October 06, 2006
The Circle Man
After visiting a few weeks ago, I’m more or less of the opinion that Brighton is the best city in the UK. I knew something was different as soon as I got off the train - the station was in good repair, no missing or mismatched panels in the roof, and all the supports were recently painted. The city lived up to that promise, and one of the highlights was a brief encounter with a local eccentric of the sort that only seems to exist in England.
When I was taking some pictures at the seaside, I saw this older guy digging around the pilings of the derelict West Pier. Since he looked like he was about done (he was folding up his collapsable shovel), I started up a conversation.
He thought that the spiral pictured above was the best one of the day, and described in some detail how he went about creating one of the other circular designs (at left). It sounded very free-form, starting out with a triangle, then rounding it out to resemble the rotor of a Wankel engine, and adding a large rounded pentagon around the outside to finish it off with a sort of symmetry.
We had an interesting talk about the aesthetic and engineering qualities of various shapes, settling a disagreement over whether a spiral was better than a triangle by noting that the triangular bracing of the West Pier didn’t seem to be working all that well at present.
He didn’t want to have a photo taken (which I thought was too bad - he was really animated, and his face had some real character), or take a note of his name. He’s apparently been doing this for years, as a sort of hobby (Google knows of at least one article about him from 2002). He seems to prefer (and perhaps is entertained) by the fact that noone really knows who he is or why he makes his circles.
The fellow with the metal detector who came over to talk to me after my circle conversation was over seemed pretty curious to know if I’d been told any secrets. When I told him I thought the circles were just for fun, he rather disbelievingly said “well, it takes all sorts, doesn’t it?” as if wandering around the Brighton seafront with a metal detector wasn’t a little odd in itself.
Posted by matt at October 6, 2006 02:22 AM