Impressions of London

Impressions of London

A visual and typographic essay

I moved to London two years ago to move in with my partner and to be closer to the university. I knew that living in London would be different to my comparitivly small town in Sussex. I grew up in a Village outside the new town Crawley where everyone knew each others business and the patrons of the local pub where I worked all had their own glasses. In a way it was stifiling - everyone I knew who hadnt gone to university were setting up home with their partners and working in office jobs - and after frequanting the same two pubs in the town centre, and the one club, I knew it was time for a change. 

Moving to London was going to be a shock to my system but I felt an exciting one. My partner lived opposite the Olympic Stadium in Bow and I had friends in Bethnal Green and Brick lane. I pictured myself in cooler clothes, drinking in Brick Lane every night with a cosmpolitan selection of artists and eccentrics. But after the first summer my priorites started to change, and the urban bleakness of the old industrial estate where my flat was based began to grate on me. I began dreaming of surburbia, of a local pub - not an overpriced gin and tonic bar, and places to walk to at the weekend. This apparently is not an infrequant occurance - I call it the London Cycle.

I decided to base my visual postcards of London on this - making light of the cliche's that happen when people move, and the change in views as the years go by. I wanted to use photographic images of London with my own drawings on top of them. I was inspired by 'fashion dolls' - cut out paper dolls that you could put paper clothes on top of in any style you desired. I drew the images with black outline and left them white, leaving the sender free to personalise their cards for their own means. 

My postcards follow the story of a young girl moving to London. With an assortmant of suitcases and no furniture, she moves to trendy East London to escape her country life. Shopping on brick lane, only buying "vintage" clothes, she hopes to be photographed for 'Dazed and Confused' or similar. She gets a job working as a runner for a television production company, earning minimum wage to collect coffee's and try and source increasingly bizzare lists of items. Eventually the bills from the retro clothes shopping start to fill up, so she takes a job as a Personal Assistant in 'The City', telling herself its just for now and she's going to leave these corporate arseholes soon and act/write a book/become a artist. However she soon get's used to the money, and the people aren't really that bad. Now those nights out are becoming less regular because who wants to queue at a bar for half an hour for a £17.50 gin and tonic when they could pop to the local offliceance for a bottle of red instead? No, she'd rather spend her money at the amazing Borough Market and have her friends over for a few bottles of wine and a home cooked meal instead. At least they can hear each other now. Eventually East London becomes too expensive, she's paying £1200 a month for a one bedroom studio apparment. Some tree's would be nice, and a pub she can walk to for a sunday roast. So she moves to a place in Kent, where she can sit out in the garden and grow some vegetables.

The story is a mixture of my experiences of moving to London, and my partners. I see it happening to some of my friends, and I thought this really gave a personal view of the London experience.