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Towner commissioned artist and writer Alinah Azadeh to imagine and describe what visiting Black Robin Farm might be like in the future.

Esther Collins, Head of Learning visited the site with Alinah on a chilly autumn day in 2023. She says:

"It was as it is now - before any building works have taken place. That afternoon the buildings were empty, but felt recently occupied. There was carpet on the ceiling in the eaves of the barn – it was obviously used by a band as a practice room. There were hundreds of snails hibernating in the holes of a ceramic drain on the back wall of the milking parlour. There was a tree which had grown bent over into the shape of the absent wind. We traced the routes through the site of future visitors, and wondered how these spaces will be used in years to come."

Alinah has written this short fiction from the point of view of a child visiting Black Robin Farm in years to come.

I am still quite young and she isn’t yet too old for journeys like this, like her mother, so we can do this she says, we have the energy. As always, she makes it all an adventure, like walking through a poem. She tells me it will be like crossing an invisible bridge, not only from town to countryside, but into another world.

Her proof is that we begin at a PARADISE DRIVE street sign at the far end of town. My small, bright green trainers lead us up the red brick steps, the bumps along the flint walls graze my fingertips, my right hand in hers. We stop to sniff the lichen in between the flints, they look like fluorescent paint splodges but smell woody, or fishy in parts. Then we follow the fingerposts over the shaved carpet of the golf course, and already it feels like a treasure hunt.

Steeper and steeper we climb, through the shredded light shadows back into the woods, or what we come to call The Time Tunnel, which then blows us out into the free, open space of the Downs. Or the Ups and Downs as they soon become – we both love renaming things, making them our own. Once up there, we face the sharp, fresh wind, pass spiky gorse all dotted bright yellow, which smells just like coconut now the weather is warmer. A few sheep stare hard at us and her favourite birds, the skylarks, sing their electronic symphony, as she calls it. As we head up towards Beachy Head road and over towards The Farm, she tells me you don’t hear the roar of motorbikes and cars as much nowadays, in what she calls these fading years of fossil fuels, it’s more the hum of electric buses and hydrogen-powered cars, alongside the cyclists, walkers, hikers and wanderers like us.

The path to The Farm sweeps us gently downhill, past the backward-leaning trees she says are like our great-grandparents, hawthorns with the deepest roots and wisdom of all that lives on the Downs. Except perhaps for the mushrooms, the mycelium networks underneath them, she says. These trees quietly listen to all who pass. We imagine one of them asking us what we are up to. We are cultural pilgrims she says. I like those words, she used them before when we went to the Towner for the first time. We are deep into our own adventure now, our special time.

Streams of people ahead in the same direction now, like bobbing strings of coloured flags set against the olive green and brightening blue sky. It’s hard to imagine there is any other life on the Downs around The Farm once you sink down into its belly. She used to visit this place as a child, and we agree it still looks much like a working farm from the outside; the timber, the flint walls, the ridged metal rooves of a family of buildings are all at different heights and widths. The gulls, wood pigeons, crows, robins dotted still overseeing it all, she says, but it feels so very different, who knows what we will find! She says it’s a bit like when you visit a relative you haven’t seen for a really long time, one who was a child last time you met, and now they’re a teenager. You have to adjust your lenses.

The doorway to the welcome place is so high and wide I feel like a tiny bird and I hop through, making her and the people at the desks laugh. At the same time we both spot a huge, old wooden wheel in the roof, and I long to fly up to land on it, and from there take in all that is happening below.

Across an enormous courtyard whose surface bounces like springy turf beneath my feet, we wander into a long white room with wooden slatted ceilings. There are open cubicles on each side, slotted into the walls like giant black piano keys – where the cows had been milked and were now for milking creativity, she says, smiling. You see much less of cows these days, people are consuming less milk and meat and she says that’s what is needed to help us cool everything down. But I do miss them. She points upwards, with that sad smile, to a few names painted on the walls: Betty the Third, Sandra 3rd, Ruby and Lucy.

Open boxes and trolleys offer us paint, charcoal, paper, and a library of foraged treasures; chalk pieces, fossilised leaves, tiny snail and animal skeletons, slivers of fleece and hay, hag stones and gnarled twigs, shredded blue rope, orange plastic netting, polystyrene pieces seaworn into pebbles, and other finds from beach cleans. All for our creating, dreaming, storytelling, imagining, she says. We sit and make a collage together, and make up stories about it as we do, I start to feel more a part of this place, with this first, small mark here.

Next we chase the aroma of herbs – thyme and sage, she thinks – through a kitchen four times the size of ours, full of younger children with bright green aprons and mixing bowls in hand, then out to a table loaded up with small seed packets. We are offered one to plant in the growing gardens. Plunging fingers into the chocolate crumble of cool moist soil, we sow them in rows alongside the green and magenta of chard and spinach, the orange, yellow and purple of rainbow carrots peeking through in the surrounding beds. Another mark together.

They are talking about a crop they have planted which is also part of an artwork. It was once grown and used to make ship sails, rope and clothes, oil and even a kind of concrete, and it can bring new, enriched life back to the soil, just one hectare of hemp keeps twice the carbon of a whole forest in the ground! they say as they show us its jagged leaves.

Now there is a young person who is a botanist, explaining that because greater care is being taken of the chalk grassland in this part of the Downs with The Farm open, many more flowers can thrive in this tiny rainforest again; the violet-blue of chicory and Round-Headed Rampion, the crimson of Red Clover, the purple and deep yellow of Clustered Bellflower. And the Bee Orchids, if you are lucky you will find one! I have hardly ever seen a real bee but apparently they do still exist and they love this flower.

There is a lot of talk about energy and a woman in blue tells a story about how just as wax candles were of high value as an energy source in the smuggler’s times around this farm, gas and oil will become part of our history too. Wind, sun, steam, waves, underground heat can mainly power the world, as well as ways we cannot yet imagine - meteor dust or fungi even, she says - because humans are learning about less harmful ways of creating energy from what she calls the more-than-human world. 

I like the idea of learning from the blue butterflies, grasshoppers, crickets, voles, owls, foxes and badgers they say we are seeing more of too, and of the bison cubs coming back to the Downs! Wolves are even being talked about, but the locals won’t go for that, she says. I feel a thrill because I love wolves, at least in our storybooks. But yes, the animal population is changing, like everything around us – and we are changing with it. This has always been an island of migrants, so we all know change in our DNA. A lot of friends in our community who made it over here but still carry sadness and scars from their leaving and losses could come and feel welcome and safe up here, because nature doesn’t judge humans, she says, and art also helps you imagine being free, invites you to belong.

This place is full of story she says. Back inside, at lunch, even the salt inside the pebbles on the café tables seem to have a story, we learn, from an artist who is living here for a while in one of the studios. This salt is something to do with the salt marshes further along at Cuckmere, which have now taken over that valley. And changes are happening in the sea too. He talks about oyster beds and crops that are incredible for the sea’s health, like kelp and seagrass, being replanted more now, after many years of loss and pollution. He also says that because polluting the sea is finally, finally being made properly criminal, and now has rights like humans do, soon we will all be able to swim in it safely again whenever we like. This makes us both smile because just staring at it from the beach, especially when you live quite nearby, really isn’t enough.

Afterwards we explore a gallery that is just like being inside a film and she holds my hand tight – vivid marine blues and golds, pinks and emeralds all around us, flashes of an island archipelago, rows of wooden houses painted in a spectrum of bright colours right on the edge of the sea, sinking, fading. We listen to the story of the artist who had to move here with their entire family from one of the islands now sunk deep into the Pacific Ocean. It is their only record of the lands they grew up in. We look at each other, our secret look, and she says, well, you can imagine, we are not so far from big changes ourselves along our own coastline, with the chalk falling into the warming, rising seas. Places she loves, like Belle Tout Lighthouse, the cottages and café along at Birling Gap she had known as a child, will soon be gone, and even parts of our own town are at risk of meeting the water because humans cannot defend against the sea forever. The Seven Sisters cliffs will be ten sisters by the time you are an adult she says, and like them we are all learning to move with the changes. She has her hand on my back now, reassuring.

As we wander on, I ask so her many questions, as I always do, because she has seen the wider world and I haven’t yet – as she wasn’t born here and I was. She tells me stories of milennia ago, before the splitting of this island from the mainland, and the arrival of people and animals from Africa, Asia – like our family – and Europe. Imagined stories from before the birth of towns and cities along this coast. She says people have always gathered up here on the Downs for reasons other than survival.

They communed, she said because their bodies knew how to be in relationship to the earth, and to treat it like family. And they have never stopped, but at one point the land was taken into just a few wealthy hands and now it is being reclaimed again, in different ways. She said The Farm is a return to what humans and the land needs now - joy, rest, renewal, culture-making, celebrating life, growing and cooking up fresh ideas and futures. Especially after the long sadness of the pandemics, and wars, like the one her own love died in.

We both agree The Farm feels like a welcome for everyone. We can bring more of our community on our time travel journey up here, I say. There are after all people with ties from across the world because we count 11 different languages on this trip alone. We have three between us and it’s always been a kind of game, the counting. She says that many people who live close-by have found it hard to get here out of town or are nervous because they don’t know what is in store or if it’s their kind of thing or if they even belong up here on the Downs. And back at Towner, that gallery has all kinds of clues to the treasures that are up here so there is a thread they can follow too.  

As sunset begins to glow burnt orange along the far edges of the hills and the chalk is turning golden, we start heading back home. The lights around The Farm are dimming behind us, so the dark skies up here can remain dark and the stars can still be seen.

And as I open my arms out to the fading horizon, she is talking about how humans are endlessly creative and describing how musicians and scientists are creating sounds together here that speed up the growth of the mycelium, the tiny mushroom networks underground which support everything living, and are turning old plastics into fertile soil! And it’s at that moment there is a flash in my head, and I realise that when I am older I really want to be a cross between an artist, a scientist and an ecologist. But there isn’t a word for that yet so we spend the journey home trying to make one up..

She seems so happy, she is bouncing like I do in my green trainers all the way to the bus stop, and she declares ahh.. when you are in the company of the sea, sky, earth, trees and animals, you are never alone and that up here is very different from being in town in that way and places like The Farm bring hope. Hope in the dark she calls it, after a book she likes.

This is because all the seeds, care and experiences we are planting now will bear fruits whose form we just cannot yet imagine, she says. And that uncertainty is part of living fully now. She says we can show our future ancestors that we found ways to live more simply, more closely and creatively with each other and with nature, as nature, again. And that this would be more, much more than enough. 




©Alinah Azadeh 2024

https://www.alinahazadeh.com/