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.