SPONSORED SWIM OF THE STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR

On October 7th our Director, Christopher Woodward, swam The Strait of Gibraltar in order to raise funds for the Museum’s project to create the country’s first archive of garden and landscape design.  Christopher's goal was to raise £20,000 which is equivalent to £1 per metre of treacherous swimming. With the great generosity of our supporters Christopher raised (and money is still coming in) an amazing £21, 160!

The Swim - an account by the swimmer himself

We set off at midday and at just after 4pm I grabbed hold of a small chunk of Africa. I am Swimmer No. 549 since the first cross in 1929, and one of two hundred to swim in a wetsuit (it’s the second best category, but includes David Walliams and James Cracknell in 2008. See here for the full list.)   It was very hard, and several times in the last two hours of the swim I drafted in my head a letter admitting failure to our sponsors. The tide had turned, and the coast of Africa refused to come any closer.

The Strait is 14 km as the crow flies from Tarifa, the southernmost town in Spain, to Morocco. It is the busiest shipping lane in the world. But we had not realised just how much depends upon the weather. We waited for six days in Tarifa, which markets itself as “the wind surfing capital of Europe” but is also said to have the highest suicide rate in Spain, thanks to El Levante, a wind which blows from the east and drives everyone crazy. It is the windiest place that I, at least, have ever been. Palm trees toss their branches like head bangers at a 1980s rock concert, and in the narrowest alleys of the medieval centre dust seeps under doors and rattles the windows. It was hard to sleep, and we would have gone mad with the creaking and clattering – and the uncertainty – if we had not stayed at a pretty, laidback courtyard guest house called Dar Cilla.

The wind blew and blew and on the morning of Day Six I packed my bag; an Easyjet flight would leave Gibraltar that afternoon. But minutes later a call came from the Swimming Association: good weather is forecast tomorrow. And at sunrise on Friday the sea was as calm as a mill pond.

After the ten day blow a queue of seven had stacked up, including a channel swimmer from Chicago, and two young Germans. They were faster, and swam at dawn. John, Sara, and I had met on the Hellespont swim in the spring of 2010 (which raised £14,000 in sponsorship for the Museum’s collections) and we are newcomers to long distance swimming.

We could not start until the first group had finished and from the roof of Dar Cilla we watched their escort boat through binoculars; exciting, but so nerve-wracking that the notes I was making at the time are utterly illegible.

It is hard to describe a swim, as you repeat the same stroke 20,000 times, and in crawl your head is under water. The lot takes place in your head. At the beginning the sea was so flat it seemed surreal. Could it be this easy? Approaching boredom was broken by the sight of the first oil tankers. These are the largest moveable objects ever made by man but from the water look as cute as giant Lego boats. (There is no danger, as they communicate with the escort boat and change course). Dolphins or whales pop up in the Strait but none appeared, and a boat with whale-watching tourists came to photograph our pod of three.

Halfway across the boatman waved a red flag. You are going too slow. If you don’t speed up to at least 3.5kmh, it was explained, we will have to pull you out. I have only ever swum a few minutes at that tempo and two hours seemed impossible. But that was when nine months of early morning training sessions paid off; as with gardening you get back what you put in. We raced along, and buildings on the shore became distinct.

But suddenly the sea changed and the millpond became a washing machine. The tide had turned, and rough cold water swept in from the Atlantic at 6kmh. The next hour was the hardest exercise of my life. Every single stroke I struck the water and pulled as hard as I could, counting in blocks of 100. But the cliff came no closer. It seemed impossible but you continue because of pride, fear, and strength;  anger at yourself for starting too slowly; and embarrassment at failing sponsors. The escort boat was with Sara, fifty metres in front, and the dinghy was behind with John, and alone between the two and invisible in the waves I felt lonely and not a little scared. There was no glimmer at the bottom as the cliffs drop 900 metres into the sea.

Afterwards, a map shows what happens: you are being swept along the coast but making a few centimetres progress inland with each stroke. The escort boat takes a course to account for the angle: if you are tempted to point yourself towards the headland you will be swept out into the sea and miss Morocco. If you pause for breath, ditto. After a while there was a rocky, spiny headland on my left. More and more on my left. Your wetsuit and legs will be torn to pieces but you do not care, because all you want to do is to stop swimming… Finally, rocks appeared below the water, and I clutched an algae-red knobble of Africa the size of a cabbage. My watch said 4 hours 11 minutes: much quicker than I had dared to hope.

A pod of thirty dolphins followed the boat on the journey back. The relief sank in on the rooftop of Dar Cilla: we had swum to Africa, we told each other with slight disbelief, as the cliffs of Morocco burned in a miraculous sunset. No one can look at a sunset for more than ten minutes, said the German poet Rilke. Tonight he was wrong.

The Design Archive

At the core of our next phase of architectural development will be an archive dedicated to the design of gardens and landscape since the early 20th-century:  There is an archive for artists at Tate Britain, and at the V&A the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects; writers’ archives are collected by the British Library and a number of Universities. But there is no institution dedicated to collecting the records of garden design although – in contrast to buildings or paintings – the majority of gardens vanish within weeks of the creator’s death or departure, and these records will be their only trace.

The extra urgency is that many of our most influential makers of gardens are in their 70s and 80s and their records are at risk of physical decay, or going abroad.

Archives of delicate material are incredibly expensive. We will have to build a extension for storage, and inside the building a study room, and a gallery to exhibit material. If the project is to have the national reach it deserves there will have to be digital access. There will be the cost of conserving the material, and critically, there is the cost of an archivist, to make the material meaningful through cataloguing, research, and education activities.

This is a big challenge for a small Museum to take on but we think there is an overwhelming and urgent need to rescue for the future the designs and records which will enable the achievements of the great figures of our time to be understood in the future.  

We have completed an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for £3.7 million and that will be decided early 2012. Whatever the swim raises will also have a double value as it will be counted as matching funding in our application to the HLF. 

To donate online please click here. and then click the "one-off donation" tab on the page.  The Archive is now open and you can read more about it here.