Walking through the gates was like entering a memory.

A fifteen-year-old me would recognise all of it. The same curved sign set in stone. The same seemingly towering three-storey classroom block where I fought with mathematics. The same sprawling view of the harbour, punctuated by the shroud of trees dotted along the shoreline.

But I catch myself. I was here to do a job, and the light was changing fast.

To make it worse, I had done no proper scouting. Five years of high school didn't count. And the problem with this place is that there are too many good compositions to choose from, not too few.

The shots were made.

But let's talk about the school. The fort. The landscape. Titchfield High School.

I Took My First Photographs Here

Everybody knew it was a fort. That was the best part. You do not walk to class past a huge cannon for five years and forget where you are. We knew the walls were old and we knew roughly what they were for, and it made the whole place feel enormous — a castle you happened to have to do homework in. Hogwarts with a harbour view.

It is also, straightforwardly, why I do this. My first photographs were made on that hill on a little film camera, because the place demanded to be photographed and I was fifteen and had no idea what I was doing about it. What I never had back then were the dates. So I went and got them.

1723 — the parish appears.

Portland is created as a parish, named for the Duke of Portland, then Governor of Jamaica. It's a hard sell at the time; nobody wants to live in this newly minted backwater parish. The Governor is offering thirty acres to any white Protestant willing to settle here and twenty acres to any free man of colour. Port Antonio at the time is considered an unhealthy spot (hard to imagine). For a while the town itself is renamed Titchfield, but the old name won't die, so the new one is dropped — but it sticks to the peninsula and never leaves.

1728–29 — the fort.

A committee of the House of Assembly meets to consider how to treat with a possible Spanish invasion. Christian Lilly is assigned to build a fort on the peninsula, and Fort George goes up in 1729. The walls are ten feet thick and built to hold twenty-two guns. It was built for two jobs, not one. The Spanish from the sea was the first. The second was the Maroons in the mountains behind the town — this is the height of the First Maroon War, and the fort was as much about the interior as the coast. The guns pointed both ways.

1786 — the school.

Here's what surprised me most: the school and the fort have nothing to do with each other for the first hundred years. In January 1786, trustees known as the Titchfield Trust raise money for a free school in an area of Port Antonio actually called Free School. Reading, writing, and arithmetic, plus Latin and Greek were to be taught at no charge to parents. It is the fifth-oldest high school in Jamaica — behind Wolmer's Boys (1729), Manning's (1738), St Jago (1744) and Rusea's (1777). And like those schools, it was founded to educate the colony's poor — in practice, the children of poor whites; however, there was no system at all for the children of the enslaved. So: a fort built partly to put down Jamaicans, and a school built without Jamaicans in mind. Two separate institutions, on the same small peninsula, for ninety-seven years.1883–1886 — they become one thing. In 1883 the Jamaica School Commission takes over the running of the school from the Trust. Then in 1886 a day school for boys and a day school for girls are established — in the old military barracks; The Titchfield High School is born!

Major W. H. Plant is appointed headmaster. His name is still on one of the school houses. That's the moment the barracks stopped being barracks and became something else entirely. They became classrooms and have remained that way ever since.

When I sat in that block fighting with mathematics, or getting life-changing advice from a caring mentor, I was sitting in accommodation built for a garrison. How neat is that!

What's still there: Most of Fort George is gone — nearly three hundred years will do that. What remains is the munitions building, the defence walls, and two cannons. The remnants of the other cannons have been integrated into the layout of the school at various points

I walked past those cannons every day for five years, and I photographed them badly on film at least once. Last week I came back for them properly.

From the barracks wall you can see the whole east harbour. Folly Point Lighthouse, built in 1888, two years after the school moved into the barracks. Folly Oval. The length of Allan Avenue.

The peninsula itself is why the town exists — it separates the east harbour from the west, and together with Navy Island it shields the deeper west harbour from the easterly winds. This place is rich in history and significance. That's the whole reason ships came here. That's the reason Lorenzo Dow Baker sailed in in 1870 and started the banana trade. That's the reason Errol Flynn turned up in the forties and never really left.

When I was in school, I used to watch ships come through the harbour to dock at the Errol Flynn Marina. I thought I was daydreaming out a window. I was looking at the only reason there was a window.

Why any of this matters to a photographer: because this is where I started, and going back was harder than I expected. At fifteen I had the fort and no facts, and that was plenty. The walls were old, the cannons were real, the harbour was enormous, and I pointed a film camera at all of it out of pure appetite. Nothing I made was any good. It didn't matter. Something in me was already sorting the world into frames. Now I have the facts. The walls went up in 1729 to hold twenty-two guns. The barracks became classrooms in 1886. The peninsula was designated protected national heritage on 16 April 1998. And the facts made me slower, not faster. I stopped shooting the view past the wall and started shooting the wall in the view. I spent a long time on the cannons deciding how much harbour to give them, because a cannon with a pretty bay behind it is a postcard, and a cannon on its own is a different sentence entirely. Five years of high school didn't count as scouting. But it turns out it counted for something.

One Frame

A Location Note

Titchfield peninsula, Port Antonio — late afternoon.

Start with the thing nobody mentions: this is a working high school. The fort, the barracks, the cannons and the best views are all inside an active school compound. Go through the administration and get permission before you go with a camera. During term time, plan around the school day.

The barracks wall gives you the east harbour, Folly Point Lighthouse, Folly Oval and Allan Avenue in one sweep — that's your compressed long-lens material. The cannons work better wide and low, with the harbour behind them for context.

Light comes from behind you in the late afternoon, which is what you want for the harbour, but it puts the classroom block's face in shadow. If the buildings are the subject, go in the morning instead and give up the harbour. You will not get both in one visit.

And Port Antonio takes up to 150 inches of rain a year — the highest in Jamaica. That's why everything is that green, and it's why you should treat any forecast here as the suggestion it is.

☝️TITCH!!!

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First Photons — Jamaica. See you at first light.