By Nige
It’s 1990, and there I am, sprawled on the sofa in my ground-floor flat on the (then rather dodgy) Rowner Estate in Hampshire. Between jobs, fresh off an incredible eight-year stint in zoology (a tale for another day!), and toying with the idea of going freelance. The only problem? I hadn’t the foggiest what my “thing” was. Ideas? Plenty. But that spark, the missing piece, was still out of reach. I felt like I knew what it was, but where to find it?
Cut to a weekday afternoon, 1pm, to be precise….I know this because I was watching Pebble Mill at One (the BBC’s answer to daytime telly back then, sort of like The One Show but with more knitwear). Enter Peter Seabrooke, the show’s resident green-fingered guru, introducing a segment about a retired chap and his fleet of garden ponds. Now then, ponds! Right up my street…. I’d been elbow-deep in them since I was knee-high to a newt.
But these weren’t just any ponds. These were raised ponds, built like miniature stone reservoirs, except the walls weren’t brick or block. They had this weirdly hypnotic, almost 3D-printed look (and bear in mind, this was years before 3D printers were a thing). I was hooked. Then…jackpot! the old boy announced he was going to show ME (yes, ME, because at this point, the telly was speaking directly to me) how he built them.
Now, I braced myself for some arcane, decades-perfected technique that would go straight over my head. But what happened next was pure genius.
The man “stole” his wife’s tights…not for a cheeky night out, mind you. No, he stuffed them with a gloopy grey sludge, a magical mix of scrunched-up newspaper, water, and cement, then laid them out like sandbags. Once the cement set? Boom. Watertight pond walls.
KERPOW! The lightbulb in my 25-year-old brain blazed. This was it,…this was the missing piece. Not the tights themselves (though kudos to Mrs Mystery Gardener for her sacrifice), but that miracle muck inside them. With a bit of tweaking, I knew this was my ticket to a new way of working.
And so began a 30-year odyssey, leading straight to Artecology via cement, creativity, and a cast of brilliant collaborators. In the early days/years (1990-2000) I honed my skills solo, crafting artificial habitats for zoos across the UK. Then came reinvention, new cement mixes, sculpting media, wildlife documentary sets, and more. Teaming up with other brilliant creatives, we formed Eccleston George, an arts collective that built anything and everything with schools…..dinosaurs, racetracks, outdoor classrooms, you name it. Communities got in on the action too, with large-scale art and landscape projects.
And all of it? Thanks to one man, his wife’s tights, and a very sticky cement recipe.
Eventually, in 2013 Artecology emerged. An arts-science mash-up tackling biodiversity loss and reconnecting people with nature through design. And it all traces back to that Pebble Mill moment.
I never caught the old boy’s name, and he’s likely long gone now. But without him? I might still be on that sofa, waiting for inspiration to strike!
So, cheers, mate, wherever you are…. You absolute legend!
Photo: I’ve still got this original 30 year old piece of ultra lightweight concrete with a 5 pence piece stuck in it (then newly issued). I stuck the coin in the wet mix to demonstrate the material’s excellent ‘grab’ capability!
We still use a material very similar to this today as a ‘bioreceptive’ surface treatment on our various ecological enhancement units.