Air Vent
An Early October Morning in 2010 · Herne Bay Seafront, Kent
The negative was scanned on 19 October 2010, which places the exposure two or three weeks earlier — almost certainly within the first few days of the month, during a week of annual leave taken around the beginning of October. The precise date is the kind of thing that film photography does not preserve in the way that a digital file would: there is no EXIF data embedded in a strip of 120 negative, no timestamp written to a memory card. What remains is the scan date, the processing lab's turnaround, and a reasonable inference about when, within that window, a clear early-morning in Herne Bay was available.
The building this vent serves is a nondescript flat-roofed structure a few metres east of the King's Hall on the seafront, and what it actually contains is not immediately obvious from the exterior. The King's Hall itself has a documented history — built as the Pavilion in 1903-04, developed in 1913 as the King Edward VII Memorial Hall, a seafront public building of the conventional Edwardian type — but the adjacent structure to its east offers no such legibility. The rooftop vents, in fact, relate to the town’s hidden wastewater infrastructure, serving as ventilation for a sewage treatment facility built discreetly into the cliff.
This underground plant handles wastewater from the surrounding part of Herne Bay, and the vents allow foul air from the treatment process and pipework to be safely released and dispersed above ground, rather than building up in enclosed spaces. Systems like this are standard for modern wastewater treatment: odorous air is drawn off from tanks and pipe galleries, passed through filtration or odour‑control units, and then expelled via stacks or rooftop vents where it can dissipate quickly in the sea breeze.
Locating the works in the cliff beneath the seafront allowed engineers to bring sewage flows to a gravity‑fed treatment point close to the outfall, while keeping the industrial plant largely hidden from view in a popular resort town. By using a low‑rise building with a flat roof and only the vents visible, the design minimises visual impact so that most passers‑by simply register it as a service block on the promenade. This kind of discreet integration is typical of coastal towns that rely on clean bathing waters for tourism: the essential but unglamorous business of treating sewage is tucked into revetments, seawalls, and cliff faces, with the most obvious external clues being features like these vents and occasional access hatches.
Although the cliff‑side works rarely feature in guidebooks, they are part of a much larger story about how Herne Bay has modernised its coastal defences and water treatment over the last few decades. Investment in breakwaters, sea walls, flood gates and upgraded wastewater treatment has been driven both by the need to protect the town from the sea and by tighter environmental standards on what can be discharged into local waters. In that context, the modest rooftop vents beside the King’s Hall mark the surface expression of a substantial, largely invisible system that quietly helps keep the beach, the bay, and the town’s reputation clean.
The composition is the point, and it is straightforward: the vent fills the frame, centred, its outer rim touching the edges of the image. The sea appears in two narrow strips on either side, framed between the vent and the cast-iron seafront railings behind it. The Victorian ironwork of the railings — their finials just visible at the shoulders of the circle — places the industrial object in a different temporal context from the functional metalwork of the louvres. Above the vent, a cloud-scattered sky and a horizon line that runs cleanly behind the top edge of the structure. There is not much else in the image because there is not much else to include: this is a photograph of a circle, and the circle takes up most of the available space.
Fujifilm Acros 100 was my film of choice for this kind of work — not because the subject required it, but because Acros was the standard for medium format black-and-white in that period. It was a fine-grain, ISO 100 emulsion with unusually good reciprocity characteristics, meaning that its response to long exposures was predictable in a way that cheaper films were not. In more ordinary daylight conditions, as here, its qualities were equally apparent: tight grain, rich tonal gradation, a rendering of textures — the louvred metalwork, the slightly rough surface of the vent's outer ring, the concrete of the forecourt — that extracted more from the scene than a faster emulsion would have. The original negative, shot on 6×7cm film, held significantly more detail than the scan can fully represent.
Mamiya 7ii · 80mm f/4 L · f/4 · Fujifilm Acros 100
The Mamiya 7ii is a medium-format rangefinder camera that uses 120 roll film in the 6×7cm format, producing negatives roughly four times the area of a 35mm frame and considerably more than any digital sensor available at the time. It was designed for landscape and travel work, being unusually light for a medium-format camera at under a kilogram without a lens, and used leaf shutters built into each lens rather than a focal-plane shutter in the body — a design that allowed flash synchronisation at all speeds and contributed to exceptionally quiet operation. The 80mm f/4 L lens, equivalent to approximately 40mm on a full-frame 35mm camera, was considered one of the sharpest lenses available for any medium format system. The camera offered aperture priority and manual exposure; all exposure settings were made on the lens and body rather than via an electronic interface.
