Red and White Sticks in Princesshay
On the day before the Princesshay shopping centre in the middle of Exeter was closed for demolition, I placed two straight lines of red and white striped, knobbled and bent sticks in the flower beds around the Blue Boy statue.
As the demolitions around the statue and flower bed began the sticks remained and I would visit them, visible through fencing, whenever I passed. Then one day, a week or so after demolition began, they were gone. Then a week later they were back again – carefully returned to the two straight lines. And then finally, a few days after, they went for good. A couple of weeks after their final disappearance I was gazing through the fencing at the work, when one of the site’s security guards passed by. I asked him, quizzically, about the red and white sticks. “O, them,” he said, “We never did work out what they were.”
The local paper published a bird’s eye view of the demolitions, but the print quality in the newspaper was too poor for me to tell if they had captured the sticks or not. So I purchased a print copy from the newspaper’s offices. No sticks, but in their place was a huge red and white striped tube, perhaps 10 metres long and as broad as the trunk of an old oak tree, some sort of pipe.
