Day five in Southend, it’s a bank holiday and like a good self-employed person, I’m hard at work from the second floor of Chalkwell Hall.
Yesterday Metal hooked up a meeting with Krithika from Pocket Places for People (http://pocketplacessouthendonsea.wordpress.com/) she works for Sustrans to create place which encourage people to move around in more sustainable ways. We had a good chat about public space, movement, my work, their work and she’s going to get me some contacts in the council here too.
After that I went on another exploratory walk, this time, more wandering, with my camera and the intention to take photographs of different houses around the area. I nervously abstained for the first quarter mile or so, but then started snapping away, being sure to avoid pictures that looked directly into people’s windows (that felt intrusive). I’ve come away with around 100 pictures that show the general fabric of housing in the area, and now today I’m diligently cutting them into tiny squares with the intention of creating a ‘residential mosaic’ with them. I’m thinking about all that I’ve read about housing development and how it both responds to and shapes population movement in the UK. Terms such as ‘infill development’ will inform at least one piece of work, as will the sense of Southend and it’s urban area closely hugging the coastline.
But for now, back to the cutting out…
