Mark Titchner
South Beds Hard Core (If You Can Dream It, You Must Do It)
2025
The design for this limited-edition T-Shirt by Mark Titchner was originally produced for the chapter ‘Mercury Delirium, Exodus, Wauluds Bank and the Cursed Earth: The Cracked Ballad of Luton and South Bedfordshire’ in British artist John Russell’s 2007 book Frozen Tears III.
Updated in 2025 to form a contemporary homage to the artist’s birthplace of Luton (from a social, cultural and political history of a region thirty miles north of London from the neolithic age to the present), the work’s title – South Beds Hard Core: If You Can Dream It, You Must Do It – contains a line taken from Titchner’s now iconic 2017 public artwork Beacon, which permanently adorns the wall of the Hat Factory situated next to Luton’s central railway station, renovated by the local authority in early 2025.
As a celebration of all things south Bedfordshire – and as acknowledgement of the new life recently given to the public commission in Luton town centre – this T-Shirt comes with a signed and numbered woodcut print, a miniature version of the artist’s prophetic public light box, remade for domestic use.
The text that originally accompanied Titchner’s design follows in full here:
‘…Further along I come to other pieces of discarded printed material blowing across the road. The few I rescue, before they’re cast into water or through gaps in nearby wire fences, appear to contain diagrams and lists that speak of half-forgotten events and cultural phenomena. They remind me of new-age symbols, pentagrams and occult paraphernalia, conceptual art diagrams, which contain an unexpected form of mysticism. The first is a map of Dunstable, which shows its position at the meeting point of the Roman road of Watling Street and the ancient Icknield Way that leads over the Chilterns, together with a list of surrounding towns and villages. Titled ‘South Beds Hardcore’, it looks like it could represent the territory covered by a marauding but well organised subculture from the early 90s.
A second diagram, emblazoned with the text ‘Immediate effects of a 150kt Air-burst’ represents a personal order of actions in Dunstable. It’s telling that these speak of the threat of nuclear war, and it sounds as if the individual who’s created these plans must be old enough to have experienced the prospect of this reality. I remember just the previous week nrk telling me of a four-minute warning siren that had gone off by mistake in a nearby village during the early 80s, causing untold psychological damage to the locals who heard it. If you were of a certain age around this time – born a couple of years too late, it would have passed you by – you either got the full force of the trauma attached to the threat of nuclear war, or missed it altogether.
Within this picture, ‘Number 1’ represents instant annihilation, while ‘Number 10’ stands for third degree burns. First on the list, near the epicentre of the blast, is ‘Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones’, who all played in the aforementioned California Ballroom – or ‘The Cali’ – situated on Whipsnade Road at the foot of the Dunstable Downs. This was out on the western edge of Dunstable during the 60s and 70s. The venue was the site for so many important events that it’s incredible it was ever closed. As was also the case with The Queensway Hall. This modernist civic centre was bulldozered more recently in after being built in the early 60s. It hosted some great concerts (and bizarre events such as ‘The International Tattoo & Body Piercing Expo’, also included on the diagram’s list at ‘Number 4’).
Although the town’s famous for hosting the divorce proceedings of King Henry viii and Catherine of Aragon, which led to the separation between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, the other illustrious thing about Dunstable is its penchant for sporadic football disturbances – even though it’s situated approximately five miles from the nearest league ground. When the England team were knocked out of the World Cup by Germany in 1990 the ancient crossroads at the centre of town, which at the time was home to a double traffic roundabout, became the stage for one of the biggest riots that has ever followed a televised football match. Perhaps these brief disturbances of 1990, like the Poll Tax riots of the same year, held only a slightly more minor impact for the fate of the country, compared to events such as that at ninth place on the list, ‘The first skirmishes of the English Civil War’, which also took place in Dunstable.
Dunstable or Durocobrivis in Latin (there are two stories behind the town’s current name: firstly there was a famous robber, Dunn, who gave his name to the town, ‘Dunn’s stable’; the second is that it comes from Anglo-Saxon Dunstaple, meaning ‘Hill Market’) has an unusual amount of pubs that are concentrated in its centre around the ancient crossroads. This is because the town was a day’s ride from London and a place to spend the night – The Sugar Loaf in High Street North, and The Saracen’s Head on High Street South, for example, still have coaching gates to the side. One could say that this heavy concentration of drinking establishments led directly to the events in the summer of 1990 when a few hundred angry fans spilt out onto the street. The fact that the ancient roads and the area in general is said to be host to a number of lay lines also provides these skirmishes with a touch of neo-Situationist or psychogeographical inevitability, as if the area is laden with a kind of cursed power.
The final image comes in the form of a diagram or ‘map of the known universe’ that tells us to read its contents from the bottom up. Just like the individual who made this image, the map’s perspective is skewed with a form of beautiful provincialism. Luton and its surrounding villages are shown in opposition to London on an ‘ancient’s map, and the two sites form a topography known only to the local tribes that populated the area. Outside of Luton’s demography – as if surrounded by a huge city wall – is a void inhabited by ‘The migs’ and ‘Inertia’. ‘The migs’ or ‘Men in Gear’ were, and to some extent still are, the football club’s undesirable element. The group’s tag used to be written all over the place, especially twenty odd years ago.
This drawing is like a contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno, with London as ‘heaven’ and Luton and the surrounding towns and villages – such as Houghton Regis, Caddington and Studham – as ‘hell’. Just like the previous text, it speaks of a progression from suburban or semi-rural estates – out on the periphery of small towns – towards a form of ‘culture’ of the urban, and perhaps an escape from the barbarous nature of certain environs. It speaks of the magnetic pull of the big city, and represents a seed or bulb that’s flowering into a glorious rose. Yet it’s strange that the diagram is inverted. Which is really the true north or south? Which is heaven or hell?…’
Limited T-Shirt in three colour combinations:
Orange shirt with black print (Home)
Black shirt with orange print (Away)
White shirt with orange print (Third)
All available in sizes L, XL and XXL
(MEDIUM HAS SOLD OUT IN ALL COLOURS.)
Orange T-Shirts printed on AS Colour Staple on 180gsm combed cotton.
Black and white T-Shirts printed on 180gsm Stanley/Stella Creator 2.0 Organic Cotton.
Each comes with a two-colour handprinted linocut measuring 17.5cm x 26.3cm, signed and numbered by the artist.
Edition of 100
£35