© Carla Wright
A history of alternative housing in the Caledonian area gathered through walking, conversation, and making with former squatters and local residents, including a residency at West Library. The resultant booklet, published by AIR, was realised with the support of Arts Council England.
More information on the artist, and the publication
Cally Colour Chart suggestion from Robert Blair Primary School
© Rayna Nadeem
Hi 8 video and stills documentation of unpleasant scenarios experienced or witnessed by the artist over a year while living near York Way. King’s Cross was previously known as Vale Royal, also the name of an English rose. Each of the twelve characters are given the name of a rose.
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©Lou Macnamara
A twelve hour silent walking of the neighbourhoods of King’s Cross on 4 May 2016. Beginning in Granary Square at 8am, it passed through twenty-one times on a route of five repeated loops through Maiden Lane, Somers Town, The Cally, Argyle Square and the fringes of Pentonville. Over the twelve hours, fifty-four of AIRs colleagues, associate artists, students, friends, neighbours, and interested strangers walked in shared silence.
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© Mark Newell
Self-portrait taken in the Euro Tunnel, just before the portal as it surfaces into the Kings Cross Railway Lands, before they laid down the tracks. Newell ran up and down the tunnel for hours in the middle of the night to create the image.
Installation view © AIR
Audio of birdsong and sweeping are placed with photographic images highlighting how the resonances of specific spaces can appear both epic and unremarkable. The work was made in response to walking and talking with Jimmy, a caretaker, who has lived and worked in the Bemerton Estate for thirty years. Part of AIR's Cally Calls.
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Film still © Magda Fabianczyk
Three videos exploring the relationship between physical transformation of places and transformation within ourselves. Magda collaborated with local resident Lacey-Jay Barham whose poems form the voiceovers. Part of AIR's Cally Calls.
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© George Padmore Institute
Radio documentary about Britain's first African and Afro-Carribean arts and cultural centre, the Keskidee Centre (1971-1991) describing the social and educational activities inlcuding artists in residence, theatre productions, and the library. Broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
© AIR
Artists were paired with locals – postman, retired solicitor, unemployed young woman, playworker, pensioners group, caretaker, cafe owner – to walk and talk the Cally and make artworks considering how place is defined by the lives lived there. An AIR collaboration with Team Cally funded by Creativeworks.
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© LKJ Records
A reading from Kwesi Johnson's first published collection of reggae poems Voices of the Living and the Dead at the Keskidee Centre where he was librarian. Produced by Jamaican novelist Lindsay Barrett, with music by Rasta Love reggae group.
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screengrab from Youtube (Is This Love by Bob Marley and the Wailers)
This music video for Is This Love was filmed at the former Keskidee Centre, Britain’s first African and Afro-Caribbean arts centre. Marley walks down Gifford Street with a group of children, including Naomi Campbell, and joins them singing, dancing and playing party games.
Watch on youtube
Drawing detail © Nancy Jackson
A final year project from CSM BA Architecture developed through close analysis of existing patterns of loitering on the Caledonian Road. The proposal for a community living room on the high street includes an amphitheatre, an elevated structure and a market hall.
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© Stuart Brisley
A fictitious art institution taking the street where Brisley lived as its subject through photography, performance, video, tape/slide, sound, installation and sculpture. Exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1987.
More about the artist, the work (page 232) and exhibition
Drawing detail © Luiz Conceicao
A final year CSM BA architecture project developing a new sharing network of local skills. Currently vacant corner shops along the Caledonian Road are proposed as centres for different specialisms – technology, education, daily-services, homeware and wellness.
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© Lee Milne
A series of Cally logos recalling Frost’s Sweet Shop, Buffalo Club & Institute, Barclays Bank, and the Watermelon Emporium/Mrs Betty Jarrett Wardrobe Director. During Cally Calls and Cally Festival local traders used paper bags stamped with these logos. Part of AIR's Cally Calls.
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Installation view © AIR
An installation with Costi's 'Ralphy' clothes collection, gang logo painting, Wikipedia extracts and film connecting the street subcultures of the Lo-Life’s of Brooklyn, New York, and the Cally Bangers of Islington. Part of AIR's Cally Calls.
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© Rob Grieg
A natural freshwater swimming pond surrounded by wild flowers and building sites in the King’s Cross Estate commissioned for the RELAY programme. The water is purified through a closed-loop process using wetland and submerged water plants.
More information on the pond, the artist, and the architects.
© www.diariodesign.com
A programme of commissions for the King’s Cross Art Programme. Launching with IFO by Jacques Rival, followed by Across the Buildings by Felice Varini and Black Maria by Richard Wentworth. The final commission is King's Cross Pond Club by Marjetica Potrc with Ooze.
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© KX Railway Lands
King's Cross Railway Lands were a campaign group of activists, academics and local people who proposed redevelopement led by low cost housing as an alternative to London Regeneration Consortium's plan for a channel train terminal and massive office development at King's Cross.
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© Käthe Strenitz
Strenitz' husband owned a plastics factory north of King's Cross whose interior as well as the surrounding industrial landscape she made the subject of many paintings and engravings.
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© AIR
A wooden stile for an ‘inconvenient’ railing blocking access to the estates behind York Way which is clambered over by locals. The stile was made in response to conversations with local playworker Merveil Banuatu about how young people negotiate physical and social boundaries in the Cally. Part of AIR's Cally Calls.
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© Stephen White
A version of Michael Clark's Modern Masterpiece concieved for a derelict warehouse on the railway lands. Costume design by Leigh Bowery (who also performed as did Clark's mother Bessie), lighting design by Charles Atlas. Music included Stravinsky (The Rite of Spring), Sex Pistols, T Rex.
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© Sam Taylor-Johnson
Dual screen 16mm projection with one screen showing actress Amanda Ooms walking down York Way topless, and the other a close up of a man's breathing heavily.
Watch the film
© Ruth Miller
Mural with portraits of local people commemorating 1834 Trade Union Rally in support of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of agricultural labourers and early trades unionists who were deported to Australia. The rally began in Copenhagen Fields (now Caledonian Park).
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© Joann Hong
Pendants made with red brick rubble from a demolished building on the former Railway Lands are designed as mementos representing a transient experience of London for students leaving after the end of their studies. A final year CSM BA Jewellery project.
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© Adeeb Ashfaq
Ashfaq hosted Housmans bookshop at Central Saint Martins as his BA Fine Art degree show, creating a space for commercial and financial exchange, happenings, and discussions around art pedagogy, feminism, and the nature of self-organising. Contributers included Nils Norman, Rosalie Schweiker, Anthony Davies, Iain Boal, Howard Slater, Mostafaa Rajaai.
For more information on the artist
© Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council
©Ross and Nguyen
People living and working in the area were invited to collectively analyse and edit the Wikipedia page for King's Cross Central, opening up a conversation around the 'interactions between text-based and in-depth in-person knowledge of a contested urban regeneration site' (Ross 2014). Part of CSM's Contested Spaces forum in 2014.
For more information
© National Railway Museum Pictorial Collection
Watercolour painting showing barges being loaded and unloaded in front of the Granary Building and adjacent warehouse buildings, railway tracks and transit sheds. Exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851.
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© Katherine Midgley
A series of artist walks commissioned by Junction Consortium: And the days run away by Rebecca Birch, Thomas Percival Harefield And The Golden Rectangle by Tanya Loi, Beneath Your Feet by Katherine Midgley, King’s Cross: A Pictorial Guide (Unreliable) by Simon Faithfull.
For more about the series and audio guides by: Rebecca Birch, Katherine Midgely, Simon Faithfull
©AIR
A year-long weekly walking club, every Thursday 1.05-1.55pm. Meeting under, leaving from, and returning to, the square trees in Granary Square. The walks are devised to get to know the streets of King's Cross by repeatedly walking them, connecting across it, through it, tracking the seasons and the neighbourhood change. The walking club explores walking in silence and walking in conversation. An AIR associated work.
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© Catherine Dixon
An epic poem in seven hundred triads exploring the valley of the lost Fleet river and the mysteries of King's Cross. First recited at the Albert Hall.
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© Sam Blunden
Ten artworks, made in response to conditions of publicness in Granary Square, appear unannounced with permissions negotiated on a basis of trust with the landlord. The audience is anyone present, encountering the works as part of their everyday life. As each day passes nothing of the act remains in the square. An AIR project.
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© Antonio Sansica
Five people sing a dawn chorus through the early ‘magic hour’. Each of the nine stanzas of William Wordsworth’s The Pilgrim's Dream; or, The Star and the Glow-worm (1818), is sung from a different place in the square. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© AIR
An ‘adhan’, the muslim call to prayer, is broadcast live from the roof of the Granary Building at 04.00, 13.00, 18.30, 20.45 and 22.00. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© Antonio Sansica
Over twelve hours thirty-six readers read aloud in Granary Square from books about, or set in, London, describing moments in the history of modernity, and voices disempowered by its physical and technological transformations. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© Antonio Sansica
Seven people enter the square carrying speakers emitting slowly changing tones, beeps and blips, which combine to create shifting chords and melodies as the performers move around in a choreographed sequence. A collaboration with SENSE members and part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© Antonio Sansica
A gigantic ball is rolled into Granary Square and through the fountains by small masked childrens accompanied by a man with a silver ball for a head. They ignore their audience, pointing and shouting at the ball, eventually abandoning it in the fountains and disappearing. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© AIR
The artists invite patrolling security to tip thousands of orange ping-pong balls into the square. Over a twelve hour 'shift' the balls are tipped out three times. Each time those that are not gathered by passers-by are picked up one by one by the artists. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© Antonio Sansica
A lifesize pointing figure is seemingy abandoned nearby a plaster female torso sitting on a bench. Later they are joined by two speakers who relate a tale of idolatry and iconoclasm stretching across the centrues and across the globe. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© Antonio Sansica
Seven cyclists move in slightly wayward patterns across the square just before sunet; following pedestrians and cyclists, weaving in and out of the trees, meandering through the fountains, filing out of the square in a line and then returning to do it all again. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© Cairi Jacks
An artist's book that emerged from repeated walks through King's Cross in different seasons. Illustrations of plants found on the Regents Canal sit alongside the transcription of a walking conversation with herbalist Jonathon Church. A final year CSM BA Fine Art project.
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© AIR
A lone performer traces a path across the square. Lifting arms and legs one at a time, balancing on clear plastic pots, he hovers above the hard surface whilst casually discussing with passers-by the complex collection of decisions made to navigate his path. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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© Antonio Sansica
A model of the Kings Cross Development is constructed over a day with earth from the adjoinging construction site. Six 'builders' (in bright green t-shirts with ‘value’ printed on) converse with passers-by explaining their calculations that decide the height of each mud tower. It is demolished at dusk. Part of AIR's Unannounced Acts of Publicness.
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Installation view © AIR
A novel-in-progress, set in a place rather like the Cally twenty-five years after excavations for a vast underground international train terminal have collapsed taking the stations and housing communities with it, written in response to conversation with a retired solicitor and local resident. Part of AIR's Cally Calls.
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© Niels Braun, Adam Csoka, Opashona Ghosh, Edgar Ospina
A proposal for a Camden Council's Environmental Services feedback system with an associated advertising campaign to communicate the work of the service, researched through working with the street team. An MA Communication Design student live project.
For information about the designers Nils Braun Adam Csoka Opashona Ghosh
© Peter Barker
Twenty performers reenact scenes from Julien's film Looking For Langston (1989) in a series of impressionistic tableaux in the streets behind King's Cross station with projections and dancing. Comissioned for Edge 90 with support from GLC, LB Camden, Projects UK.
More information about the work, artist and an online publication
©Mir Gwilliam-Parkes
An ongoing project begun while studying BA Fine Art at CSM, documenting the regeneration of King's Cross by capturing changing views of the landscape that evolve and vanish during redevelopment.
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© Ria Pacquée
© Angela Ingliss
Collection of photographs by photographer and long-term local resident Angela Inglis, documenting the changing landscape of King's Cross. Published by Troubadour.
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© Richard Wentworth
Wentworth, a King's Cross resident for the last fifty years, installed maps, a periscope and ping pong tables in a vacated plumbing shop on York Way, and devised a programme of walks, workshops, talks, screenings and tournaments to explore the shifting nature of the city. An Artangel commission.
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© Richard Wentworth
Nahoko Kudo and Ben Campkin made a series of black and white computer drawings based on Richard Wentworth's photographs of King's Cross. Shown as part of An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty.
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© Mark Titchener
Lightwork on LB Camden's new headquarters reinterpreting the borough's historic motto 'Non Sibi Sed Toti'.
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© Alex Gerry
A regular club night at Central Station (1993-5). The basement was transformed each time by Urquhart with poems, drawings and short stories reponding to the chosen theme (eg. My Daughter’s Wedding Turned Out To Be A Terrible Disappointment, Lady Blows the Singhs).
More about the artist, watch Tales of the Potting Shed, Lady Blows the Singhs, and Leigh Bowery and Donald Urquhart at the club
© National Railway Museum/Science & Society Picture Library
One of a pair of paintings depicting station scenes – King's Cross (Going North) and Perth (Going South) – celebrations of prosperity, privilege, and the romance of train travel, with detailed attention to travel fashion and paraphanalia.
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© Mark Newell
Speculative survey for sash window repairs made over a week living in the boarded up Culross Buildings which were under a demolition order by the King's Cross Estate. The work included charcoal wall drawings inspired by William Faulkner's As I lay dying.
Film still ©Schady and Kedar
A series of films based on a text chosen from William Golding's novel The Lord of the Flies. The source of the text was not revealed to the students until after the filming was complete and the resulting films are a reflection of the students individual interpretations of the text, produced in collaboration with Schady and Kedar. Part of Junction, Camden Arts Centre.
Watch on Youtube
Image credit unknown
As a train departs handkerchiefs attached with strings to old-fashioned suitcases on the platform are pulled with it and the artwork is ‘destroyed’. Left Luggage was the opening performance at the Edge 90 festival.
More information on the artist
© Nicky Bamber
Murals with accompanying soundworks made in response to community oral history, reflecting how old and new co-exist within the everyday. Two works in King's Cross as part of a wider series across Camden.
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film still by unknown photographer
A comedy feature film focusing on a motor-cycle courier and his girlfriend living in the former Stanley Buildings in King's Cross. The plot includes their problems with 'yuppies' moving into the neighbourhood and outpricing them.
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© Ellie Reid
A series of sculptures and films made during a sixth month residency on the Kings Cross regeneration sites and exhibited in the German Gymnasium before its renovation. The residency was a partnership project by Arts Council England and Argent.
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© BFI
A documentary relating the St Pancras Housing Association’s pioneering approach to slum clearance including the building of high quality social housing to rehouse every person locally, Father Jellicoe and his colleagues' careful approach to rent collection, and annual outings and pantomines.
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film still by unknown photographer
A film about two teenage friends in Somers Town. The father of one is working on the new Channel Tunnel rail link. They both fancy the same girl and the film follows their bickering over who loves her the most. The film was funded by Eurostar.
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© London Mural Preservation Society
Mural shows view from old Somers Town over industrial Victorian London, Fleet river and St Pancras Church. It features famous residents Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and local people who fought for the mural's rennovation and move to current location in 2007. Funded by the GLC, LB Camden, Arts Council.
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© Cornelia Marland
Marland makes visible the life and work of long-term Caledonian Road resident Jim Geddes (1932-2009). The project includes film, ceramics workshops, and an exhibition (at former KC Continental Deli next door to where Geddes lived) exploring his sculptures, paintings and textiles.
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© Museum of London
Oil on canvas. St Pancras seen from Penonville Road with the Welsh Congregational Church on the left, St. James's Church on the right, and the Lighthouse Building below, with the dome of University College in the distance. Street figures include a policeman, a postman and sandwich-board men.
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© Sarah Weal
Two-part radio programme relating stories of lives lived around London's King's Cross station through interviews, further to the oral history project King's Cross Voices. Broadcast by BBC Radio 4.
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© Mark Newell
Self-portrait taken in St Pancras undercroft where the passport control for the Eurostar is now, and where there was once a Roman camp. Newell took sitework as a carpenter to gain access.
Installation view © AIR
A postal artwork of seven daily packages containing audio, object and text piecing together a history of Housmans Bookshop on the Caledonian Road where postwar British pacifism and radicalism have persisted and thrived, whilst the might of developers and multinationals have been resisted. Part of AIR's Cally Calls.
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© BFI
A social critique juxtaposing shots of slum dwellings with homes of the wealthy, reminiscent of 1920's Soviet filmmaker techniques. Commissioned by St. Pancras House Improvement Society
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© Wellcome Trust
Illustration of the view from Maiden Lane (now York Way) of the dustheap in King's Cross. The caption explains it was removed in 1848 to assist in rebuilding the city of Moscow. There is a smallpox hospital in the background.
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Charles Booth Maps Descriptive of London Poverty,1891
An MSc dissertation exploring the relationship between mapping and urban change through cartographic representations of King's Cross from 19C onwards. Ross argues for an understanding of maps as active participants in urban change and draws out a relevance to the contemporaneous King's Cross redevelopment.
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© Sarah Weal
Oral history project recording memories of teachers, shopkeepers, publicans, policemen, students, squatters, housewives, social workers, builders, actors, artists, campaigners, politicians, prostitutes, factory workers, cleaners, office workers and railway workers who have lived, worked and studied in King's Cross, with accompanying series of photographic portraits by Sarah Weal.
More information about the oral history project and photographs
Derek Jarman 'King's Cross' tour video, Youtube screengrab
King's Cross was written by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant and released on 1987 album Actually. Tennant has described the song as a 'metaphor for Britain' and 'an angry song about Thatcherism'.
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© Leon Kossof
Oil painting showing a woman standing outside King's Cross Station. Kossof was born in Islington where he spent his early years, and had a studio in Mornington Crescent in the 1950s.
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Derek Jarman 'King's Cross' tour video, Youtube screengrab
Black and white super8 footage featuring underground station ticket hall, gas towers, and trains leaving station. Edited as music video for Pet Shops Boys' song 'Rent' (October 1987). Enlarged as 70mm back-projections for their song 'King's Cross' in 1989 tour.
Watch on youtube
© Egied Simons
A dovecot designed for London pigeons, painted in 'Royal Mail Red' and placed over the entrance of the mail vans depot in front of St Pancras Station. Part of Northern Adventures exhibition.
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Photographer unknown
A working replica of the station’s clock, reversed in black and silver, suspended sixteen metres infront of the original. For those alighting from the trains the original face gradually appears eclipsed. Commissioned for St Pancras International’s Terrace Wires, a partnership between HS1 and the Royal Academy.
More information on the artist
More information on the commission
© Colin Bailey
A set of five etchings by Hillview Estate resident Colin Bailey inspired by John O'Connors painting From Pentonville Road looking west: evening: 1884, depicting views of the St Pancras clock tower from Hillview and from the north of the Euston Road.
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Seton Smith Untitled (Tree & Viaduct) 1993
An exhibition at St Pancras Chambers of work by ten artists responding to the past, present and future of St Pancras Station. Works include a dovecote for pigeons in 'Royal Mail Red', pavement paintings, photographic and installation works. A Camden Arts Centre project.
For information
© Public Works
Tips, tricks and slogans for regeneration using local small scale and grass roots initiatives, gathered in poster format from King's Cross activists, residents, workers and commuters, and housed in public work's Folk Float. Later exhibited at Camden Arts Centre.
More about the work and public works
copyright unknown
Protest song about a neglected concrete pond behind LB Camden's town hall.
Listen to it here
copyright unknown
A monthly revue-show from the King's Cross Splash Club at the Water Rats, conceived by Offset, a collective of musicians, poets and artists. Performances included artists force-feeding themselves raw liver and on stage body piercings. Glamorre and Bateman-Bowery finished each evening singing So You Think This Is Art?
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View of Almeida Theatre from Caledonian Road © Haworth Tompkins
A chapter in Campkin's book Remaking London relating the narratives of blight and regeneration in the de-industrialised King's Cross through an examination of cultural artefacts and the Almeida's temporary theatre. Published by I.B. Tauris.
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© Tas Kyprianou
Cole worked with Coram's Young Parents Group for over a year, to explore experiences of being a very young parent. Smother emerged from this process as a performance in an empty five-storey triangular house, where performers could be found ice-skating, fuming, gagging, juggling and dancing. An Artangel commission.
© Marcia Farquhar
A performed tour leading listeners through King's Cross, contrasting the frenetic regeneration efforts with testimonies of former inhabitants, accompanied by a cd of interviews with past and present residents of the Hillview Estate and the surrounding area. Commissioned for SPIN at the British Museum.
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© Catherine Packard
A magazine created by people living in King's Cross to focus on local lives and issues during times of redevelopment and gentrification. One pilot issue produced under umbrella of Communities in Focus. Supported by Camden Council.
© AIR
A limited edition set of eight postcards depicting King's Cross, selected by a competition judged by Richard Wentworth and Jenni Lomax, including an image of a work by Cornelia Parker in St Pancras Chambers for Northern Adventures. Produced by Cross Section Magazine and exhibited at Scarlet Maguire Gallery as part of the Arrivals Festival.
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© London Mural Preservation Society
Extensive murals over several arches, telling the story of the building of the Calthorpe project and featuring stories and images contributed by St George the Martyr School, Argyll School, and the Bengali Workers Action Group.
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©Catherine Packard
An exhibition of photographs in and around Hillview, a victorian housing estate vilified by the press. Packard, a resident, took many during festivals and events in the 80's and 90's organised by local artists, musicians and performers. The images were accompanied by interviews from the King’s Cross Voices oral history project.
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The King’s Cross Field Map is a log of creative response to this place. The entries include artworks and interventions, hypothetical proposals, and place-based research, and reveal the breadth of response by artists and designers. The works we have selected recognise a local place and the people living and working here, with a particular sensitivity to their immediate, and broader, political and social context in an area under considerable processes of urban change. As a whole the selection traces trajectories of commissioning, permissions, funding, and programming, and is a gathering of significant work offered as public resource and prompt for future reminiscences, reworkings, exchanges, and collaborations.
If you would like to suggest something to be entered on the King’s Cross Field Map please email info@airstudio.org. We have attempted to contact all authors and copyright holders. Please contact us if there is any incorrect content.
Concept and curation: Tilly Fowler & Anna Hart
Design: Duarte Carrilho da Graça
Published by AIR, 2016
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