103: Convenient Unconformity
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Picture‘Zig-zag toward the unconformity’ Cristina Accotto (imaggeo.egu.eu) Creative Commons: CC BY-ND 3.0
In geology, an unconformity is a missing slice of time in the rock – a place where one layer rests on another with thousands, or sometimes many millions, of years, absent in between. Convenient unconformity is what happens when societies manage to achieve the same kind of thing on purpose – a practice that Horatio Morpurgo traces around Lyme Bay in A Guide to the Unconformity, published this month.​

It names, for example, the gap between the actual history of a place and the official stories that its inhabitants find it convenient to remember:

A small English harbour town celebrates its ‘Age of Exploration’ and its local heroes but barely mentions privateering, slave voyages or the plantations that paid for the fine houses scattered up the hill behind the harbour.

A heritage site offers cocoa, cake and tidy narratives while treating mass graves, erased labour or colonial plunder as background – if it mentions them at all. The missing layers are not accidents. They keep certain people, industries and nations looking cleaner than their histories justify.

Convenient unconformity often looks modest and reasonable. A guidebook ‘simplifies’ a story to fit two pages. A museum label talks about ‘trade’ instead of forced labour, ‘expansion’ instead of invasion, ‘troubles’ instead of state violence. That coastal town raises a statue to a seafaring ‘founder’ and leaves out what his voyages actually did in West Africa and the Caribbean. None of this requires a conspiracy. It just needs enough people to agree, silently, that some details are ‘too complex’, ‘not what visitors came for’, or ‘better left to the specialists’.

Horatio Morpurgo follows Lyme Bay’s geology, fisheries, imperial entanglements and marine conservation over centuries, showing how one small stretch of sea holds slavery, privateering, global trade, mass tourism and ecological repair in a single frame. The official stories – statues, panels, tourism copy – tend to pick out the explorers and the picturesque shoreline. The forced labour, the wrecked sea bed and the long, slow work of marine protection are scarcely visible.​

Phil Smith’s Counter‑Tourism works on these seams. It invites visitors to look for “buried ballrooms, hidden histories, mass graves and inconvenient details” – the bits that official heritage management has edited out in favour of comfort and deference. His tactics – walking the edges, treating a site as a psyche, asking what lies behind the ‘smooth’ story – are ways of making convenient unconformity visible again. You could say Counter‑Tourism is a field guide to finding the cracks in the brochure.​

For systems thinkers, convenient unconformity is a warning label on any very neat self‑description. When a government talks about ‘global Britain’ without attending to its colonial past, when a company boasts of ‘net zero’ without naming the places and people absorbing its externalised costs, when a city brands itself as a ‘heritage destination’ while pricing out the communities that created that heritage, you are probably looking at a stack of missing layers. The question to ask is not just ‘what is being forgotten?’, but ‘for whom is this forgetting convenient?’.

There is, however, another side. The same fault lines that hide what is awkward can also shelter what is vital. For both Morpurgo and Smith, the cracks in the story are where you find citizen science, the history of the less often praised, less than famous men {sic}, folklore and the scars of past injustice. Convenient unconformity can cut both ways: it can allow harm to disappear from view, but it can also allow new forms of care and resistance to develop in the margins.
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Working with convenient unconformity does not mean demanding a perfectly continuous history or filling every silence with accusation. It means noticing when smoothness has become suspicious – and then going looking, as Morpurgo and Smith do in different ways, for what the gap is hiding.

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