Joe
Pettet
Smith

“Your grandad was a rocket scientist”

“Your grandad invented radar”

... Or so my father would tell me with pride throughout my childhood. I only met the man on a few occasions, he past away before I was old enough to get to know him. He was a fairly reserved man, from what I remember. The night before moving to Brighton I was sat at the dinner table with my father. We were chatting, as we often do, over a few pints when he shared a story he hadn't told before. He began to describe these concrete structures dotted along the coastline between Brighton and Dover that my grandfather was "involved in”. He told me they were the precursor to radar, how they were used to detect enemy aircraft using sound alone, monolithic concrete dishes looking out across the channel. His father had described them on numerous occasions but he himself had never actually seen them.

The structures are referred to by numerous interchangeable terms; they are sound mirrors, acoustic mirrors and also listening outposts. The first were built midway through the First World War when massive blimps with loud engines began to fly over the channel on bombing runs. The experimental structures were built in various designs following the same basic principle of a concrete concave to amplify the sound of the engines of enemy aircraft. Positioned out of the way from the general population and close to the sea, each structure would have a ground crew listening in using early microphones, several structures spaced apart could work in tandem to plot the flight trajectory of incoming enemy aircraft, giving anti-aircraft ground forces an early warning signal to get in to position.

The project was still in its infancy when it was pulled, advancements in aircraft technology, namely smaller, faster, quieter warplanes made the structures obsolete. In Defence of Lost Causes is my response to this failed experiment, going off in search of the last remaining sound mirrors that are scattered along the coastline. Named after a book by Slavoj Zizek of the same name in which Zizek proposes and projects possible hidden meanings beneath the surface of popular culture, the photographs here remove the structures of their original function, transforming them into monuments of a lost family heritage that may or may not exist. There is no physical evidence that my grandfather was involved in aircraft defence, all I have left are these last remaining structures, dotted along the coastline.