Dawn Hart participated in the Heathrow Airport Residency in September 2018. We met up with her over coffee in the Café Barcelona in Streatham, where talked about her recent residency in Oval tube station, her MA studies, and beekeeping.

You’re no stranger to doing residencies in public places. In fact you recently completed a residency at Oval tube station. What was that experience like?

I finished that residency at the end of April, and it happened then because its timing was dictated by my university term. I’m studying an MA at the University of Brighton. The reason I chose Brighton is that they have a module called “Communities”, as part of which you have to negotiate a residency. I’m interested in art and writing being in public places rather than isolated and only for the elite. A lot of people did their residency in institutions like care homes and so on – but I wanted to be in a much more public and much less controlled environment.

When I was there I dropped in at random times, on different days of the week and at different times of day. I sat on a row of metal chairs at the top of the escalators, next to the book swap. I started observing the stream of people as they came through, and found that at different times of day it was easier than others. To begin with I felt quite overwhelmed by it. And then I sent an email Alain de Botton (I was aware of his residency in Heathrow) and asked him how he set out noticing? Did you have preconceived things that that he looked for, or did he set out with a completely open mind? He said to start with a pretty blank sheet, and that after a while you would start to notice things like shoes. Then you would start to notice more shoes. Or you’d start to notice faces.

As well as noticing people, what else did you do while you were there?

The other thing I had to do as part of my course was to generate some writing in place. I came up with the idea of a return ticket. I got that designed and printed up, and then I asked people (if I could get them to stop) to fill it out with their answer to the question “If you could return to any tube station at any point in the past, where would you go and why?” It was a very quick way to engage people, and what I got from it were these beautiful little stories of love. They were just so lovely. I didn’t quite expect it. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not that. It completely humanised the experience of the tube. Beneath the machines and rapidness and the people with their headphones in there are all these really significant interactions going on.

Do any particular stories from the ones you collected come to mind?

There were quite a few that were along the lines of “at this tube station I met someone on a first date who then became my partner”. There was one which was lovely: it was Liverpool Street station. A woman said that she and her husband had an agreement that, should there be any major disaster or apocalypse, they were going to get themselves to Liverpool Street station, because her favourite colour was red and his was yellow and that was where those two colours met on the tube map.

My favourite one was a French woman. She said, “Does it have to be a London tube station?” I hadn’t really thought about that, but I told her it could be anywhere. She took a ticket, but warned me it was a sad story. In the end she wrote about a station on the Paris Metro; it was where she took her child as a newborn baby to show to her father. “That sounds like a happy moment,” I said, “but you said it was a sad story.” And she told me her father had died a few years ago. Of course I said I was sorry to hear that. She went on to get a train, but before she passed the ticket barrier she turned and came back, and said to me that ever since her father died she had only ever thought of him sadly. “You’ve just reminded me of a happy memory,” she said. It was a really lovely moment, just to experience that change of perspective.

How did the people you spoke to tend to react?

Virtually all positive, although there was one guy – he was older, wearing a battered tweed jacket. He looked as if he’d been wealthier in the past than he was now. I went over and asked if it was okay to speak for a minute. He peered at me over his glasses and I explained what I was doing. I showed him one of the tickets and he took it and looked it over, before handing it back to me. He said in a very dismissive tone, “No I don’t think so. You might be better off asking a sixteen year old.” And then he went back to the nearby book swap, took three books, and didn’t leave any!

The next person who came by was a young woman of about sixteen. Of course I went to speak to her and she was really chatty and lovely. Apart from that one man everyone – all ages, all nationalities, even people who didn’t speak much English – really engaged with it and tried to write as best they could. Under the quite harsh exterior of London there is a real humanity.

What’s your experience of the Creative Writing MA at Brighton been so far?

I love it. I’m about to start my third year and I’m already getting anticipatory grief about it ending. I did my degree in English in 1984, and I’ve done other bits and pieces of study, but nothing so substantial – life kind of took over. My husband died, I had my son and so on and so forth, and so starting the MA felt like going back to where I should have been several decades before. So I had a lot of emotional attachment to that… but also some trepidation about whether everyone else was going to be amazing and whether I was going to fit in.

Is there anything about Brighton as a place that plays into the character of the MA course?

Brighton is a very community-focussed city. One of the things that attracted me was that they say that as long as you finish within six years that’s okay. Which is great, as I work freelance and need to keep work coming in. A lot of younger people set out to finish it within one year, but end up doing it over two or three. It’s very open. The course leader did say at the start that whatever your plans for the course, life happens. And if life happens, they said, come and talk to us and we’ll work something out. I do like that linkage between life and writing, and one not being totally isolated from the other.

One thing with living in London and commuting to Brighton is that I miss out on a lot of the community stuff. The slams and the open mics and the meetings in pubs. I do miss that kind of stuff, and it is frustrating.

You’re also a beekeeper?

I am. In fact I did a workshop at Heathrow about beekeeping. There’s a lot of interesting metaphors surrounding it in the way that bees interact and in the hive and in the way that they operate as a whole ecosystem. They will die for the benefit of the colony. And when it comes to noticing, for example, they tune into the colour blue and don’t see a lot of other colours. Which is why a lot of flowers, it’s thought, have these veins of blue leading in to the stamens. Of course nobody knows which came first, chicken or egg, whether flowers developed that way because of the bees, or the bees evolved that way because of flowers.

Do you keep them in London?

I did have some in my garden in Tooting, but some people were saying they couldn’t come around to my house because of them (their choice, I suppose). Anyway, now I have them at Trinity Hospice. They’ve got an apiary there, and it’s a really lovely space. There’s a pond, and two other guys keep bees nearby, so we can help each other out if need be. And they let me use the sluice room to extract honey, which is a really hot sticky job that nonetheless has to be done in a closed room in late summer. You take the frame out of the hive and there’s a cap on the honey, which you slice off with a hot knife, and then you have to drip it into the extractor. The first year I did it in my kitchen. One of the things I learned was that if you get honey on a surface wiping it with a damp cloth you’re just dispersing it over a wider surface! Whereas in the sluice room you can just hose it all away. When I did it in my kitchen it lingered around for weeks – the cat was treading in it and everything.

Anyway when we’ve extracted the honey we give some of it back to the hospice and they auction it at their charity balls. They also give us tiny little jars to fill and they give them to their patients. And of course our bees are pollinating their gardens and we’re getting pollen, so it feels like a real virtuous circle, a real positive process.

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Dawn Hart lives in south London and writes both poetry and prose. Her fascination with liminal spaces led her to be writer in residence at Oval Tube station in spring 2018. She is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Brighton. She was runner up in Brighton and Hove’s Art Council’s poetry competition in 2017. Some of her poetry is currently on display at Hot Yoga Wimbledon where her poetry is married with the paintings of Bahar Boostani in an exhibition entitled “Where Worlds Meet”.