Charts
Drawing berth occupancy without a control room
Plenty of United Kingdom municipal harbours still keep a paper movements book. The spine is broken. The biro changes halfway through March. Someone has written ‘see over’ and then not turned over. We like these books. They are closer to the quay than a tidy export that has already been ‘cleaned’.
The method is slow and unfashionable. We transcribe the rows. We sit with the clerk on names that appear three ways. We mark lay-by as lay-by, not as cargo. We refuse to colour a berth occupied because a vessel was ‘expected’. Occupancy, for us, means alongside or on the cill according to the book’s own rule, stated in the notes.
The chart itself is a bar for each berth across the days of the study. We keep the palette quiet: occupied, idle, closed for works, unknown. Unknown is a colour. Hiding unknown days inside idle is how a harbour pretends the record is complete.
Councillors read left to right. They do not need a legend that looks like a laboratory. They need the harbour’s own berth names, the dates in British form, and a caption that says what the bars cannot: that Tuesday the 14th the east wall was closed for fender repairs, so the apparent crowding on the west wall is not a mystery.
People sometimes ask whether this work is old-fashioned. The quay is old-fashioned. The lock is old-fashioned. The argument in committee is old-fashioned. The chart should be precise, not ornamental, and it should survive being photocopied for a meeting that still uses paper.