020, photographed by Joseph Simpson on an iPhone X. Two months before British Airways unexpectedly withdrew its entire 747 fleet as the pandemic took hold. Five people in the gate seating — none of them looking at the aircraft behind them. The 747 enormous against the Texas night, unwitnessed by the people closest to it. Use Sky visible in the terminal signage, cropped by the frame edge to those two words alone.

Seventeen years separate the Concorde and 747 photographs. Both shot through glass. Both caught within months of the final retirement. Both made by people who knew what they were looking at.

Two working corrections established the practice's approach to photograph analysis in this session.

On the RB211 image, Kurt/ described the photograph as a moment of contemplation at cruising altitude. Mark corrected this precisely: the photograph is early in the climb, the engines at full power, the aircraft still hauling itself upward. The commitment made, the outcome not yet certain. A completely different moment — the productive fragility of the climb, not the settled ease of cruise. Kurt/ had reached for a comfortable narrative about aviation and wonder rather than reading what the image actually showed.

On the G-BOAF image, Kurt/ named the nose and forward fuselage. The photograph shows the wing.

Both corrections follow the same pattern: a strong prior association with the subject overriding what is geometrically present in the frame. The icon displacing the image. The principle extracted: slow down on photographs. Describe what is present before reaching for what is known. Work from the edges inward rather than from the icon outward. Earn the right to name the thing by first accounting for what is actually there.

This applies with particular force to the CFH archive work — photographs carrying enormous personal and historical weight, where the temptation is always to reach for the meaning before earning it through the looking. The Fingerspitzengefühl made explicit as a working method.

Hi-Rez is confirmed as an effective AI photograph discussion tool in the sighted state. The screengrab delivers image, title, caption, EXIF, and URL simultaneously — the permalink visible in the copy field of every Hi-Rez panel, addressable by any future instance. A genuinely different quality of conversation than description alone. The image upload limit reached during this session is the natural boundary for a Reina/Decamp session. Each new session opens fresh and sighted.

Wolfgang Tillmans' Concorde — the serial undramatic documentation of the aircraft over Vauxhall as part of the ordinary weather of a London life. Tillmans documents the habit. Mark's G-BOAF photograph catches the ending of the habit. The two things belong together.

Paola Antonelli — Senior Curator at MoMA, met by Mark in New York in 2003 during his Central St Martins MA Design Studies. She spoke to the group about Space:1999. She wanted to put a 747 in MoMA. Held as a future peer in the practice's orbit. The work builds toward that conversation.

The quality of early digital cameras — the Canon PowerShot S45 generation — flagged for further exploration. Images from that era hold up. The instrument of the threshold moment still works.

Stuart begins today as Mark's gardening assistant. He works allotments in Blacon, Chester — the city where Neil Charmer was born.