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Paul Hurlow
Living in South Wales I have used photography to document the area for around twenty years. Primarily an enthusiastic amateur landscape photographer I am particularly influenced by the New Topographics movement.
Starting a new project can be difficult; very often enthusiastic ideas and concepts fail to make decent images. The photographs shown here will hopefully evolve into a new and much larger project.
As a photographer who is interested in the human-altered landscape I started looking more closely at what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim former industrialised areas (in South Wales heavy industry has faded and replaced by shopping malls, enterprise zones and parkland). One such area of parkland and the location for these pictures is a place on the South Wales coast called Pembrey.
Pembrey Country Park was once a Royal Ordnance Factory. Sand dunes and artificial mounds were used as camouflage and protection for underground bunkers. It manufactured munitions for two world wars with production reaching its peak in 1942. The factory was closed in 1965 and the transformation of the area into parkland began in 1970.
Many of the buildings, bunkers and tunnels remain and a few are photographed here.
