Metropole

(2014 – 2018)

The London skyline is a maze of cranes and construction, but this frenzy belies the crumbling foundations below

Over the past two decades, London’s overheated property market has become an irresistible target for multinational developers, speculators, and more opaque interests. Vast sums of capital have flooded into the city, reshaping its social and political landscape as much as its architecture and public realm. This has intensified housing shortages, driven the social cleansing of entire areas, undermined local democracy, and deepened inequality. While luxury high rises grow skyward in some areas, truly Dickensian conditions proliferate in the new slums of the city’s hinterlands.

Metropole records the brutally disorientating effects of the transformation of London, by documenting the legions of new luxury developments as they are constructed and occupied. Multiple exposure photographs are combined with appropriated, repurposed photographs taken from the billboards of the developments, alongside research into the property developers behind these schemes, including their extensive their use of opaque offshore financial structures and unaccountable political lobbying.

Metropole comprises:
= 150 monochrome multiple exposure photographs
= 85 colour photographs
= 67 appropriated CGI images
= approximately 100 A4 pages of research materials
= 5 minute single screen video installation.
= Book published by Overlapse Books, 2018.

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