Work in progress

 

Urban development continues to hold a major fascination for me. In fact it is over 20 years since I first walked through a new housing development on the edge of the village I was living in and felt there was a subject to develop into a photographic series. This became Emblems of Civilisation (see the Archive section of this website).

 

This new series of houses, which I'm referring to as Contemporary British Housing, is the latest body of work exploring this fascination with the way in which a particular form of development is appearing in the British landscape. A number of major developments have emerged in the 21c that draw on periods of architectural history and new planning and construction ideologies such as the New Urbanism movement.

 

'New Urbanism is the revival of our lost art of place-making and is essentially a re-ordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages and neighbourhoods - the way communities have been built for centuries around the world.'

www.newurbanism.org

 

Within these developments there is a sense of accelerated place-making that I find fascinating, and at the heart of which are individual homes built in a variety of architectural styles from across the centuries, arriving in a matter of months.

 

These images are all shot on a mobile phone camera, a contemporary, fast-paced system of image-making but one which allows me to draw on established histories of architectural representation.