'Eating Gull Since Friday': Estuary Grotesque, Seaside Noir

This essay identifies a contemporary form, “estuary grotesque,” which is placed in the larger context of the postmodern, the cosmopolitan, and the post-cosmopolitan. Examining the writing of representative figures such as Nicola Barker, Ian Sinclair, Jonathan Meades, David Seabrook, and Cathi Unsworth, it constructs contemporary writing about the Thames estuary in terms of a relational metropolitanism. This “London” perspective is connected to literary forms of the past —pastoral, gothic, modernist, and so on—but represents a new turn, an Othering geographic that reconvenes the “condition of England” in terms of the marshlands, industrial detritus, and social deprivation of the Thames Estuary.