The Dhaus Company publish latest Arches construction photos

Text by The Dhaus Company

DHaus is currently building 6 x new homes in North London, the homes each have 4 bedrooms and are arranged in a terraced formation.

The concept for the new architecture is influenced by the gothic arches of the Church at the rear of the site and all of the brick railway arches that crisscross the local area.

All 19 prefabricated brick arches have now been installed and we are working fast to seal the building.

First fix electrics have now started and we are due to complete works at the end of this summer.

CZWG - East Riverside Published on Architects Journal

AVR London’s aerial visualisation of proposals by CZWG have been published by Architects Journal today.

The image is a collaboration between CZWG, AVR London’s 3D team, drone pilot Tony Jackson and myself. Work began with AVR London’s Uma Shan and myself sitting down to look at potential aerial views looking west towards Canary Wharf and Central London, the site is well located to include these two landmark locations. We set the view up in 3D, working within the bounds of maximum drone heights and started looking at times of day.

Given the waterside location and the colouring of the towers we decided early evening would work well, the warm evening light also tying together the surrounding urban context. I arranged permissions from the landowner for access to take off/land the drone and Tony sorted out all the relevant permissions to fly.

On the day of the shoot Tony and I arrived in good time to ensure we could safely operate from the site, the police were called to ensure they were aware of our flight. The lighting panned out nicely, we knew what time we wanted to shoot but shot an multiple times to ensure we got the maximum from the occasion. After this shot we also shot a lower dusk shot where the buildings are much more prominent while still showing the context of their East London surroundings.

Dhaus publish latest construction photography of The Arches

The Dhaus Company have published Matthew’s latest photographs of the progress on site at The Arches currently under construction on Highgate Road, North London.

The basement has now been fully excavated and reinforced with the intermediate slab now cast. The flank walls and upper level timber frame will follow.

Read the full article / The Dhaus Company

Elephant on a tightrope

Work Matthew shot in collaboration with Robin Farley (art director) and Joe Lloyd (writer) for ICON Magazine is in this months issue (October 2019) Well worth a read, Joe looks at the changing Elephant and Castle including; the Shopping Centre, Elephant Park, and Aylesbury Estate.

Exhibition Extended

Good news! We’re extending our stay at Anise Gallery, the exhibition was supposed to end on Friday 14th June but will now run until Friday 21st June. We will also have a late night opening on the 21st June until 8:30PM with drinks so come down and join us!

Print still for sale Via www.anise.gallery

Londonist

Matthew was interviewed this week by Londonist Editor Will Noble and featured on an article with Londonist.com. Article link below!

Read the full article / Londonist

Wallpaper Magazine

Fantastic to see today that Wallpaper Magazine have listed the exhibition of Every Building on the Old Kent Road at Anise Gallery as one of their “What to see at London Festival of Architecture 2019”.

Annotations

As part of my planning for the shoot, I annotated an image of me setting up the truck for the shoot in the same way Ruscha did. The annotated image below is an interesting insight in to Ruscha’s technique and it’s also interesting to look at the differences. Ruscha shot on a 35mm lens from the opposite side of the road i.e driving on the south side shooting the north side. This won’t be possible along the Old Kent Road due to the central reservation with trees blocking the view. I plan to therefore shoot with a 17mm lens, portrait as I will be much closer to the buildings, this should allow me to capture the majority of height of all the buildings. I’m also having to shoot through the sunroof rather than on the back of the truck for legal reasons.

GIF

I want to create something different to accompany the printed form of Every Building on the Old Kent Road, I’ve had a few ideas. Today I set up a GIF of the test shots I took last weekend, the idea is to show the full length on both sides, using every image shot.

Quick test at an accordion fold

I decided once I edited the images together in to a consecutive elevation I would begin to attempt an accordion fold. I thought a small tab would work to connect one page to the next with the remaining paper left for the image folded in half. This should allow for a neat folded final piece.

On InDesign I laid out my simple design and measured the ratio of the box. I used this ratio to crop my long panorama in to smaller chunks. Once printed and folded I glued the pages and it went pretty smoothly. Obviously going forward I’ll be wanting to put each side of the road opposite each other but I should be able to adapt this method.

Truck Tests

Today I began testing with the truck with assistance from Amy Stringer. I decided it was not possible to shoot from the back of the truck as it's unstable and illegal to sit with the camera. I therefore removed the sunroof from the truck and set the tripod up in the cab.

I setup the tripod and set up the camera so it was above the roof line of the truck. I made sure the truck wasn't in the vertical field of view and decided not to shift the lens to begin with. With regard to settings I decided to begin with around 1/200 and allow the camera to choose its own aperture to allow for variance in lighting conditions, shutter speed is the key as the vehicle will be moving.

Once I got going Amy began shooting along Tower Bridge Road, we aimed to head for Old Kent Road for a real test as the road is wider, it then poured with rain! With the roof down we got pretty soaked and pulled in under a tree to wait it out. I checked the camera and decided I needed a faster shutter speed and we set off again. I drove down the middle lane heading east down OKR and Amy began shooting with the remote. It then poured with rain again! We called it a day and drove back to begin editing.

LFA Core Programme

Today it was officially announced at the launch of the London Festival of Architecture 2019 that the my exhibition of Every Building on The Old Kent Road will be part of the Core Programme.

Every Building on The Old Kent Road will be exhibited from 3rd June - 14th June 2019 at Anise Gallery, Bermondsey. Join me on the 6th June from 6PM for the official opening and drinks!

London Festival of Architecture 2019

Excited to announce that Every Building on The Old Kent Road will be exhibited this summer and has been accepted as part of this years London Festival of Architecture.

More info regarding dates and times to follow.

For the London Festival of Architecture 2019, Anise Gallery and Matthew White are curating a photographic documentation of the Old Kent Road. A homage to Ed Ruscha’s ‘Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966’ the final work will be presented as an elevation of the full 1.8 miles on either side of the road, depicting the architecture, scale and culture.

Using the same methodology as Ruscha’s iconic work, the photographs will be taken from a moving truck that will drive along the Old Kent Road. Stitching them together in post production will then allow a complete overview of the road as one image, a never before seen perspective.

Old Kent Road has a long evolving history, the changes due to the Bakerloo Line Extension to Lewisham could however be the most sudden to date. The planned tube extension has caused major development plans to be drawn up including 20,000 new homes and 5000 new jobs over the next 2 decades. White’s photography will therefore become an important historical record and document of this infamous London road.

Hand held tests

Every morning I get off my bus at the end of the Old Kent Road, having been taken down around 1/3rd of it. I began tests this morning by getting off my bus early on the way to work and walking down a section of the road shooting hand held.

I stood on the central reservation and shot at 90 degrees to the buildings that line the road. I shot an image then side stepped around 10 paces and shot again. I continued until I reached the end of the road at the Bricklayers Arms Roundabout. To begin editing I overplayed each image one at a time and spliced it straight down the middle, sometimes it fitted perfectly, other times where there was a lot of perspective change it looked weird and abstract. Both ways were interesting and the whole experience gave me a better understanding of the techniques I would need to perfect. I considered shooting the whole road hand held, quite a long and slow process, however I have decided against for several reasons.

1, it goes against the almost automated system Ruscha undertook
2, the camera is not high enough
3, not always possible to walk down the middle of the road

When I was shooting hand held I made too many decisions, “That car doesn’t look right”, “That person will look better in front of that window” etc. I don’t want those decisions to be made, the whole point is to document what I find, photography has a long running debate (since it’s inception) about whether a photograph is an honest depiction or if like paintings or drawings the artist has a bias. Detractors say that photography is just pressing a button, capturing what is there, whereas others say everything about an image is decided by the photographer. The photographer has overall control over when to press that shutter, the wait for the right light, the moving elements of the image to fall in to the right place, they even rearrange objects to suit their aesthetic/goals.

Ed Ruscha drawing of his set up

For Every Building I want to be as mechanical as possible, there are reasons I want to shoot how I shoot and I obviously have control over the situation but as much as possible I think shooting from a truck as Ruscha did is the best way to approach it. The truck will travel along the road at a steady pace (depending on traffic) and I will shoot at set intervals using a remote. This means while I press the shutter I won’t be standing there waiting for the conditions I see best with regard to composition, lighting etc. The project is mostly about planning and editing, the photography in the middle will be a pure (as much as I can hope) documentation.

Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966

Ed Ruscha’s photography was unconventional for it’s time, as was his way of presenting his work in self published unpretentious books. Each of his books were upfront about their content, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Nine Swimming Pools and Every Building on the Sunset Strip. I love this approach, its stripped back and simple, beautiful and upfront, a documentation of what is around us, presented simply for us to experience in a straightforward way.

Ruscha shot the entire length of the Sunset Strip from the back of a pickup truck, then spent 9 months splicing the images together to form the continuous length. The presentation is a concertina side after side of folded paper, the top side shows one side of the street and the bottom shows the opposite side, facing each other. Ruscha sold his books for only a few dollars each, disregarding the artist’s book as a precious object, he has described them as “snapshots with only an average attention to clarity” and “technical data”

How to document OKR

How can such a large area of London be documented in a coherent way? For me the people on the street and the architecture that frames the road are the two most intriguing parts of OKR. I've been thinking about this for a while and two things keep coming back to me Ed Ruscha's work and Google Street view. In 1966 Ed Ruscha documented every building on the sunset strip from the back of a truck and published it in a continuous concertina.

I first learnt about Ruscha while studying photography and was in awe of his stripped back simplistic ideas, his execution and his hand made publications. Every building on the sunset strip was a revolution, to document such a long stretch of road and present it in such a concise manner. The editing is abstract, images spliced together and I think that really adds to the work, to have a perfect elevation along the road would be somewhat sterile. Ruscha could not have known at the time but his work could be seen as a forerunner of Google Street View, the technology which photographs and documents almost every road in the planet it would seem, I myself have been captured on street view numerous times (see below). It's interesting to compare the various iterations between 2008 and 2019, imagine if we could see our roads in their entirety in 1908!

I want to create a documentation of OKR in homage to Ed Ruscha, to celebrate the road and Ruscha.

Historical photographs

As a photographer it’s interesting to me that what we experience every day doesn't seem that interesting or extraordinary but with the passage of time it's true value reveals itself. Photography works as a window on the past and it's fascinating to compare the past with the present in such a striking way.

It is my endeavour with this project to document and explore Old Kent Road at this moment in time. Perhaps one day in the future we will look back on this period of time with a much different perspective.

It's all change

Old Kent Road is about to change extensively and rapidly. This is in part due to the planned Bakerloo Line extension. The underground line currently terminates at Elephant and Castle but under proposed plans it will be extended to Lewisham with 3 stops along Old Kent Road. As with the Elizabeth Line property developers have preempted these infrastructure improvements by drawing up plans to develop the extensive swathes of land currently occupied by industry, out of town shopping and supermarkets. The developments are all much taller than anything Old Kent Road has seen before and if Elephant and castle, Nine Elms or Canada Water are anything to go by the area will be transformed.

OKR like most of London has constantly been changing and has gone through several defined eras/stages, this though seems like the biggest yet. Many of the towers have planning permission already and 1 (Bermondsey Works) is complete.

There are 2 main improvements coming from the Bakerloo Line Extension. Number one is improved links between central London and the area of OKR, this should have a huge positive impact on the pollution along the road. Number 2 is the building of thousands of new homes. It’s down to the council to ensure it’s done properly with sufficient affordable housing and to ensure the community and character are preserved.

OKR Brief History

The Old Kent Road is situated in south east London. It runs in a fairly straight line and is angled north west to south east at a roughly 45 degree angle on a map. It runs for 1.8 miles and forms part of the A2 which (unsurprisingly) leads to Kent. The road is part of the historic Watling Street which was an ancient trackway trodden by the Britons and later paved by the Romans. Watling Street ran from what is now Canterbury to St Albans via central London. As you might imagine such an historic and important route has borne witness to some monumental events. Pilgrims heading to Canterbury as documented by Chaucer, soldiers marching back from victory at Agincourt in 1415, public hangings and more.

In more modern times the road became more industrial with large gas holders built alongside the Surrey canal and railway sidings near the Bricklayers Arms. During the 19th and 20th century the road became known for its organised crime and violence. At one point there were 39 pubs along the road! The biggest changes happened post war when the flyover was built at the north west end of the road, derelict victorian housing was demolished to build housing estates and as part of the 1943 County of London Plan Burgess Park was built. The Surrey canal was filled in and now acts as a green cycleway from Peckham to Bermondsey.

Old Kent Road

My first awareness, growing up outside London, of the Old Kent Road was playing Monopoly as a child. The first square on the board and the cheapest property to buy the connotations were laid out from the start. Obviously as a child I wasn't that interested in finding out much more about what was to me some obscure road in London, but I must have assumed that it had importance like every other square on the board, why else would they have been chosen?

When I moved to London I lived in the North East and it wasn't until my work as a photographer took me to OKR that I started exploring and thinking about the road. I had a few jobs which required me to walk expansively around the area and found it fascinating. It felt to me quite hostile at first, the road is busy, loud, dirty and the industry along the road is dusty and scruffy looking. The people though seemed to know each other and were friendly.

There isn't a wide variation in height along OKR the variation comes in space on the ground, some premises are tiny whereas others seem to take up the whole of your gaze. It struck me as quite an jarring place, the juxtaposition of huge supermarkets, with their vast car parks, industrial garages and workshops against small retailers and cafes is stark.

Until you see an area every day it's hard to understand the way it works. When I moved to SE London I started experiencing OKR every day on my bus route, the 363. Fascinated at the culture and how the area got to where it is now with regard to it's fame and heritage I began reading its history and future, I decided I wanted to document the road as it stand today.