Commissioned by The Architecture Centre as part of their ‘Our Place’ programme, Sounding City involved travelling around the area throughout 2016, and asking people for their thoughts, feelings and experiences about where they live. Artists were then asked to respond to these community sentiments through music, an audio transcription of their home and habitats. The result was a ninety minute long LP where 600 stories were turned into twelve songs that, as the Architecture Centre explain, are ‘ as a tuning fork – taking the measure of place through musical interpretation, and that the songs produced are a diffraction or a kind of reverb resonating like ripples across the city.’

Jennie’s work is grounded in the theory of cartography and psychogeography, but is site specific, and artistic. This blurring of creativity, physical place and intellectual ideas work is fundamental to ‘re-inscribing a place with its own narrative….allowing us to experience its complexity and the value of our story in it.’

Throughout the music we hear conversation and activity, clashes and extremities alongside the harmonies. The songs are communication in themselves, expressing the less tangible nature of a place that we forget about, those far beyond its physicality. Atmosphere, culture, belief, social networks, freedom, routine – all play a part in the identity of a place.

For Jenny ‘this is political. As cities have increasingly become places you visit rather than a part of, this is a way for people to take ownership of their townscape. Through this work I would like to state that cities are for people and should be spaces we are the co-creators of…where we can think about what architecture and town planning does and look at its end point – which is individual experience, collective narrative and shared stories. To explore the idea that cities are not simply  buildings, they are what happens between people around buildings and on the streets.’

Our location is not a passive player in our lives, and just as we affect our environment, it impacts us. It’s this that makes a place become like home, or attached to particular memories. Sometimes we don’t see a place, instead relying on past knowledge to create a picture in our minds.

Jenny explains that ‘As we walk through an environment we develop an intimate knowledge of it which is at once the interpretation of what we see and, as our familiarity increases, this becomes entwined with our own store of memories and experiences. In this sense we digest the built environment and it becomes a language for us which is like a two – way mirror. Our landscape tells us who we are and what our place is within it, how we interpret this is extremely nuanced.’

There’s a vast variation in the genres, styles and subjects. Gill Simmons & Paul Lawless song about Georgian Waitrose is humorous, Alexandra Hamilton Ayres created a more abstract response to the line Tower Blocks and Terraces, and Joe Walker and Lewis Toghill made a beautiful piece which drew on a field recording they made with a busker.

Although the tracklisting does not follow any route, it would be fascinating to use the record as a guide to the city, and explore it as you walk it. If nothing else it’s an inspiration to pay attention to the world around you – your world.

For more on Bristol’s Architecture Centre and its community work, visit here.

Katie is an engaging guide, her enthusiasm for the city fluently conveyed. She’s clearly done her research, having been blogging about London for the last three years, and she imparts enough knowledge to educate and interest us without it being overwhelming. ‘On a mission to reveal the secrets hidden above your eyeline’ she runs walking tours around the area.

‘There are three things to remember about Spitalfields’ she tells us. ‘Radicalism, immigration and industry. Sitting just outside of the city walls the East End has always been a place where the rules and regulations of the financial and government stronghold doesn’t quite  stretch. It’s something that is represented by Kenny Hunter’s Goat sculpture that stands at the entrance to Spitalfield’s Market; the goat being a somewhat wayward creature that doesn’t follow the crowd, unlike sheep.

Taking its name from the fields around the hospital – ‘spital – the area has seen huge changes, the economic ones accelerated over recent years. Street names like Gun and Artillery give clues to Henry VIII’s selling of the area to convert to army barracks. After the  immigration persecuted Huguenots in the 17th and 18th centuries,  the area became home for the fabric and textile industries, particularly silk weavers. This was due to large attics and airy light rooms available at the top of buildings on streets such as Fournier Street. Waves of Jewish communities fleeing Russia moved over in the 18th century, and many street signs are still written in both Yiddish and English. Today it is home to a large Bengali community; Brick Lane famed for its curry houses.

There’s plenty of clues to what the building that are now trendy pubs and coffee shops once were. The A Gold store in Brushfield Street was originally opened in 1880 by Amelia Gold, and the original shop front can still be seen. The signs of a bakery are found in the form of Philip Lindsey Clark’s Sculptures in Widegate Street. Frying Pan Alley is so named due to the frying pans hung outside by the ironmongers who used  to operate there. We look up to see what some of them might have been before – warehouses, weavers, pubs, and the art deco Mayfair cinema.

One of the most fascinating buildings was built on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street in 1742. La Neuve Eglise was a Huguenot chapel, then in  1809 started to be used by missionaries as The Jews’ Chapel, where they promoted Christianity to the expanding Jewish population, before being adapted as a Methodist Chapel in 1819. Then in 1898, the building was consecrated as the Machzikei HaDath, or Spitalfields Great Synagogue, and most recently in 1976, to serve the expanding Bangledeshi community, it was adapted again as the London Jamme Masjid (Great London Mosque). The fluid and ebbing nature of the area is something that fascinates me. How people make a place their own but with echoes of the past.

It’s hard to imagine now with all the glass buildings and money dripping from the surrounding banks that Spitalfields was once one of the poorest areas, up to twenty families houses in each building and the slums being no go areas for many. The decline of the textile industry in the 19th century led to a poverty-stricken, over populated area with little work available, where drinking and prostitution were often the only escapes from a troubled life, and crime ran rife. These were the days of Jack the Ripper, and the Ten Bells pub on Commercial Street, where victim Mary Kelly drank, still stands. We see the Jewish Soup Kitchen in Lehman Street, and the Providence Row Night Refuge.

One of the most striking things is the echoes of past years that run through the threads of the story. Immigration from refugees fleeing conflict, tension between communities, concern for jobs, and steady gentrification pushing workers further out to the suburbs continues. We finish up in Altab Ali park, named after a 25-year-old Bangladeshi clothing worker of the same name who was brutally stabbed here in 1978. It prompted mobilisation and protests and a coming together of communities, and despite ongoing friction this has been repeated over recent years. Along the path down the centre of the park are letters spelling out a fragment of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore: ‘The shade of my tree is offered to those who come and go fleetingly.’ People may come and go, but the spirit of Spitalfields lives on – and as Katie taught us, you often have to look up to find it.

Read more about London on Katie’s blog here, and book on to a tour here.

Napier in New Zealand is a city shaped by its geology. Lying on one of the world’s most active tectonic fault lines, the north island city was largely destroyed by an earthquake in 1931, leaving mid-century town planners wondering how to rebuild their city. The art deco marvel they created still stands today, one of New Zealand’s best architectural heritage areas and a reminder of Napier’s regeneration against the odds.
In Napier, as in much of New Zealand, architecture and art in Napier is influenced by a common factor: plates. Namely the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates, and their constant rubbing, sheering and sliding that has seen a tumultuous and turbulent history shape a people and a place. The country’s most fatal earthquake took place on February 3rd 1931 in Napier, a small town on the East coast of the North Island. At 7.9 on the Richter scale, buildings crumbled and 258 people died. Once the initial shock had ebbed the townspeople embarked on an ambitious rebuilding programme, with a few key stipulations: new buildings must be safe, modern, and cheap.
Enter art deco.
Read more at The Culture Trip.