The Isle of Wight is, by any measure, a place of disproportionate historical weight. Its coastline was fortified against Napoleonic invasion. Its downland housed some of Britain’s earliest radar installations during WW2. Its western tip hosted a secret Cold War rocket testing facility that briefly placed the Island at the frontier of the space race. Its beaches, piers, and holiday camps absorbed the social aspirations of several post-war generations.
Most of this history is not preserved. It is repurposed, absorbed, or quietly erased. The Victorian fort has become a country park. The radar masts have been removed and replaced with an information board. The holiday camp has returned to scrub. The piers now just spaces on the sand and memories of those who walked them.
Forgotten History is an ongoing fine art photography series examining these sites as they exist now: still present in some physical form, but stripped of legibility, their original function visible only through the gaps in what replaced them.
The project began as part of M.P. Osborne’s MA in Critical Creative Practice, engaging with theoretical frameworks around cultural memory, landscape, and the politics of heritage, discussing why some histories are actively preserved, and others are allowed to disappear.
These are not photographs of ruins. They are photographs of continuation. The ordinary that has grown over something extraordinary, and the tension and inconguity that produces.
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