The “Great Herring Fishery” occurred in Britain from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. This was an unprecedented period of commercial herring fishing, the likes of which has never and will never be seen again.

This project focuses on two key characters in this heritage story – that of the herring themselves, and of the working class women who gutted the fish on the dockside. In identifying areas of misrepresentation in current heritage narratives, and by providing alternative theoretical understandings of the herring industry, this project urges towards a new, contemporary unravelling of how alternative stories of industrial heritage can be discussed and circulated within our societies today.

In the salvaging of queer agency and trans-species generosity from the wreck of post-Industrial exploitation of the natural world, we can reclaim and repossess the processes of pollution and effluence that have come to define the human. This project thus hopes to demonstrate how destructive industrial heritage narratives can be provocative, bold new ways to tell the story of our own becoming.