The Thames Estuary - London’s wild side
One of the London Festival of Architecture’s most interesting exhibitions is a show at Southwark gallery, charting the unvisited reaches of the Thames Estuary.
As you head out of London along the Thames, the glitzy office blocks and shiny residential developments disappear. Instead, there are sheds, warehouses, the strange concrete shapes of water towers, chimneys, power stations and cargo terminals. And mile upon mile of gloomy marshland.
It’s a landscape that looks its best with grey skies - moody and unloved. A landscape where history has come and gone, leaving only stumps of old forts in its wake.
This exhibitions puts photos by Frank Watson together with sounds by Dave Lawrence and spoken word pieces by Germander Speedwell, who has an ear for the strange and archaic names of the area -
Long Reach to Oaze Deep
Halfway Road to Middle Ground
Small Gains, Great Lines
The tide turns, the Lower Hope rises.
If you can’t get to the gallery, there’s a video of some of the work - very weird and slightly sinister. And a nice video piece in the Guardian, too, with a review of another exhibition I found fascinating, the one on flooded London that I blogged a while back.
Where: Novas Contemporary Urban Centre, 73-81 Southwark Bridge Road, SE1 (nearest tube - Borough or London Bridge)
When: Mon-Sat 10-6, till 20th July
Photograph courtesy of and copyright Frank Watson
Tags: landscape, thames estuaryRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Art
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