Wasteland Circus

As part of our Artcity programme this year, Dan Thompson is working with B arts on a history of the company from our beginnings to the present day. The company was founded in 1985 and in this post Dan invites us to reflect on the context in which the company was founded. - Susan Clarke

Author - Dan Thompson, July 2021

Charles Keeping is largely forgotten now, but between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, he was one of the UK’s most prominent children’s authors. He won two Kate Greenaway Medals, his work was exhibited around the world, and his drawings were added to the V&A collection.

Keeping was born and grew up in Lambeth, in a terraced house that housed three generations. He described his life as ‘comfortably Working Class’. He served with the Royal Navy during the Second World War, but returned quite broken, with a severe depression that led to him being institutionalised. He worked reading gas meters, while studying art in the evenings. Back then, being an illustrator was a sound commercial career: and after studying he worked for newspapers, Punch magazine, and for a range of commercial clients, before being asked to illustrate a work of historic fiction by children’s author Rosemary Sutcliff. His approach was radical, with double-page spreads and smaller illustrations in the margins. His style was loose lines and ragged edges, but historically and technically precise.

In the 1960s, printing technology evolved and Keeping developed a bold, full-colour style as he started to write his own picture books. Drawing on his own childhood, and using the grittier parts of a London still scattered with bomb sites and ruined buildings from the Second World War as a backdrop, he created a tough, urban, and ultimately believable world.

Railway Passage (1974) tells the story of the residents of a terraced street, drawn brick-by-brick in monochrome brown ink. We meet the elderly residents, one-by-one, in their drab homes. With apologies for the spoiler - they win the football pools, and the street becomes a technicolour wonderland for the children who live there.

Richard (1973) tells the story of a real horse in the service of the Metropolitan Police, and shows their stables on the first floor of Great Scotland Yard. About five years ago, I was passing the building and got talking to a Police Officer. He took me inside, showed me the stables (still in use) and told me that Richard had been retired to the country, and died only a few years before my visit. The officer wasn’t surprised by my visit: a few middle-aged people drop in each year, it seems.

But the Charles Keeping book that has had the most influence on me, and which I’d say is one of the key texts in understanding my practice as an artist, is Wasteground Circus (1975).

Two boys play on a city wasteground that ‘had arisen when the old houses, factories and warehouses in the centre of the city were pulled down’. Scott and Wayne play football on the ground behind a fragment of old brick wall and a rough wooden fence. One day, they find the site full of lorries and wagons, and watch over the fence as two big tops are erected. They buy tickets, and find a crowd of people inside who are ‘not at all how they had imagined circus people’. There are more than a dozen people in Keeping’s illustration, looking much like the crowd you might find at B arts, with turned-up jeans and tattoos, boots, roughly hipster haircuts.

By the time they take their seats, the cast are transformed into clowns and acrobats, trapeze artists and a lion tamer (it was, after all, 1975), dancing girls. At the end of the book, the tents and the circus crew have gone, and the monochromatic wasteland with its backdrop of gasholders and chimneys has returned.

‘The wasteground has been left deserted, to become once again a bleak playground. But only for Wayne.

It will never be the same again for Scott. He will remember for ever the time the circus came to the town and will always see the wasteground as a place where anything can happen.’ On the final page, Wayne’s wasteground is brown - while Scott’s is a vibrant magenta.

It’s an incredibly simple book, with the whole story just a couple of hundred words long. But that idea, that a space, once transformed, can forever hold the magic of the possibility of what might happen, has come to underpin my work. Momentary things can change a place permanently, for the people who witnessed them.

And the more I explore the history of B arts, and their near-forty years of practice, the more I think - ‘they’re the wasteground circus’. Time and again, for an hour or a few days or a week or a month, they bring magic and wonder and chaos and fun to the wastegrounds of a post-industrial Stoke, to the streets of a war-scarred Mostar, using lanterns and bread and music and costume as they scatter magic from Newcastle-under-Lyme to New Zealand.

B arts are the jugglers and the acrobats, the unicyclist and the clowns, merry pranksters transforming places with splashes of vibrant cyan, yellow, magenta thrown up against the smoke-blackened key-coloured brick wall. They make unforgettable things that leave you seeing the world in a different way. Too often the debate about transforming places is driven by the idea of big, physical projects, regeneration driven by physical change, but it’s time we recognised that the temporary has an equal magic and power. Charles Keeping is largely forgotten now, but between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, he was one of the UK’s most prominent children’s authors. He won two Kate Greenaway Medals, his work was exhibited around the world, and his drawings were added to the V&A collection.

Dan Thompson

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