Runes is a creative investigation, exhibition and series of creative writing pieces exploring migration and the roots of place names around the Thames Estuary. The project is a partnership between Jeremy Scott and visual artist Steve Lawes.

​The project website contains the artworks and writing from the project, exploring questions around ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’ and what these concepts really mean to people living in the country now. These questions seem particular pressing in the current climate.  

​The project’s starting point was local place names: what do the names of areas in and surrounding Southend reveal about its history and character?

​To summarise the project’s findings as succinctly as possible: most of the place names in and around Southend appear to be of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origin, with a handful of Scandinavian Viking additions; the most obvious of these is ‘Thorp’, now ‘Thorpe Bay, which is an Old Norse word meaning ‘satellite farmstead/dwelling’. In other words, the region has a tradition of migration stretching back through thousands of years.

A book based on the project’s findings and featuring its artwork is in preparation, and takes the form of a creative reflection on a journey around the four river estuaries at each corner of England (the Mersey, the Humber, the Thames and the Severn), exploring (and often re-imagining) the roots of the place names that the many migrants who journeyed up these estuaries brought with them.