Stories and the City

A YOUNG URBANISTS PROJECT BY TRACEY TAYLOR & SZU AN YU

STORIES & THE CITY BRINGING NEW PERSPECTIVES TO URBAN ENVIRONMENTS THROUGH CREATIVE WRITING

A YOUNG URBANISTS PROJECT BY TRACEY TAYLOR & SZU AN YU

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Young Urbanists and Bright Pryde-Saha for project funding and support Our five writers, Tess Little, Jon Wood, Lana Doyle, Kit Samuels and Manasi Pophale Raquel Ajates Gonzalez for support and a wonderful essay Manasi Pophale for installation photography Tomas Dryburgh for advice and support

academyofurbanism.org.uk.

STORIES & THE CITY Stories & the City explores how new perspectives can be brought to urban environments through creative writing.

In collaboration with five writers, we created an urban installation outside Moorgate Station, supported by online social media. The installation offered commuters a series of new evocative, thought-provoking and surprising perspectives on Moorgate’s urban environment.

INTRODUCTION Stories & the City explores how new perspectives can be brought to urban environments through creative writing.

London’s contemporary urban environment is evolving rapidly and on a large scale, driven by many factors that seem relatively remote from the small scale qualities of everyday human experience: urban masterplanning, building floor space, transport networks and traffic flow.

The project is interested in how we might return human qualities to our experience of the urban environment through finding new perspectives on these urban spaces, that represent creative and uniquely human ways of imagining and understanding.

Stories & the City uses creative writing to bring new perspectives to a very specific site: in this case, Moorgate Station in central London, in September 2015.

We worked with five writers to produce five new and unique creative responses to Moorgate and the surrounding area. Presented as an installation of posters outside the station, supported by online social media, these creative perspectives offered Moorgate’s thousands of daily commuters new ways of understanding this particular urban space.

In its conception and design, the project aimed to ‘reframe’ a familiar urban space for Moorgate’s commuters. The installation was displayed close to the Underground station entrance on Moorgate itself, meaning that commuters would emerge from the underground into the street and encounter the posters almost immediately, as a new lens on the urban view in front of them. The posters were transparent, creating a sense of floating text layered over the cityscape.

We distributed handouts to accompany the installation, connecting to an online Stories & the City blog and Twitter feed. Through engaging Moorgate’s commuters, the project sought to change the way they think about Moorgate, its history and its qualities as an urban environment.

We believe that a key principle of vibrant urban spaces is human scale and a sense of distinct character.

Focusing on Moorgate, the Stories & the City project offers a way of reintroducing these qualities to an urban site through which thousands of people pass every day without stopping - a site that is a

busy transport hub, surrounded by large scale new construction and offering relatively little to engage people at street level.

More broadly, the project investigates how the way in which something is described informs our understanding of it. We think this is a key mechanism of creativity: simply by changing our perspective on the environment around us, it can change that environment itself, bringing new ways of thinking and producing new forms of knowledge that enable us to see differently.

In the design tools and approaches it employes, the Stories & the City project belongs to the genre of urban typography projects, which have used words and their design to allow the city to ‘speak’. These kinds of projects open up a dialogue between people and the city – one key way of infusing human qualities into the urban spaces around us.

In its use of primarily poetic texts, the project also sits in a tradition of urban poetry that ranges from sculpted poetic texts embedded in the urban environment itself, to projects such as Transport for London’s Poems on the Underground, which layers poetry alongside advertising in Tube carriages.

Additionally, Stories & the City attempts to gather new perspectives on the city. In this sense it connects with a wider set of projects that seek to produce and gather new knowledge about the city, from performances and installations to the current proliferation projects that create the city in new ways, for instance The Urban Orchard Project and various artistic mapping projects.

THE SITE Our project is focused on Moorgate Station in central London.

A busy commuter hub, Moorgate connects to the Northern, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan and Circle lines, as well as to the National Rail.

The underground station alone is used by over 21 million people every year, travelling in and out of the central city.

With a mixture of architecture – from the original station building, dating from 1865, to the glassy and curving Moor House, built in 2005 and designed by Foster & Partners – Moorgate currently sits just to the north of London’s commercial centre, bisected by a key arterial route through the city. The area is dominated by office and retail buildings, most dating from the late 19th century through to the current day.

Like most of London, the broader outlines of Moorgate’s history are filled with a mosaic of events and stories. Moorgate was the birthplace of John Keats and the site of the first hydrogen balloon flight in London, in 1784. Moorgate Station is also known for the tragic Moorgate tube crash of 1975, when an underground train terminating at Moorgate failed to stop and crashed into a brick wall, killing 43 people.

As its name suggests, the site was originally a moor.

Due to the difficulty of draining its swampy marshland terrain, it was one of the last parts of central London to be developed and remained open ground until 1606, when it was landscaped to become a public park, Moor Fields. The 19th century economic boom of Britain’s powerful industry and expanding empire saw the transformation of Moorgate into a commercial centre, with the area’s domestic streets replaced by offices and corporate buildings, including the headquarters of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later to become British Petroleum, in the grand and newly constructed Britannic House.

In 2015, Moorgate is a site in flux. The construction of a new Crossrail entrance adjacent to the existing station will change not only the site’s physical architecture but also its patterns of movement: the trains and buses that connect into and out from the station from the wider transport network, as well as the thousands of commuters who flow through Moorgate each day. The commercial opportunities that the Crossrail connection promises are also visible in the flurry of commercial and retail developments in the surrounding streets, with new skyscrapers rising from the ground and the outlines of new buildings emerging from the masterplan into reality.

THE PROJECT TEAM The project was conceived and led by designers Tracey Taylor and Szu An Yu. Supported by the Young Urbanists, we collaborated with writers Tess Little, Kit Samuels, Lana Doyle, Jon Wood and Manasi Pophale, and writer/researcher Raquel Ajates.

Project conception, design & installation

Creative writing

Tracey Taylor & Szu An Yu

Tess Little, Kit Samuels, Lana Doyle, Jon Wood & Manasi Pophale

Tracey Taylor is a designer and writer. After completing a Masters in Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, Tracey currently works as a content developer for an exhibition design consultancy.

She previously worked as a graphic designer for an architectural and urban design studio, and developed design and exhibitions for a contemporary art gallery and an urban ‘art quarter’ in New Zealand.

Szu An Yu is a designer and architect. Currently based in London, where she studied for a Masters in Narrative Environments, she works as a graphic designer for a wayfinding and signage design consultancy. Szu An previously worked in Taiwan, where she completed various graphic design and architectural projects and developed exhibitions, including for REC Alternative Space and Curating.

Funding & support The project was generously funded by a Young Urbanists Small Grant Scheme award.

Evaluation Raquel Ajates Gonzalez Raquel Ajates Gonzalez is a member and codirector of the Rural Urban Synthesis Society Community Land Trust and a teaching fellow in the Centre for Food Policy at City University London working on the Innovative Food Systems Teaching and Learning (IFSTAL) project.

Tess Little is a writer, historian and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She has published short stories in Words And Women: Two and The Belleville Park Pages, and has worked as a journalist for Reuters. Tess is currently writing nonfiction articles and her first novel.

Kit Samuels is a writer and retired history teacher who has recently completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. He is currently undertaking a research degree in History at the University of London.

Lana Doyle is a writer from Wellington, New Zealand.

She is currently based in London.

Jon Wood is a writer and architect. He has worked at the award-winning practice Greenhill Jenner Architects and has taught at the Manchester School of Architecture. Jon has recently completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster.

Manasi Pophale is a writer and exhibition designer.

After completing an MA in Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins, she recently completed a Summer Intensive course in Design Research and Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

THE PROCESS The project followed a process of five phases: 1. Engagement and briefing 2. Preparation 3. Design and production 4. Installation 5. Documentation and evaluation

1. Engagement and briefing During this phase, we located, engaged and briefed our five writers.

In order to produce five different perspectives on Moorgate, we looked for writers with a range of different creative styles and approaches, some of whom had an interest in urban environments and some of whom had not written about urban spaces before.

Some of the writers had been our collaborators on previous projects, which enabled us to build on and extend these existing creative relationships. Others were new to this project, which gave us the pleasure of meeting and discovering new collaborators and new approaches.

Site briefing at Moorgate Station

Having approached and engaged the five writers, we developed a Writers’ Brief, which we sent out to the writers. We took each of them on an individual visit to Moorgate Station, where we explored and discussed the site, and talked through the brief.

Each writer then took this away with them to work on their creative response individually.

WRITERS’ BRIEF

Project context

The brief

What happens next?

Stories & the City explores how new perspectives – and in particular, uniquely human perspectives – can be brought to urban environments through creative writing.

Please produce a short written creative response to the area outside Moorgate Station that offers a new and unique perspective on it. We’re interested in how your work might give Londoners an opportunity to see this urban view in an entirely different way. How can they look at it through different eyes? How can they find things in it to relate to on a human level?

All of the pieces will be published at full length, and in their original form or format, in a digital book, which will be circulated to the Academy of Urbanism through the Young Urbanists.

London’s contemporary urban environment is evolving rapidly and on a large scale, with driven by many factors that seem relatively remote from the qualities of everyday human experience, such as urban masterplanning, the economics of new construction, building floor space, transport networks and traffic flow.

In the process, the city’s resulting urban spaces are at risk of becoming impersonal, devoid of human qualities.

This project is interested in how we might return human qualities to our experience of the urban environment – not primarily through physical interventions into the environment itself but rather through finding new perspectives on these urban spaces that represent creative and uniquely human ways of imagining and understanding.

Writers’ Brief

As a rough guide, a short piece of prose might be around 300 words.

However we’re happy to receive pieces of any form and length, as long as they’re written (ie text not images).

A short excerpt from each piece will be displayed on a poster installation outside Moorgate Station itself, where busy commuters will encounter these new perspectives as they emerge from the station and, through these, will have the opportunity to reconsider the way in which they understand their urban surroundings in a more poetic way.

They will also be given access to the digital book online.

2. Preparation In the second phase of the project, while the writers were underway producing their creative responses, we began preparations for the installation.

We set up an online Stories & the City project blog, on which we began posting regular updates on the project progress. This was intended as a useful tool for the Young Urbanists and other interested parties to follow the project, as well as forming the platform for the online publication of the stories to support our eventual installation. We also created a Twitter account to tweet project updates to the Young Urbanists and other project followers.

Stories & the City project blog

Working with the initial plans we had drawn up at the proposal stage, we developed and refined our design for a wooden frame structure that could be placed on the pavement outside Moorgate Station to display each of the posters.

We then consulted with the various authorities and organisations involved to seek their advice and permission for the project. These included Transport for London and their advertising partner, J C Decaux, as well as the Borough Planning Department of the City of London borough council. In the process, we undertook various modifications to the project plan, proposed poster size and frame structure design to ensure that it complied with regulations and didn’t pose any risk to the public.

Stories & the City Twitter feed

But Moorgateʼs

I speak, but you cannot hear me.

I see, but I cannot show you.

ʻoʼs

I remember, but I cannot remind you what this street was like the day I was born.

I was there when the bombs

3. Design and production As we received each of the completed written responses from the five writers, we began the process of designing and producing the posters.

With the final poster size in mind, as well as the limited time that Moorgate’s busy commuters would have in which to encounter and read the posters, we discussed and selected an excerpt from each written piece that would form a compelling and evocative poster text. We then created a bespoke graphic layout and typographic response for each excerpt to create five unique A1 sized posters. Each poster design was also adapted into a smaller A5 sized handout.

I

I will be here as the glass from the ground.

fell and

are full and soft.

grows

Old stone faces of Britannic House watch over faces reflected in glass screens emerging from the Station gates.

From Mascaron Monologue by Manasi Pophale / Stories & the City project / More details at storiesandthecity.tumblr.com

Yet never once do you pause and remember.

But then why would you?

It is so long ago now.

Over forty years.

Before you were even born.

From On Moorgate by Lana Doyle / Stories & the City project / More details at storiesandthecity.tumblr.com

Every stro ke I witness, between the flic kering deep shad ows of the perpendicular f orms, the puls e of p lume like c lo ts of s mo ke tha t p e e l and diss ipa t e int o the ho les and f issur es of Mo orgate.

Judge for yourself by casting your eye over this street of invisible commerce.

Are they about plunder or progress?

Do you ever think about it?

Do you even know about it?

There is no reason that you should of course.

The world has moved on.

Such things are easily forgotten with the passage of time and all too quickly subsumed in history's dark pool.

From An Ordinary Day by Kit Samuels / Stories & the City project / More details at storiesandthecity.tumblr.com

From The Lady of Moorgate by Jon Wood / Stories & the City project / More details at storiesandthecity.tumblr.com

of tunnels budding; spaces shrinking; holding hands and crossing paths; that humans stream like ants—

Once the design was finalised and the text approved, we printed the posters and handouts digitally in black and white on clear acetate.

Of thick and glassy squares beneath, How many scratches smoothed them matte; Of how many skin cells and particles of smoke It takes to turn this pavement black.

The display frame was constructed from timber, with inset hooks to hang the posters, and hinged to enable it to be folded up for easy transportation to and from the site.

From Besides by Tess Little / Stories & the City project / More details at storiesandthecity.tumblr.com

The five poster designs

4. Installation We installed the posters outside Moorgate Station on five weekdays in September 2015. Each installation featured a different poster, and was set up outside the station from 7.30am to 9am each morning, the peak period for commuters emerging from Moorgate Station.

Installation in progress

We were on site each morning to support the installation, giving out handouts and engaging with passersby who stopped to read the posters.

5. Documentation and evaluation We documented the project as it progressed in a ‘live’ way through updates on the online project blog and Twitter feed. Photographs throughout the preparation and production phases of the project formed a visual record of our process, while the installation itself was documented through photgraphy by one of our collaborators, writer and photographer Manasi Pophale.

We sought feedback from the writers, and also from members of the public who engaged with the installation.

Twitter updates during the installation phase

Analysing this documentation and feedback, as well as our own experiences during the project, we evaluated the successes of the project and identified opportunities for future development or improvement, detailed in this book. Another critical perspective was contributed to our evaluation in the form of a thought piece by Youg Urbanist writer and researcher Raquel Ajates Gonzalez, also published in this book.

THE INSTALLATION September 1st – 7th, 2015

The installation was set up outside Moorgate Station in the following sequence: Day 1 1st September Poster from ‘Besides’ by Tess Little Day 2 2nd September Poster from ‘An Ordinary Day’ by Kit Samuels Day 3 3rd September Poster from ‘On Moorgate’ by Lana Doyle Day 4 4th September Poster from ‘The Lady of Moorgate’ by Jon Wood Day 5 7th September Poster from ‘Mascaron Monologue’ by Manasi Pophale

EVALUATION Our evaluation process was undertaken by analysing our documentation of the project on the blog, the Twitter feed and our notes from the responses of Moorgate’s commuters during each installation.

We also sought feedback from the writers who collaborated with us and reflected on our own experiences of the project.

THE PROCESS Key insights The process of briefing the writers was one of the most important aspects of the project, as it both sparked and shaped the written responses. The success of the project very much depended on these responses creating genuinely engaging new perspectives on Moorgate, as the poster and installation design could only ever form a surface and a frame for the perspectives.

Undertaken as part of the briefing, the site visit with the writers was a strength of the project. We felt that it gave us a productive opportunity to discuss and guide the direction of the responses, while also taking on board the writers’ initial thoughts to ensure that we were not thinking too narrowly about the project ourselves. All of the writers felt the site visit to be very helpful in clarifying the brief and talking through early ideas. We also felt that the experience of having been physically at the site itself, with all its noise and atmosphere, informed the pieces the writers produced in a positive way, drawing out sensory qualities in their imagery and generating works that were highly site specific - that could only have been written about this place.

After the installation was finished, we also sought feedback from the writers on how they felt the process worked. Generally they initially felt challenged by the apparent openness of the brief, even after the site

visit. However after working on their responses – and especially after reading the responses of the other writers – they felt that the openness of the brief was a strength, as it produced a diverse set of approaches.

Some felt that the project gave them an opportunity to pursue or reflect an enduring interest that runs through their work, such as architecture or social history, while others, conversely, enjoyed the chance to be prompted to write something that they would never otherwise have written.

The poster design process was undertaken as a dialogue between the two of us as designers, and this is perhaps the aspect of the project that most strongly reflects our own collaborative practice and creative responses. We established a graphic language for each poster that stemmed from each unique piece of writing, and refined these collaboratively into a common language for the project, which resulted in five posters that feel bespoke and sensitive to their material, yet also connected to each other.

Opportunities One of the writers mentioned the possibility of a more open and communal process, where they could read and respond to each other’s written pieces, or even set briefs for each other. While this may affect the diversity of the written responses, which was generally a strength of the project, it could be useful in increasing the cohesiveness of the pieces as a kind of

conversation about a particular urban space.

The selection of the extracts for the posters from each written piece represents a form of curation, emphasising particular qualities and elements of each perspective. It could add an intriguing dimension to the project to involve the writers - or even, more broadly, the public, perhaps through an online process - in the selection of these extracts.

The process of consulting with the various authorities and organisations involved in the project, while protracted, did provide us with a sound understanding of the requirements and parameters for these kinds of public urban space projects. The design for our installation structure was ultimately modified to fit within these requirements. In future, it would be interesting to start the project with this knowledge and work within these parameters from the outset, exploring creative ways of flexing what is possible within these boundaries.

Finally, we didn’t set an overt brief for the poster design, working more intuitively and in conversation with each other. While we felt that this did produce a strong and diverse yet coherent set of posters, it would also be interesting in future to try out a more clearly established methodology for these, to explore how the poster design can further enhance the communication of different poetic perspectives.

THE INSTALLATION Key insights While we had worked on the basis that Moorgate Station’s busy commuters would have little time to spare, the reality was that they had even less time than we had anticipated. Some passersby did stop to look more closely and ask about the project, and over the course of the installation, we developed a cast of ‘regulars’ who would greet us each morning and eagerly take the day’s story. The majority, however, encountered the poster at a glance, slowing briefly in their stride to register and read the poster, and then moving quickly on. Many also took the handouts as they passed, or doubled back to take one.

The underlying challenge of this kind of installation is attracting attention in an urban environment that is a kaleidoscope of different colours, textures, movement, posters, advertising and information. The greatest strength of the installationin this regard was in fact a relatively small thing: the distinctiveness and beauty of the transparent acetate. Layering text over the urban landscape, reflecting the light, the transparent posters and handouts were visibly different to the assortment of other posters, flyers, newspapers and advertisements on offer outside the station. They caught the attention and interest of passersby.

The conception of the installation as a series of different posters over subsequent days was also a strength. It enabled the project to gain a presence

at Moorgate Station and in commuters’ minds; by providing refreshed content each day, it established the project as a rich and rewarding narrative for those who engaged with it, offering something more enduring and memorable than just a one-off encounter.

The handouts were a more successful strategy than we had predicted, as they allowed commuters to take something away with them very quickly - in an interaction lasting only a second or two - and return to it later in their own time. The blog address was written on the bottom of each handout, and we noticed a spike in activity on the blog after each morning, suggesting that people had taken the handouts and visited the blog when they got to work.

We also felt that the ‘glance’, which was the most common form of encounter with the poster, was not in fact a failing of the project, but a particular and familiar form of experience in the urban environment. Flooded with sensory information in urban environments that are busy, multi-coloured, multitextured and layered with information, the glance is our way of quickly processing the urban world around us. A glance at our posters offered commuters something unexpected, a moment of disruption in the smooth flow of the world as it rushes past them. We felt that the brief but perceptible slow in their walk as they took in the poster text meant that we had contributed something to their morning experience of the urban world, and hopefully, to their imagination.

Opportunities We wonder whether it would be possible in the future to signal to our audiences more clearly what the project is about. While there was to some extent a nice sense of discovery inherent in the subtlety of the installation – it was unobtrusive and intriguing, yet rewarding for those who took the time to engage – it nonetheless generally required us to explain its poetic intent. It may be beneficial to explore how we could do this in the future, perhaps through developing the iconography of the display structure as a kind of ‘frame’, or investigating other very different mechanisms of display, such as projection.

The success of the handouts also suggests that these could be further developed as a strategy for engaging audiences. Our approach, with a copy of the poem and a link to the blog, was relatively straightforward and passive; in future, the handouts could perhaps question or prompt, or carry some other engaging function or task.

Finally, we learned a great deal about the importance of the physical position of the installation in relation to the station entrance, which is crucial in terms of the timing of encounters: commuters would often pass by and then double back to take a handout, suggesting that there might be some potential in extending or stretching out the installation somehow, to give them more time to engage.

“I didn’t know about all this history of Moorgate... it makes you look at it differently, doesn’t it.”

MOORGATE COMMUTER, 2nd SEPTEMBER

“I don’t know anything about poetry but it does brighten up the morning!”

MOORGATE COMMUTER, 4th SEPTEMBER

“What’s a mascaron? Oh, right... I never noticed them before, up there watching everyone...”

MOORGATE COMMUTER, 7th SEPTEMBER Screenshot of blog activity, increasing in the mornings after the installations

THE RESPONSE Key insights The responses of commuters outside Moorgate Station were varied, ranging from indifference to curiosity, engagement and extended discussion. The feedback from those who did engage was almost universally positive; they generally felt that the project added pleasure to their morning experience of the city by breaking with routine and provoking thought.

The specificity of the written responses to Moorgate Station was revealed by the responses to be a strong element of the project. Commuters seemed particularly interested when they learned that the pieces described Moorgate, as they felt this to have an appealing relevance to them and their world.

The most frequent comments from commuters related to the aspects of Moorgate’s history that the written pieces revealed. Awareness of the stories of Moorgate’s history was generally low, even of relatively recent history, such as the Moorgate tube crash. This underlines that history is a compelling aspect of urban space to draw out; it seems to have a strong narrative appeal and a sense of significance.

History may also be particularly intriguing in urban areas with a dynamic relationship to the changing city, such as Moorgate, where the old facade of Britannic House faces the new Crossrail construction site.

The greatest and perhaps most sustained response to the project has been online. The project was photographed and tweeted by commuters, and our tweets were retweeted, creating an online community of sorts around the project. The installation was also

tweeted by the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

We felt that the increased blog activity after each morning’s installation constituted a positive form of response to the project, in that commuters were interested enough to follow up on the blog link listed on the handouts.

Opportunities While the social media aspect of the project was generally successful, we wonder whether how it could be pushed further, to invite more of a considered response from commuters. Twitter is a powerful mechanism for enabling audiences to put forward their own views, but the tweets relating to our project were mostly comments by passersby that they liked the project. In future iterations of the project, we would be interested in developing some kind of social media conversation about the project, soliciting more of audiences’ own contributions. These could be written perspectives of their own, or even visual ones.

We also felt that the blog could have been more connected to a forum that invited responses, either through a closer connection to Twitter or through developing an online conversation on the blog itself.

While there was a mechanism for posting comments, we would like in future to make this more overt and prompt responses more strongly.

If the project does continue in a future form, the online elements of the project can strongly support its future life, expanding awareness of the project and creating a record of the project over time as one long continuing story.

CONCLUSION The Stories & the City project has brought new perspectives to Moorgate Station - for the five writers involved, for Moorgate’s thousands of commuters, and for wider audiences who became interested in the project online via Twitter and the blog.

In a broader sense, the project has also piloted a creative approach and a methodology that could be used in further projects.

The approach of the Stories & the City project has been to draw out poetic perspectives on the history of an urban environment, its sensory qualities, its layers of meaning and its connection to people’s lives – and present these to a broad audience in the urban space itself.

Beyond Moorgate, the project has the potential to be extended to other urban sites around London and around the world. Each further iteration of the project would create another creative lens for a different urban site. There could be great value to assembling a set of these lenses across a single city, exploring the connections and discrepancies between them and creating a view on the city as a whole.

Our perspectives used creative writing as a medium.

However the project could test the possibility of other media in expressing perspectives – for instance, visual media such as photography, film and illlustration. We also see potential to exploring other media and other display strategies, such as projection or an expanded installation.

Subsequent developments of the project could also explore other ways of enabling audiences to encounter these perspectives. While the perspectives need to have a strong connection to place, online platforms and social media – as we discovered – are a particularly powerful way of reaching wide audiences. This nexus of online-offline could be further investigated to try out new ways in which the online world can be brought into a relationship with the physical urban spaces around us.

Finally, we hope that in further developments, Stories & the City will help to promote ‘good urbanism’ more broadly, making this a topic for discussion not just among urbanists but among everyone who uses the city in their daily lives. Shifting our perspective on an urban space encapsulates the possibility of change: by changing how we understand and interpret urban spaces, we open up the potential for reimagining them and reshaping them. We hope that this offers one contribution to a collective discussion on what we want our communal urban spaces to be and how we want to relate to them.

THE WRITERS’ B RIEF

WRITERS’ BRIEF

Project context

The brief

What happens next?

Stories & the City explores how new perspectives – and in particular, uniquely human perspectives – can be brought to urban environments through creative writing.

Please produce a short written creative response to the area outside Moorgate Station that offers a new and unique perspective on it. We’re interested in how your work might give Londoners an opportunity to see this urban view in an entirely different way. How can they look at it through different eyes? How can they find things in it to relate to on a human level?

All of the pieces will be published at full length, and in their original form or format, in a digital book, which will be circulated to the Academy of Urbanism through the Young Urbanists.

London’s contemporary urban environment is evolving rapidly and on a large scale, with driven by many factors that seem relatively remote from the qualities of everyday human experience, such as urban masterplanning, the economics of new construction, building floor space, transport networks and traffic flow.

In the process, the city’s resulting urban spaces are at risk of becoming impersonal, devoid of human qualities.

This project is interested in how we might return human qualities to our experience of the urban environment – not primarily through physical interventions into the environment itself but rather through finding new perspectives on these urban spaces that represent creative and uniquely human ways of imagining and understanding.

As a rough guide, a short piece of prose might be around 300 words.

However we’re happy to receive pieces of any form and length, as long as they’re written (ie text not images).

A short excerpt from each piece will be displayed on a poster installation outside Moorgate Station itself, where busy commuters will encounter these new perspectives as they emerge from the station and, through these, will have the opportunity to reconsider the way in which they understand their urban surroundings in a more poetic way.

They will also be given access to the digital book online.

WRITERS’ BRIEF Project context

The brief

What happens next?

Stories & the City explores how new perspectives – and in particular, uniquely human perspectives – can be brought to urban environments through creative writing.

Please produce a short written creative response to the area outside Moorgate Station that offers a new and unique perspective on it. We’re interested in how your work might give Londoners an opportunity to see this urban view in an entirely different way. How can they look at it through different eyes? How can they find things in it to relate to on a human level?

All of the pieces will be published at full length, and in their original form or format, in a digital book, which will be circulated to the Academy of Urbanism through the Young Urbanists.

London’s contemporary urban environment is evolving rapidly and on a large scale, with driven by many factors that seem relatively remote from the qualities of everyday human experience, such as urban masterplanning, the economics of new construction, building floor space, transport networks and traffic flow. In the process, the city’s resulting urban spaces are at risk of becoming impersonal, devoid of human qualities.

This project is interested in how we might return human qualities to our experience of the urban environment – not primarily through physical interventions into the environment itself but rather through finding new perspectives on these urban spaces that represent creative and uniquely human ways of imagining and understanding.

As a rough guide, a short piece of prose might be around 300 words.

However we’re happy to receive pieces of any form and length, as long as they’re written (ie text not images).

A short excerpt from each piece will be displayed on a poster installation outside Moorgate Station itself, where busy commuters will encounter these new perspectives as they emerge from the station and, through these, will have the opportunity to reconsider the way in which they understand their urban surroundings in a more poetic way. They will also be given access to the digital book online.

THE STORIES

‘BESIDES’ Tess Little

The time has come, while passing by, to talk of many things: of paper cups and dancing dust, of layers in the city; of how each dark pane is a person, each concrete chunk, one million steps; of how the pavements cracked and broke, by whom and what and when; of how, beneath the surface, a symphony of drills; of overhead a flock of birds, launching in one disparate sway; of tidal waves in blue, in grey And how to reflect, so perfectly, the melting-Turnered sky; of how the morning fades to noon, then lulling of the night; of elaborate patterns and metal words, who put them there (what for?); of knowing which is faster: each strata of the building to be replaced, removed, restored, or, each cell dying then regrows, not just new scars and longer hair, but an entire body no longer here; Of how this curb is scraping shoes, then balance-beam, and finally, bed; of yellow bars forming snakes, the oval window turns to red; of waves as simple magic tricks—the peak, the curving trough—not one whole but patterns of particles, bumping back and forth; of how we two are not complete, but two movements flowing fluid; of how the streets repeat your chapters, yet you not but one word of theirs; of mulching newspapers, trodden down wet, the stories that they wished to tell; of how snugly cigarette butts rest within the grooves of damp drain covers; of how many seconds it might take to see

one single, lonely shade of green; Of how we do not exist, but happen; of how many people you pass today; of two-hundred-and-eightyeight pieces of gum and thirty-nine pieces of paper; of lines besides grids, all jarred together; of heavy scent within the heat; of splattered slabs; of naked walls; of bearing arms, uncovered, hardened, cold and scaffold; of circuses, and fields of moor; of bricks restacked; of rails re-laid; of tunnels budding; spaces shrinking; holding hands and crossing paths; that humans stream like ants—— Of thick and glassy squares beneath, How many scratches smoothed them matte; Of how many skin cells and particles of smoke It takes to turn this pavement black.

‘AN ORDINARY DAY’ Kit Samuels

Every day is the same for you isn’t it. Rushing in, rushing out. Up escalators, down escalators. On trains and off again. Pushing and clawing your way through the throng; that half-eaten sandwich in one hand, that half drunk coffee in the other. Rush, rush rush. Be the first one at your desk. Sort that file. Answer that call. Strike that deal.

Yet never once do you pause and remember. But then why would you? It is so long ago now. Over forty years. Before you were even born.

Do you ever think about it? Do you even know about it? There is no reason that you should of course.

The world has moved on. Such things are easily forgotten with the passage of time and all too quickly subsumed in history’s dark pool. And you are young, so very, very young. Too young to know, too young to remember. And even if you did know, why would it matter to you? Its passed. It happened to others, not to you. It couldn’t possibly happen to you. Could it? For you are little more than a child, and you are strong, you are healthy and so surely immortal.

I was once like you. Absorbed in confines of my own existence, with little doubt about the future and no thought for the past. Work to be done. Bills to be paid. Fun to be had. The future was assured, it was guaranteed, it was certain. Only of course it wasn’t, was it? There was to be no future. One

moment it was stretching before me like an endless carpet of golden possibilities, the next - nothing.

The dreams, the plans, the expectations ended as quickly as the snuffing of a candle.

It was just an ordinary day. Just like your day. Just like this day. No reason to suspect anything untoward or different from the day that had preceded it or the one that would inevitably follow. Rush, rush, rush. Squeeze in. Elbows press your ribs. Knees knock your knees. That vile cocktail of other’s stale sweat mixed with the breath of last night’s sweet wine fill your senses. Sound familiar?

Just an ordinary day. But it was not ordinary was it? Not that particular day. Not for me. Not for the others.

I stood once where you now stand, journeyed where you now journey, laughed and cried, dreamed and hoped as you do now. But my journey ended. It ended here. Here in this place.

So seize the moment my young friend, seize it and hold it close and hold it dear. Wring from it all the joy, all the sweetness, all the love that you can, while you can.

For who knows what awaits you? Who can tell God’s unruly plan? Who knows what is around that corner? Around that bend? At the end of that tunnel?

‘ON MOORGATE’ Lana Doyle

Imagine John Keats, stepping out of the gates of Moorgate, now. In the streets, there is the form of a glass urn, a bending glass rising to the sky.

The Gherkin is a shimmering gloss of light, blinding the memory of the soft passages and open space of another time. Its edges arch away from the ancient city.

What people are these who make their way around wide plastic barriers and under a lattice of metal scaffolding, heads down against the clatter of instruments; folk bustling in a fast-time beat, just making passage or some kind of pursuit or some kind of escape.

Construct, construct. Layer one thing upon another.

But Moorgate’s ‘o’s are full and soft. Old stone faces of Britannic House watch over faces reflected in glass screens emerging from the Station gates.

New gleaming structures may endure the passage of time better than the wood and brick and tiles of decades and centuries before, and make these folk appear as breakable as little knomes amongst the plastic barriers and wooden panels.

These streets are clanging with change, and move with an endless stream of men and women, as they rise out and into the street. The River is not so far.

That glass urn may never reflect the grass and leaves of a field below or remember a wide open space, but will look instead to the sky, and notice the clouds as they pass, and the jetstreams.

And Keats may look up into its undulating panes and raise up his spirit, and maybe feel a kind of ecstasy or hysteria, a joy or a pain.

‘THE LADY OF MOORGATE’ Jon Wood

The sun scythes across a high sky. Every stroke I witness, between the flickering deep shadows of the perpendicular forms, the pulse of plume like clots of smoke that peel and dissipate into the holes and fissures of Moorgate. There are many sources from which these collections of small dark forms emanate but one of the principle outlets is from the mouth of Moorgate house. From this cliff white serenity they billow out at regular intervals.

There are contradictions, some of us believe that these entities can disseminate great love and compassion; that they can forgive and are capable of creating great beauty- That is where they differ from the material and natural world. Others say they have no purpose other than to devour the earth’s resources, their crude machines digging, gouging and rumbling precious earth through the troughs and cracks of their city without compunction.

Judge for yourself by casting your eye over this street of invisible commerce. There are some structures that cast long shadows. Not yet extinct in form but probably in earthly polemic are the ‘sixties’ buildings: Idealists whose concrete pillars and primitive motifs now rot. They were upstaged soon after by the camp pastiche of styles they termed post-modern: Evident here in a constraint of mock marble facades. Then the Towers of Glass took hold. Are they about plunder or progress?

Perhaps we should go back and consider the finely proportioned Lady of Moorgate to decide. Built on Anglo-Prussian oil in the 1920’s. Does she serve avarice or represent beauty? She can still turn heads with her delicately carved keystones that adorn every window and opening. Some are exquisite examples of Arts and Craft others depictions of leafy locked demi gods from another age. The delicacy of these carvings contrasts with the deep cut rustication of her façade. These determined lines talk of classical order and imperial certainty. But is she simply the most sophisticated of courtesans? Maybe her delight can hide all their sins.

‘MASCARON MONOLOGUE’ Manasi Pophale

I speak, but you cannot hear me. I see, but I cannot show you. I remember, but I cannot remind you what this street was like the day I was born.

It has been 94 years since our first stone was laid down and we made our way, piece-by-piece from Lutyens’ drawing board to the City of London. We are faces perched on the key stones of the arches that frame the doors of Britannic House - immovable, ever watching witnesses to human wisdom and folly. I myself oversee the central door, with three brothers to my right and three to my left. On the drawing board, I occupied a place of prominence, central to the composition, holding it all together if you will. In reality though, my position seems to have diminished. My door is closed and they have put paper on my glass. I am in the company of smokers and mobile phone talkers as they edge out of the way of the daily commuters.

Not the most dignified use of our facade but it is said that we are the back of the building. (I fail to understand how my front can be considered someone else’s “back.” But that is the way of man.)

My brothers on the other side don’t understand the rumble in our belly. They cannot see the people pouring out purposefully every morning from Moorgate station and rushing back in in the evening.

They sound different too. Soft-spoken, as if they are sitting on the edge of a park and don’t need to raise their voice over the din of construction.

I was there when the bombs fell and I will be here as the glass grows from the ground.

ESSAYS

ESSAY R E AD I N G PLAC ES BREA K I NG ROUTINE S REIN V EN TIN G TH E CIT Y Raquel Ajates Gonzalez The Stories & the City project has shown how creative writing can serve as a catalyst for imagination, giving spaces a voice, a history and new meanings. It has encouraged us to look, encouraged us to be in the spaces we move through each day. It has also created virtual narratives – in the shape of a blog and an e-book – of physical spaces that have remained unchanged but were altered during five consecutive mornings, temporarily filled with thought-provoking pieces of writing that reminded commuters of these forgotten stages we share during our daily urban performances.

What does it mean for a space to be public if we cannot publicly express it, shape it? If we feel so detached from it that we can no longer see it even when we are moving through it on a daily basis? Why doesn’t it longer have anything that speaks to us? That catches our eye? How can we make them more visible and increase the porosity between the spaces and us? How can we permeate humanity into the inherently inhuman urbanistic scales of urban masterplanning, built floor space, transport networks and traffic flow?

Moorgate station proved to be a fertile ground to answer these questions. The project reached to the crowed but isolated commuter collective. When commuting by public transport and walking in the city, we are all coming from somewhere else and going somewhere. Nobody is at home and nobody belongs to these transient spaces. People are in motion more than ever before, on a journey to find home, whether a physical or ideological home. In these transient times, it makes sense to fill transient spaces with expressions of belonging and human experience.

The creative pieces of writing broke the predictability of the stories we tell ourselves (or we don’t tell) about a space, such as Moorgate station, and about an activity, such as commuting; commuting in turn being the signifier of a deeper signified: the work routine that rules most people’s lives. Apart from the first class carriages of some trains that often get reclaimed during rush hour, public transport and streets in London are classless spaces and commuting a classless activity – a perfect context for engaging detached commuters to become citizens.

Stories & the City has helped us imagine ways to stop being passive consumers of the city and become active citizens, stop being audiences and become actors that actively shape the spaces around us, become designers that create and recreate meaningful and appealing places. This creative process needs to be inclusive to be effective as the city is more than the sum of its parts but nothing without its individual parts, without every one of us. Stories & the City has invited us to consider new creative methodologies that can be adapted and recycled across time and space. This project has been an attempt to turn a space into a place; an attempt to re-invent public narratives by making narratives public; an attempt to deconstruct accepted narratives of inhuman spaces into more human components.

Re-inventing spaces without changing the physical is both a challenge and an exciting opportunity for all of us.

Creative writing, performances, food growing, installations, projections, all expressions and attempts count. We need to multiply bottom-up initiatives and work to shape top-down policies to make people feel like citizens that can fuel change in their surroundings, that can create place; let’s move from “a place” to a “place to thrive in”; let’s create urban labs; let’s re-scale urbanism to a human level: the city is ours!

ESSAY WRITIN G TH E C I TY: P ERSPEC TI V ES ON MOO RGAT E Tracey Taylor From its ambition to create new ways of thinking about Moorgate, the Stories & the City project has generated five distinct new pieces of writing. Each of these pieces, displayed in the early morning outside Moorgate Station, presented Moorgate’s commuters with a new and unexpected perspective on this busy urban environment.

But what are these new perspectives? The five writers involved in the project certainly offer us many different eyes through which to view Moorgate: the poet John Keats; a mascaron; the sculpted Lady of Moorgate; a ghost.

What is interesting, though, is what the five pieces of writing have in common. They share many common threads of imagery. Moorgate, seen through the composite lens of all five pieces, is an urban landscape that is sooty, grimy, blackened, pulsing with smoke and speckled with cigarette butts; it is traversed by flows of people, like particles, subsumed into dark tides, with faces bobbing over tiny illuminated screens. There is a sense of telescoping scale: buildings rise, tall and shadowed, high above the tides of commuters. All note the noise, the din, the roar, the rumble, the clatter; all have a sense of the underground, an underworld sunken deep below the surface, out of which the masses of people emerge in ceaseless streams. Yet this imagery is not quite infernal.

Almost all the pieces find an organic beauty in Moorgate – the beauty of ashes and old whitened stone, of peat, of blackened surfaces and flows of movement like rivers, motes of dust and reflecting light.

Similarly, the pieces share a sense of history and the layering of the city. All of the pieces delve into the past in some way to discover the invisible in the visible, the traces and the remnants of the past found in the present, if you only scrape with your fingernail through one blackened layer, or turn your eyes up to the stone above you.

The city is a palimpsest. In all of the pieces, there is a sense of the profundity of the passage of time: the past stretches back before both our city and our lives, and we lay it down behind us as we continue to live on into the future. Other ages precede us – their architecture, their values, their ideas of beauty and truth. Yet the gleam and clamour of change is visible in glinting scaffolding and new openings in the earth; it is audible in the “symphony of drills”. The construction site at Moorgate becomes a metaphor for the transforming city: glass overlays stone,

the new world rises from the old.

Where the pieces differ is in how they ask us to respond to Moorgate, to this grimy, noisy, shifting, changing urban landscape, with its underlying strata of history. How do we position ourselves in Moorgate? How do we understand our relationship to this particular vignette of city? What should we think about? Each piece offers a different answer – or better, a different set of questions.

‘Besides’ draws our attention to the sensory qualities of Moorgate’s world through a stream of consciousness that observes the patterns and blooms of ever-changing detail around us. Something like Prufrock’s coffee spoons, these patterns are the measure of our lives, our many-starred universe, our scurrying cosmos. Unlike Prufrock, this is not a bleak thought but a kind of celebration of collective being: “we two are not complete but two movements flowing fluid”. Collectiveness is the rhythm, the poetry, of urban life.

Evoking the somber history of the Moorgate tube crash in 1975, ‘An Ordinary Day’ throws the precariousness of our lives into sharp, startling relief. The apparent ceaselessness of the streams of people through Moorgate obscures a hard-eged truth: the possibility that at any moment, on any ordinary day, it may all come to a sudden end. Our ghostly narrator entreats us to live in the moment, to enjoy what we have, not to flow on blankly and unwittingly through our lives.

‘On Moorgate’ considers our relationship to time, memorialised in the material world. The enduring presence of a previous era’s architecture, worn full and soft with time, is a conduit back into history, connecting the past with the present. Like Keats’ urn, our glassy new edifices are our historians, recording our stories; unlike the urn, they are not immobile but have the capacity to reflect, in their mirrored surfaces, our mobile and changing world.

‘The Lady of Moorgate’ poses a provocative moral question on the character of human society. Viewed through the black gloss of the colonial oil that funded Moorgate’s commercial wealth, Moorgate’s history becomes ambivalent: a story of both progress and avarice, of construction and destruction. The piece calls for us to cast judgement upon our society and its incessant development: do we do more good, or do we cause great harm?

Narrated by one of the mascarons that perch on the facade of Britannic House, ‘Mascaron Monologue’ suggests the compelling idea that our buildings bear witness to our history. We have invested them with character, with personality, with a not unsympathetic consciousness; now they observes us, patiently, keeping pace with the events of our world as they unfold on into our opaque future.

These varying concerns are the real perspectives that Stories & the City has brought to Moorgate. More than simply seeing Moorgate and its urban environment through different eyes, these five writers invite us to think about it in radically different ways. We are asked to reimagine ourselves and our relationship to our urban environment through a powerful and rich set of different frames – moral, literary, aesthetic, historical, political.

I M AG E C R E D I T S Installation photography: Manasi Pophale, Szu An Yu, Tracey Taylor and Tomas Dryburgh All other photographs: Szu An Yu and Tracey Taylor

academyofurbanism.org.uk.

STORIES & THE CIT Y 2015