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From a collection of old postcards depicting British lighthouses. My own fascination with these structures can be traced directly to these two particular examples. The Lower Light or Beach Lighthouse is positioned a couple of streets away from the nursing home where I was born. Although we never lived in Fleetwood, I grew up a few miles down the coast and we often made trips to this unusual port which 19th century entrepreneurs built from nothing in the 1830s.

The lighthouses were built in the 1840s, intended to function together as a guide to ships approaching the docks through sandbanks. To me they helped augment the town’s curious edge-of-the-world quality. Fleetwood is positioned at the end of a peninsular, surrounded by the Irish Sea on two sides with the estuary of the River Wyre on the third. The trams which travel the length of the coast have to make a loop around a block of buildings when they reach the Pharos lighthouse and head south again. A lighthouse built in the middle of a residential street seemed completely bizarre when I was a child; it still looks strange now, as though it was dropped there then forgotten. Once you’ve reached it there’s nowhere left to go. (Well, unless you take the ferry over the river….) Its modest companion is more naturally situated on the promenade nearby. This Flickr photo shows how it looks today.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hungarian water towers