Look Up

At street level this is an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet with bright plastic signage, but just look up…

Neon internet

Dalston: Peeling the layers

Dalston has been stripped back layer by layer as buildings have come down to make way for the new London Overground and the resulting development of the existing buildings.

I find the revealing of the insides of somebody’s house – the choice of paint, the fireplaces, the faded patches where pictures hung – strangely intrusive, private becoming public.

Alexandra Blum has been the official artist in residence whilst this has been taking place. In her own words “I’ve been making drawings of the streets in Dalston for about 12 months, building up a series of images, to give a sense of how the area is changing: the life cycle of Dalston’s buildings, the interaction between existing buildings and spaces and the potential impact of new constructions.  As part of a residency, I am now drawing from inside the site too, exploring the sequence of temporary spaces before they vanish beneath the building’s final form.”

Metamorphosis

The inevitability of change as the regeneration of an area picks up its pace

Where East meets North

There is no NE London. I live and work along the diagonal that starts at the bottom of Kingsland Road where North and East London are at opposite sides of the same road. Dalston is where N1 and E8 meet, and I live in N16 whilst my neighbours are in E5. Big distinctions in London where living ‘norf, saath, east or west’ evoke such a strong sense of loyalty and identity.