Created as part of my Masters degree this little zine is a collection of images, ideas and thoughts around the redevelopment of London. The pictures document eras of destruction and reconstruction of specific sites in South East London. A kind of living legacy for the identities and individuals displaced by […]
gentrification
10 posts
That’s not a fire to warm yourself by It’s the fading embers of destruction the last traces of a whole transmuted to ash and red flashes that light your eyes You know though – this was never for you Scavenger, vulture that you are Nothing here was built or burnt […]
I want to put beauty down create nothing more than delicate wonder with a few simple words laid down with no force and no thought but even beauty now seems to have owners and whatever I can see and love seems to step into the copyright of an indifferent class […]
You own the houses the streets the shops the grass the grey the ground the walls the sky There’s no taking them back but do you have to take the rest? Do you need the feelings? the love the anger the security? Do you need our past? do you need […]
Given my recent obsession with drawing – sometimes well and sometimes badly – I thought I’d share my latest effort here. A series of three pictures all inspired by the city. Not, I’m sad to say, in a particularly good way but given the way it’s being forced, and paid, […]
Sterility is one of the true markers of our time. As we live, try to understand and to create we repeatedly assume that to cleanse, to add a polished shine is to imbue quality in what we do. In cities we gentrify, bringing order to urban chaos in the form […]
It wasn’t until they set about building the new flats that questions started to be asked. They were easy ones at first, mundane in nature, technical in approach. ‘Have you checked the subsidence in the north west corner?’ and ‘we’ll have to add another layer of concrete to those foundations […]
They made up a surgeon’s hand. Dissecting concrete housing blocks and perishing tarmac roads, slicing away incongruously overgrown marks of humanity to remove the infected tissue of life. A healing process, they said, the men and women who orchestrated the diggers, cranes and wrecking balls with balletic elegance. From their […]
Chip away the rock on which you stand to offer clearer views and wait nervously for the collapse to bury you Be sure to check out my new book No Cure for Shell Shock.
What do you call this future? The one at the end of the rat run you’ve built out of today and into tomorrow? The one we can see as a pin-prick at the end of the tunnel, a pin-prick of grey light and confinement. Why do you want us to […]