Famous Sights of London
This series of products, drawings and prints comes from Chris’ long standing interest in the discarded and abandoned objects that he sees everyday, particularly in south east London.
It began many years ago through documenting and collecting images of these sights and juxtapositions with a particular interest in the surreal, funny or poignant combinations or placement of objects. This became a corner stone of our ‘photo of the week’ feature on our website between about 2006 and 2016 before Instagram became a regular way of sharing images.
This then became the starting point of a more formalised project when we were asked by Neil Mason who at the time was Executive Creative Director of GPJ to create an exhibition for the reception gallery of their new office in Great Suffolk Street, in Southwark. He was particularly interested in our photo of the week series and how it celebrated ‘the real London’ rather than the idealised image of the city which advertising and other mass media often shows. As part of the process developing this exhibition we began thinking about how much the city is changing and how much if this change involves a process of what we termed ‘Generic-ification’ which, similar to the more familiar ‘Gentrification’ removes much of the character and interest from areas in favour of a sanitised and more profitable alternative.
This then led us to consider the idea of listed status and heritage, which are processes and ideas generally applied to ‘important’ buildings and spaces, but that should also probably be considered much more for the everyday high streets and residential streets that make up the majority of the city. This then led us to finding Historic England’s ‘Register of Heritage at Risk’ and visiting the buildings in southwark on this list. This then helped us to think that we could create a parallel ‘Unofficial Heritage at Risk Register’ for the area surrounding GPJ’s offices and make a ‘museum’ documenting these locations and sights before they disappear. This project culminated in 2 x five colour A1 screen prints contrasting the ‘Official’ and ‘Unofficial’ Heritage at Risk Registers, a 5 minute slide show containing 10 years worth of photographs of the disappearing sights of London, and a series of 8 screen printed cut out replicas of key sights and locations from the ‘Unofficial Heritage at Risk Register’. These works were shown at GPJ in 2018
After this exhibition these ideas continued to evolve, thinking about souvenirs and objects that built upon these ideas. Using some of the photographs we picked out common but important sights to represent the ‘real’ Famous Sights of London including mattresses, stripped bikes, the ubiquitous Henry the Hoover, shopping trolleys and discarded sofas. These then went through a series of drawing processes to consider how they could be represented in things like souvenir tea towels, prints and stickers by adding value through time and skill in handmade drawing and screen printing processes, all available here.
