" In July of 1988, I was buying some furniture polish from a Hardware shop in Attleborough and noticed a bundle of photographs and prints for sale on the counter. For five pounds I got as much as I could carry home. With more cash in hand I returned later in the day to fill the car with documents, menus, diaries, catalogues, postcards and boxes of ephemera. John Munday was, as he made clear, glad to get rid of the rest which was stored in his garage.

Eventually I found myself in the possession of those archival remains not thought fit to sell at Sotheby's, 11 March 1958. Only on retirement in 2005 could I do justice to the riches I had acquired. It transpired that no-one from the Grammercy family, a reclusive tribe at the best of times, had survived the catastrophe of bankruptcy and the phenomenally high tide in the East of 1957.

I have restored many of the documents by carefully cleaning and removing mildew. Only when deploying the imagery in some sort of a spatial sequence could I begin to approach the heart of the matter, the source of the family wealth and notoriety, the passage of their decline and the genesis of the many myths that surrounded Grammercy Park.

I have interviewed several estate residents, mostly now in their eighties, most of whom were reluctant to confirm or deny the subject matter of the photographs from the Family Albums that passed into my collection. It was not unusual for a photograph to elicit a shake of the head while a copy of the exact image was on the resident's fireplace

Until I have restored the original estate map from the fragments available, those interested must pick their way carefully through a seemingly haphazard arrangement of icons (above). Yet as I make coherent the various highways and paths, the overall shape of the landscape will allow a developing set of cross references. My aim is to set the mass of documentation (twelve piles of boxes, eight feet high) into a topographical whole into which I will embed the many generations of the Grammercys, from Aubrey's Stout Uncle Tobiat to Little Graham Grammercy, beloved by a generation of stage door johnnies."

 

Family Motto?

 

"There is Water under the Earth "