Stephen Turner

Stephen Turner and Jo Roberts created this web-site as the primary vehicle for sharing their collective research and experience of working on Urban Fringe project. Individual records can be found on their respective pages and any parallel paths detected in … Continue reading →

On Saturday October 27 eighteen essential ingredients available to blend into Eau de Bordure were presented to the public for testing in Chatham and the results are informing the composition of a final environmental solution from new parfumiers … Continue reading →

After the Eau de Bordure essence testing last week I left for a short vacation in Dubrovnik in Croatia and it was interesting to see this carved capital on a column to the entrance of the old Rector’s Palace … Continue reading →

Faith, rescued from a fly tip and a metaphor for the waste and neglect around the edge of town, has been my muse for the duration of the Urban Fringe project. Today she visited the exhibition and felt forgiveness.

Faith approves the distillation of Golden Samphire at Crown Quay for its particularity to place.

Cypress leaves from Crown Quay were distilled to create one of eighteen environmental solutions (currently on show at the UCA Gallery in The Pentagon Centre, Chatham). With wild thyme and fennel, it forms one of six useful incantations against waste and … Continue reading →

Stephen Turner requests the pleasure of your company to test Eau de Bordure a new sense of the fringelands distilled from distinctive local flora. Many aromatic plants from the urban edges have been sampled to formulate the essence of the … Continue reading →

Faith visiting the UCA Gallery in Chatham’s Pentagon Centre to examine Stephen Turner’s installation of different flora gathered from specific peripheral locations around Swale and Medway.

Faith Adrift beside the Queen’s Stairs, Chatham Dockyard +51˚ 23′ 37.81″ +0˚ 31′ 30.87″

Both sides of Milton Creek just a few hundred metres from the waste recycling centre and a scrap metal plant, these sorely test ones Faith in a better future.

Faith, with Hope and Charity were urged to break out from the fly tipped spoil heap at Crown Quay that they shared with a bleached to blue Pointer Sister’s record sleeve. Here they are on location at the Queen’s Steps … Continue reading →

Faith went back to Motney Hill to inspect a new pile of fly tipped refuse. One hundred yards down a farm track some thoughtless fool has despoiled Motney Hill with a van load of rubbish from a home improvement. Old … Continue reading →

On a narrow path just above the high water line off the (Templar) Knight’s Road in Strood, Faith was rewarded with aromatic Sea Wormwood

Golden Samphire is one of a sequence of eighteen rubber stamps I have made for incorporation into the labels of unique floral hydrosols; the by-product from the making of essential oils for Eau de Bordure.

Death and signs of life amid the cement and fly tipped midden of Crown Quay, Sittingbourne. A perverse sort of wonderland.

Faith identifies with Rosebay Willowherb at Crown Quay. In an ongoing battle between people and nature for control of the ground, RBWH (specialised in occupation of bomb craters and other traumatically disturbed land), is ready to stand in erect and … Continue reading →

Clara Pye made over three hundred water colour studies of flora in the 1890s, mostly from close to her home at Knight Place and which are now kept at the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. They record a need to know … Continue reading →

Bowater’s water tower has been a distinctive feature of our travels around the northern edges of Sittingbourne and an important means of orientation. This last reminder of an important part of the town’s heritage was blown up on Sunday September … Continue reading →