Poems about bladderwrack, kelp, oysters, stones and coal dust found on a beach, and a skip full of seaweed have been published after a creative workshops project to raise awareness about coastal habitats in the north-east. 

Local writing and dance groups at the Tute, a community arts charity in the former miners welfare institute in the Northumberland village of Cambois, and pupils from Cambois primary school, took part in workshops to find out how seagrass meadows, kelp forests and oyster reefs can help protect the coastline.  

The Tute’s Alex Oates says in The Book of Kelp that the Tute’s creative writing group, which meets every other Wednesday evening, were led by poet Linda France in sessions that were “inspiring, moving, and at times quietly transformative”. Lauren Matthews’ poem ‘Seagrass’ concludes: “One truth persists through all this change: / As above, so below.”  

Linda France contributes two poems in The Book of Kelp. One of them, ‘Shrine’, tells of a box of beachcombings, and concludes: “May we all / be washed clean by the tides and kept safe / from harm by the light of the moon.” She also created ‘A Kelphabet’, an A-Z for the project of what lies beneath the waves. 

Artist Laurie Powell worked with a class at Cambois primary school to press and dry kelp that had been gathered after storms, ands to create pictures with the dried seaweed, while Linda France prompted pupils to produce short poems like riddles around the theme ‘What am I’, inspired by the beach that is only a few metres from the school. The poems included Joeseph’s “Swirling with energy, / a dragon lifting his fin. / Already broken, gone”, and Nicole’s “If it wasn’t what it is / it would be coal. / Touch it and it’s hard. / Smell it and it’s like honey/ on fire. I like visiting/ where it lives.”  

The Book of Kelp includes pictures of the Tute’s dance troupe creating with their leader Esther Huss a new piece, The Shore is our Oyster, which was filmed. The booklet has been produced as part of the Stronger Shores project, led by South Tyneside council, and covering the north-east coastline from Lindisfarne in Northumberland to Skinningrove, between Saltburn and Staithes in North Yorkshire. The project is funded by Defra as part of a flood and coastal innovation programme managed by the Environment Agency.   

There has been another Stronger Shores project further up the Northumberland coast at Amble, involving the town’s Dovecote Street Arts centre, on the importance of seagrass. A booklet of artwork and poetry titled The North Side was developed with Amble Writers Group. Amble is one of only a few places in the north-east where you find seagrass, which helps to retain sediment that slows coastal erosion, provides a habitat for marine life, and is also effective at carbon capture.  

The coast at Cambois Photograph: Greg Freeman