Hello. You can read here about my work, publications, projects and news

You can email me here or contact me via comments below

The Alphabet Tax

It’s a real pleasure to have a stack of copies of my novel The Alphabet Tax, published by grandIOTA. Available to order now, and in the shops from the end of April. It’s a dystopian tale, very relevant in the present day – I hope you enjoy it.

Golden Handcuffs Review

I was delighted to have ‘Standing Witness’, a section from The Alphabet Tax published in GHR 33. Great to be in such company and a beautiful cover by Gloria Bornstein too.

Pre-sales for The Alphabet Tax

My forthcoming novel, The Alphabet Tax, is being published by Grand Iota, a great indie press based near Brighton.

The link for pre-sales and further information is here.

I was asked to be clear that if you sign up for pre-sales, you have NOT been added to a mailing list (though of course you are welcome to join).

Grand Iota have set a deadline of 24 February for the pre-publication offer. The names of subscribers will be added to the books and they will be uploaded to press a few days later. Assuming all is well, they will be ready to send out within a week from then, and available on Amazon and from other retailers in April.

The demise of the department store

Across the UK department stores are closing down, turning from bustling shopping cities in themselves into mammoth wastes of space, contributing to slow grinding down of high streets that we’ve been witnessing for some time. We’ve seen it all before of course … in the 1980s and ’90s, there were initiatives for artists to use empty high street shops as galleries and studios. Once you start thinking about it, the list of old department stores goes way beyond the current casualties: Debenhams, House of Fraser, Habitat. There was C&A, Swan and Edgar, Dickens and Jones, Derry & Toms, Peter Jones, Jones Brothers, Marshall and Snellgrove, John Barnes, Bourne and Hollingsworth, Barkers. And that’s just in central London.

House of Fraser, Victoria (now closed)

The plan is to find one of these empty stores that can be used as the site for a sound performance, and its inspiration. Any ideas welcome! More to follow …

Soundings

Soundings has become shorthand for ‘Sounding Louder: Experimentation, skills and mentoring’, which is the title of my Developing Your Creative Practice application to Arts Council England. The grant allows me to do just that: experiment with ways of making noise, through writing architecture and audio architecture, creating spaces through sound. Taking soundings, checking out possibilities …

Not yet half way through the process – one of my own making, it’s such a great opportunity that the grant gives you – and I’ve outlined three distinct projects with various collaborations in discussion, three sites, different outputs, different ways of working. Two are in London: one is a sound performance in and about a disused department store, as a way of drawing attention to this as a possibility for retrofitting (as a people’s palace? as social housing for homeless people or refugees?); the other involves exploring the architecture of markets moving to Dagenham Reach from various sites in more central London – Spitalfields, Smithfield and Billingsgate – and the changes to the old and new areas, the people involved and the industries.

The third continues my ongoing investigations into translations in architecture: from idea to description to plan to physical structure, and back again, and through image/test using AI and code translations. More to follow, as per.

Alfx

AKA The Alphabet Tax, my novel-in-waiting is going through edits pre-publication. It’s a painstaking, minutely focused process, back and forth between me and the editor and back again another time, and again. Of course I can’t wait for it to be complete, as a process and as a novel but it’s also an incredible exercise and will be all the better for it. I’m looking forward to talking covers when we’re done with the edit, playing with printing.

Ledbury Estate project

With Stamatis Zografos, I co-presented at this conference in Brasilia last week, him in-person, me remotely. This is truly interdisciplinary, across architecture, art, film, policing, linguistics … extremely fascinating, highly educational and full of potential as a result.

We were talking about our Ledbury Estate project, on the housing estate in Peckham, South London. We discussed the steps we’ve taken in the work so far, the people involved, the results, the restrictions and our methodology, which looks at new ways of applying hauntology.

Stuttgart Brutalism

As part of Sue Barr’s amazing exhibition of photographs Concrete Poetry / Brutalism in Stuttgart at Hartmann Projects – among them community centres, housing, churches, schools and colleges – here’s a piece of my accompanying text, handwritten for the gallery.

Draw Hope pavilion

The Draw Hope pavilion has grown in the last two weeks into an amazing shared public artwork, a document of drawing and writing by (mainly) people in Chatham, where the pavilion, by Bob and Roberta Smith, is based and many visitors to the Estuary festival. Six Medway artists – Wendy Daws, Lalita Bailey, Hannah Whittaker, Liz Bylett, Christopher Sacre and me – ran workshops during the festival, which runs until 13 June.

Updating site: work in progress!

That’s it really, the new version will be here soon.