The second newspaper is entitled ‘surface’, which again takes YH485’s locality as inspiration. We first discussed this idea not long after ‘periphery’ was published. After an afternoon discussing possible themes in the Monte Carlo café on Great Yarmouth’s Golden Mile, we left to walk back up the promenade. The sun shone intensely, reflecting off the surface of a recently laid white granite pavement. It was truly dazzling.

Dazzling facades and voices of amusement arcades sound out along the length of Great Yarmouth’s seafront. The pavement shocked us into realisation. What was the seafront if not one surface after another? More generally the Golden Mile is one long dazzling surface that covers some areas of worst deprivation in the country.

In Martin Pigott’s contribution on workhouses in rural Norfolk he invokes Walter Benjamin who quotes Brecht discussing Krupps iron works and A.E.G electrical engineers in one of the most notorious commentaries on the dialectic of surface appearance and reality:

“the situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the A.E.G. tells us nothing about these institutions…” (Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, 1972).

But as the dazzling pavement experience suggests, surface is also an aesthetic experience. One that, as ‘surface’ the newspaper testifies, is experienced through a complex dynamic of human sensory experience.