In 2019, I got a call from my friend Ian Paine to ask if I wanted to co-direct a documentary with him about South Gare, a man-made peninsula in Teesside dating back to the Victorian era.
It was a pretty easy yes for me. I'd loved the strange post-industrial landscape of South Gare ever since I went there as a child, the wind whipping across the sand dunes, the huge ships passing in and out of the port. There are rocks there which were once bags of cement thrown into the sea; the fabric has long rotted away but its folds and textures are still visible in the stone. Any idea of Victorian engineering being a precision art cannot survive contact with South Gare. The founding industrialists of Teesside realised the mouth of the Tees was the wrong shape for cargo, so they just threw concrete in the river until it worked. And it did work.
What I didn't know was that I was far from the only person who had personal connections to South Gare. We met windsurfers who found the reshaped river was accidentally perfect for their chosen sport, birdwatchers who saw rare migratory birds stop off on the Gare for a rest as they crossed the North Sea, scuba divers uncovering the many World War I wrecks on the sea bed. There were also those who simply loved the place: a man in a camper van who casually told us a heartbreaking, bittersweet story of loss, a man who gave us a lifetime worth of memories while sprawled out on a couch like a Roman emperor.
You can watch the finished documentary, Where the Stone Dropped, here - there are plans to release it on other platforms soon.