I Know Where I’m Going: A Guide to Morecambe & Heysham
Michael Bracewell and Linder (2003)
I Know Where I’m Going is a collaborative book by writer Michael Bracewell and artist Linder. It functions as a gazetteer for the Heysham and Morecambe coast, once described on a Victorian postcard as ‘The Naples of the North’. Whilst investigating and illustrating how a landscape can recollect its own past with a particular regional intensity, this book is also concerned with how our experience of the future can be discovered through history.
A key section in the book looks at the then semi-derelict Midland Hotel, built overlooking Morecambe Bay and considered to be one of the most important Art Deco buildings in Britain. Constructed in 1933, the ocean-liner shape of Oliver Hill’s breathtaking designs still retain their sense of sleek modernity − its exterior walls were treated with a mixture of carborundum powder and crushed blue glass which was electrically polished so the whiteness of the building literally glittered in the sun. Then there were the guests: Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, the Earl of Derby and Coco Chanel who, as legend has it, flew up from Cap d’Antibes landing her flying boat on Morecambe Bay. I Know Where I’m Going delivers an invaluable and visually demanding insight into the nature of regional studies from two celebrated creative practitioners.
