Output details

Ally Pally Prison Camp

This project draws on three different research practices (journalism, documentary film making and poetry) to produce an exploration of the experience of civilian internees during the First World War in a collage of paintings, photographs, extracts from letters and memoirs, historical endnotes and poems by the author. It resulted in a book, first presented at as a site-specific open public event at Alexandra Palace.

It asks: What happens to ordinary people when they are imprisoned without trial for an extended period? Is the structure of TV documentary effective when transformed into book form? How can poetry form an affective part of a book which uses a range of media to tell a historical story, investing personal fragments with new meaning and potentially bringing poetry to wider audiences?

The book challenges and confronts a difficult history. It uses a narrative form developed from research into publicly accessible archives, personal collections, tracing of private correspondence and contact with family members of prisoners. It is edited and structured using the methodology of television documentary production to extract poignant and memorable ‘sound bites’ and images that help to tell the chronological story of an iconic London landmark. The juxtaposition of ‘found text’ and images is designed to lend immediacy, emotional depth and weight to the variety of experience of the prisoners, from humour to despair, and the themes of camaraderie, frustration, loss, and longing.

The book builds on themes of human rights and individual freedom in the author’s TV documentaries and previous poetry collections. The poems blend the narrative and lyric tradition of Hardy, Edward Thomas and Frost, the confessional form of Olds, and the direct voice of Hugo Williams to create a fictionalised interior voice for the silenced male prisoners.