The project continues...

Over the next few months, we plan to bring together the groups that we have worked with, in additional discussion and photography sessions. We hope to facilitate sessions where the older people and the young people we have worked with meet and share their experiences of Bow Road and the project so far. We’re sure that this type of intergenerational meeting will provide a rich experience.

We will update this blog with information and pictures about these sessions once they take place. In the meantime, you may want to follow our other activities along High Street 2012, by visiting the Peoples Panorama blog.

Working with older people

Karen Elmes, the Building Exploratory’s lifelong learning officer, writes about the creation and delivery of a series of workshops with three older peoples groups in Bromley by Bow: the ‘Young @ Art’ group, the ‘Bangladeshi Grandparents Group’ and users of the Poplar Day Centre.

“In developing and delivering the workshops we strived to tailor sessions to the needs, interests and capacities of each individual group. We ran virtual walking tours along Bow Road at the Poplar Day Centre and Young @ Art, where people’s reduced mobility and frailty ruled out the possibility of walking tours. The virtual walking tour involved projecting films taken from a bus along Bow Road, stopping at various points to discuss buildings and places. This, along with a collection of historic maps and photographs of Bow Road served as an excellent introduction to the process of recovering people’s memories.

A creative session for Young @ Art encouraged participants to use their artistic talents to represent their memories and experiences of Bow Road. Two building visits for the Bangladeshi Grandparents group gave this group the opportunity to visit two fascinating buildings to which they had never been to before - the newly refurbished St Mary’s Church and the Police Stables behind Bow Road Police Station. For most of the group it was their first visit to a church and they were captivated by the experience. The visit delivered an unanticipated outcome of promoting interfaith community cohesion. We’d love to develop the links that we have established with both the church and the Bangladeshi Grandparents, to explore this potential further in the future.

We used two means for recording older people’s stories; some have been recorded in writing by volunteers who participated in the sessions and some have been recorded in audio during one-to-one conversations with people who had specific stories relating to Bow Road. This has generated some fascinating insights into people’s lives and their connections to the street and its buildings.” 

Read Will Robson-Scott's perspective on his photography workshop

Working with the year 10’s at Langdon Park, I wanted them to consider the area they live and study in. The brief was to investigate portraiture and architecture and the relationship between the two. This part of East London is an ever evolving area architecturally as well as economically. The Olympics have been a massive news story and directly affect the area, so these current issues are something that I wanted the students to consider.

To start the workshop, I showed the classes some of my own work, and I particularly wanted to show them work I had done in East London itself, to mine and the classes amazement one of the subjects in a portrait photograph I had taken was an ex pupil at the school, which started up some lively conversation. I wanted to instill in the class the idea that photography need not be complicated regarding equipment or setup, but translating a feeling or using narrative can form interesting images.

Students explored scale and composition in their portraits

Students experiment with different ways of creating portrait
photographs, including turning their backs to the camera

The practical part of the session was dedicated to the pupils shooting portraits of each other in the school grounds, considering framing and exposure. I wanted them to use the architecture around them to try and set the scene and talk about East London in the run up to 2012.

Sam Baum writes about the design workshops

Over the past 3 weeks, I co-ran a series of workshops along with The Building Exploratory which investigated physical aspects of the buildings and surroundings of Bow Road. 

Working with year 10 students from Langdon Park school, I covered the concept of marketing and how we (as a team of young marketeers) can influence people. We then brainstormed positive words we could work with to sell Bow Road to the greater public.  I then showed them to 2 fashionable trends within the graphic design work, Pixel Graphics, covering artists like Eboy and Chuck Close and Typography, covering artists like Eine and Bob & Roberta Smith. 

Working with this new awareness we then visited Bow road itself and noted down 1 of 2 things: 1, all the typefaces we could see around the street, from road signs to shop signs and graffiti to billboards. 2, the exact layouts of the windows, noting down the sizes and spacing between panes in order to make a pixel grid canvas to work from.  By the end of session one we had numerous sketches of the type and windows of Bow Road.

I found that once the students eyes were open to the potential for design, that they suddenly became aware of the numbers of typefaces and window layouts around them. Something that before the session they would have overlooked but afterwards were fully conscious of.

In our second session we then worked with our findings and created one of two things. The first was a typographic pin and thread image and the second was a pixel - window picture. In both cases the students worked with words that they felt conveyed the positive aspects of Bow Road, such as Nature, Beauty, Multi, Historical, Tree and Unity. 

The students who worked in the typographic method wrote out their words, traced the corners and edges of their letters with pins and then weaved and wound different colours of thread around the pins to highlight their words.

The students who chose the pixel window route carefully drew out their grids of windows and then using collage, created colourful imagery and words with each window pane in their grid representing a single pixel.

This was really interesting to see in action, as both routes were technically and conceptually testing, but over the session, the students hard work began to pay off as 3D thread and pixel based representations of their ideas began to form. And the prospect of some of the work actually being show on a large scale on Bow Road was an exiting prospect for some students too.

The Start of the Young Peoples Programme

Over the last two weeks, The Peoples Archive Project has got off to a great start  with two workshops delivered at Langdon Park Secondary School, where 50 Art and Design GCSE students have begun exploring Bow Road. In the first workshop the students had the opportunity to work with a professional photographer – Will Robson-Scott – to learn new portraiture photography skills. They experimented with composition, linking people to the architectural environment, and the effect of different poses. The students have also worked with Graphic Designer Sam Baum of the company Studio Baum. With Sam the students explored marketing and design, before visiting Bow Road to explore the design and architectural features of the street. Students were surprised to find the enormous range of typographies visible along Bow Road, and also looked at the ways in which pixel graphics could be created from the window arrangements on different buildings along the street. Watch this space to see how they use their explorations to develop final pieces that celebrate Bow Road in the run up to the Olympics.

The Exploration Begins...

The Building Exploratory volunteers started exploring High Street 2012 over the summer. Read about Niamh’s experiences of High Street 2012 below, as she walked the length of the street taking photos of all the buildings for the Peoples' Favourite Buildings website (which you can access here!):

I began with the Whitechapel gallery and it was a good start. It really is a beautiful building and I noticed these panels above the doors on either side where it looks like the surface is flaking away.

The Royal London Hospital has stunning tile work on the front entrance. The Whitechapel Market is a feast for the eyes and ears between all the colours and sounds. The mosaics above the doors on the East London Mosque and Cultural Centre are beautiful.  All the buildings that surround The Ideas Store are reflected on its glass exterior and it makes a great photograph. The ships on either end of Trinity Green Almshouses and Chapel are very eye catching and quirky even though there are replicas. The originals are kept in the Museum of London. From here on the street becomes a lot quieter and there are less people and traffic.  It feels cooler too as there is more shade due to a lot more trees. The Queen Mary University Administrative Building has a very lush lawn; it made me want to have a picnic. Wickham’s Department store is so bizarre as it is broken in the middle by a closed shop but really interesting and forces you to look twice at it. Ocean Estate has a lot of scaffolding and the work seems to be moving at a quick pace. Genesis Cinema is a delightful little building. St Clements Hospital is now closed and unfortunately it’s difficult to see from the street as there are big trees hiding it away. The red gates however are very visible and enticing. Bow Road Police Station and Stables are a great contrast. The Police Station looks like any old police station until you turn the corner and see what used to be the housing quarters, a modern building that reminds me of a Spanish villa. The Former Town Hall has really interesting relief and I love that the end looks like a ship’s hull. Across the road is the Bow Bells Pub, a lovely shade of orange.

I finished with the Church of St Mary Stratford at Bow, and it was the perfect building to finish with. I love that it is hidden when in the street until you get to the gates and see a lovely long footpath leading to the front doors and an arch covered in greenery.