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Notting Hill before its regeneration was ripe with images that now provoke enquiring minds to consider who benefits from our professional interventions as planners, architects and urban designers.
Living in Tavistock Crescent W11 and a student at the Architectural Association, Sarah Bissett Scott photographed what she saw and what she was a part of in London 1976. Returning to those black & white photographs Sarah shines a spotlight on a disappeared community - vibrant, diverse, exuberant, facing poverty with humour and fighting a decaying urban fabric. By 2012 though some places and some people are recognisably still there, others are completely changed - a vastly different urban and economic landscape.
Enjoy the images - let your imagination roll into the stories each one holds - B&W photographs contrasting with charcoal portraits and abstractions when you visit 'It's Only Black and White' at Herts Visual Arts OPEN STUDIOS, September-October 2022
Future Scape: In 2022 with inflation rising, economies shrinking, fuel and climate needs colliding, what is to be gained from analysing past foundations of present problems and solutions? With West London as a precursor to East London's future, Woolwich and Greenwich show the fabric of some neighbourhoods still under stress. In the regeneration of the area juxtaposed with examples of ageing Modernist there are challenging reminders of past wealth such as the Cutty Sark controversially display on a glass housing. Student projects in the local architecture college examine 'future ruins' - what is it that will last from today's regeneration schemes - while urban designers focus in on balancing the complex demands of progress, spatial equity and accessibility with the essential element for well-being: clean air.
The learning is: 'spatial justice' requires analysis and therefore measures of its component values, to enable us to manage and deliver these multiple demands of regenerating place.