Texturing concrete: Woodstock Beach beneath Woodstock streets – Place and material memory

Woodstock is a grey, windy suburb, squashed between the freeway and the docks in Cape Town, South Africa. Woodstock once had a beach. Physically, the beach is long gone, but it remains in the rain as the smell of salt, the smell of fish and, relentlessly, as sand, swept up again and again, always returning. This article engages the lingering presence of Woodstock Beach in the concrete that now covers it and explores how the memory of the beach orients us towards questions of ruination and process, of how our cities could have been otherwise, and how we can imagine them anew. It also explores the ways in which the material quality of the beach – in this case, as covered in concrete – reveals memories, metaphors and guiding analytical frameworks which in turn point us to pre-existing forms of resistance. This exploration of Woodstock Beach and its ongoing relevance is guided by the analytical attunements of ‘texture as method’. Texture as method engages memories, objects, texts and political processes to explore the emergent and processual qualities of place, and the entanglement between what is absent and what remains.