The Last Word has its roots in a 2019/2020 project, funded by Arts Council England under their Developing Your Creative Practice stream. The funding stream is unusual in that it allows creative practitioners from across the arts to look outwards and forge powerful new connections or ways of working across the arts and outside of it too. The funding allows for explorative work, and provides space to experiment, with less emphasis on the final product per se. Although I am a novelist, I have gained enormous insight and benefit from working collaboratively with others.

Testing the soundscape in the exhibition space, Waterbeach Barracks, September 2023.

From the outset, I wanted this project to be from and for the community in which I live.

The project reflects on the development of a new town at Waterbeach Barracks. RAF Waterbeach dates back to 1940 and was then under the control of RAF bomber command. In 1966 the site was transferred to Royal Engineers. Urban & Civic became development partners of the site in 2014.

It’s true to say that the development of the Barracks’ site into a new town has hung over the community for many years. The site seemed moth-balled, tantalisingly suggestive of a rewilding project. It wasn’t until 2019 that I really became aware that that was about to change. Community consultation efforts by Urban & Civic kicked into gear; it was increasingly clear that housing development work might soon begin.

I felt a pressing need to respond, to think about how the site might be documented – and, crucially, exploring the role of the arts within that. Part of this involved thinking about place, what place means to people, and as a way to form a bridge between what was and what will be: between the village and the New Town, using this to inform the somewhat dry planning process and feed into ideas of placemaking.

I applied for and was awarded funding from ACE. Urban and Civic also provided support for the project. Richard Youell, a Waterbeach resident and sound recordist, and I started recording local memories in the summer of 2019. We recorded a dawn chorus on the old golf course, which had become a wild site by this point. With Urban & Civic’s facilitation, we visited master planners for the New Town in London and the Midlands. I spoke to local council officials to understand the challenges involved in establishing new communities from scratch, including at Cambourne.

And then 2020 rolled around and the pandemic hit. The project was brought to a swift halt and then ended. I thought that was it, but the prolonged disruption provided a chance to turn the idea in my mind and to think about what else might come from it. An idea began to form of playing the memories we had recorded within various empty Barracks’ buildings and then to re-record them again. Each building, which has its own acoustic, would give shape to the sound. I saw this as a way to document the site, creating a kind of acoustic map.

Richard and I returned to the Barracks last year to work in Building 135, a WWII aircraft hangar that once housed Lancaster bombers. You will see images of the hangar in the accompanying images to the soundscape.

Again, the idea was to play the memories in the hangar and to re-record them in situ. We found the hangar and the many ante-rooms that came off it an incredibly rich site and decided to confine our work to that building. The main hangar area creaked and shivered in the slightest wind. A single coo of a wood pigeon sounded eerily, carrying the length of the hangar and lasting for many seconds.

What is a place without memory or imagination? As I stood there, I realised how important the two are and how quickly a place passes before us, even somewhere as seemingly monolithic and utilitarian as an aircraft hangar.

It seemed fitting to play the memories to the building. For the building to be given chance to ‘hear’ them. For it to be the audience. There were dramatic tonal shifts as we moved from room to room and it was clear how the building gave shape to the end sound. For a building about to be demolished, it felt apt for the final sound to be shaped by it; for the building to have, in effect, the last word.

The sound recording interweaves the 2019 recordings with the subsequent work in building 135 in the summer of 2022. It also includes flight report extracts from bombing raids from Waterbeach airfield during WW II.

I want to thank ACE and Urban & Civic for their generous support. My thanks go to Richard Youell for his time over several days and his work undertaking the sound recording. Saskia Glasfurd-Brown composed the finished soundscape. Thanks to Theo Gayer Anderson and to Gideon Pain and everyone at Summer at the Beach. Their encouragement and kindness have been key to me realising this during a somewhat stressful time in my life. Thanks to everyone kind enough to contribute a memory.

The images that accompany the soundscape document the barracks site over the course of the project. They scroll automatically and will loop as the soundscape plays in the background. The soundscape lasts for approx 11 minutes. I recommend listening with earphones/headset.

Some final thoughts: I learned from this project that what is demolished can be rebuilt; that a building has a voice; that it is possible for a building to be heard.

All images copyright of Guinevere Glasfurd; all black and white images, copyright Richard Youell, 2023.