In November 2025 I was pleased to deliver a counter mapping walk and talk in Gravesend as part of the ‘Why Live Anywhere Else’ project, commissioned by Cement Fields and supported by Creative Estuary. The walk began at the library and through the much celebrated history of Northfleet as the place of origin for ‘Roman’ (aquatic) cement in the 18th century, we transitioned through its key ingredient – chalk -into a Creolised world of spirit and memory, compounded by oceanic movement. We traced the voyage of the Diamond, one of the 12 previously unrecognised slave ships wrecked in the Thames Estuary that my project seeks to uncover stories of. The walk took us to the place where the Diamond wrecked, becoming one of many portals in the route of wreckage that Martinican Poet Edouard Glissant reminds us covers the ocean floor in a corroded entanglement of debris mapping the routes of ancestors. Since it had recently been Diwali, the site by the shore derived us some diwa lamps from this world of wreckage, which in Creole tradition we collected, repurposed and made sacred as we lit them to remember the 44 souls that died on the Diamond‘s voyage to Cuba. We heard about how the survivors were made to work building, from cement made from coral dug from the reef the Havana Church of our Lady – one of the most prominent sites of a fundamental Creole merger, that of the Virgin Mary with Yamaha, the mermaid spirit who protects those souls in the ocean. We also took the time to honour Pocahontas – who died and was buried in Gravesend after being presented in England the apparent successful model of the same kind of cultural erasure and colonial christianisation that the people on board the Diamond would experience. We returned to the Library to see the work of artist Exodus Crooks and students at Northfleet School for girls who had been creating new maps to incorporate their experiences of Northfleet through text, drawing, cyanotype and found materials.