Site Reports

Site Reports (2008 onwards) is a series of reports on places of military interest and importance. The title derives from the military term ‘sit-rep’ – a report on a current situation, and includes sites such as the D-Day Landing Beaches, Kill Devil Hills, Bletchley Park, RAF Spadeadam and many others. The reports differ significantly in content, information and intent, but all share an ethnographic methodology and each charts and records a process of detection work.

Site Report: Blue Danube

Isabella’s Site Report: Blue Danube was included in Ele Carpenter’s comprehensive book on Nuclear Culture in 2016. Recorded on location at RAF Barnham in Suffolk (the former Barnham Nuclear Storage Site) where Blue Danube (the first British operational nuclear weapon) was stored in the 1950s, the report documents the site before redevelopment began.

Site Report: Gold Beach

I wonder what my grandfather was thinking as he landed on this beach sometime between 0725 and midnight on 6th June 1944. His ghost haunts this project, and I sometimes ask myself if all my questioning is a convoluted attempt to get to know someone who has long been lost to me. I took this image with my feet in the sea, approximately in the position he would have come ashore.

Site Report: Otterburn Ranges

In 2010, Isabella took part in an expedition to military sites in Northumberland, led by Visiting Fellow Steve Rowell of the Centre for Land Use Interpretation. One of the sites visited was Otterburn Ranges, where Isabella made Shooting The Light Fantastic in 2008.

Site Report: Kielder

Kielder was one of the sites Isabella used in her 2009 piece Dead Reckoning, so she was very interested to have the opportunity to see Kielder Observatory from a very different perspective using LiDAR with SCANLAB.

Site Report: Gonesse

In 2011, Isabella traced the path of the 1783 first hydrogen balloon flight from the Champ de Mars in Paris to its landing place in Gonesse. So terrified were the locals of the yellow and red silk ‘balon’ –thinking it a sign of the devil – that they destroyed it with pitchforks. The site of this strange reception is now an unglamorous car park.