Flint grotto still standing

Ten years ago today (5 October 2015) Brighton and Hove News reported that Rory McCormack, described as the city’s last beach fisherman, had been told to dismantle the unusual grotto of flint and shell sculptures he had built on his Kemp Town fishing plot. Council officials argued the structures, some rising more than six feet, were unsafe and had been erected without permission. McCormack, who had spent years creating the site, defended it as harmless and said it had become a point of fascination for people walking along the seafront.

McCormack, born in 1955 and raised in Brighton from childhood, spent much of his life fishing from the beach. He trained as a dry-stone waller and those skills later shaped the unconventional sculptures he built along his fishing plot, one of the last of its kind on the city’s shore. The grotto began in earnest during the winter of 2013 when rough seas curtailed fishing and McCormack built a flint and shell workbench. From there he started making free-standing figures inspired by ancient archetypes and art books, teaching himself techniques to bind and reinforce the works with salvaged materials.

Over several years he produced a sequence of large figures and features, including a Venus of Willendorf, Sumerian and Spartan figures, Cycladic harpists, a throne, a grave scene with a flint skeleton, and a shell-inlaid arch. His fishing boat was decorated with motifs taken from Greek ceramics. By 2015 the grotto was striking enough to draw council attention, but despite official threats of removal, no enforcement action was taken. A petition was even launched to save the site.

McCormack eventually declared the grotto complete in 2020, saying he had run out of space to expand, and turned his creativity to his allotment, where he made new works including Egyptian deities, a minotaur and a seated god repurposed as a bird table.

The grotto still stands today, weathered by wind and tide but recognisable from the promenade. Although little recent activity is evident, it remains both a remnant of Brighton’s fishing heritage and a rare example of outsider art created without permission or precedent, a private mythscape made permanent on the city’s public shore.

More information on McCormack and his grotto is available from Wikipedia, Ousider Environments Europe, The Keepers Project, and even The Economist.