About this event
Join us for Spaces of Silvertown the first of a series of free walks in relation to Making Space, a multi-sited commission by London-based artist Jessie Brennan for the Royal Docks in Newham.
Our first walk led by writer and journalist, Owen Hatherley will investigate the role and history of public spaces in the Royal Docks. This three-hour walking tour will take participants through the side of the Royal Docks closest to the Thames, at North Woolwich and Silvertown following the linear path created by the disused railway that ran through the area. Along the way participants will pass some of London's largest scale surviving industry such as at the Tate and Lyle Refinery, old public buildings such as Brick Lane music hall and new public spaces such as the Thames Barrier Park.
Hatherley will prompt for discussion around the changing architectural landscape of the Royal Docks, its history and plans for future redevelopments of the area. Exploring the strange incoherence of the area, with successive plans laid on top of each other and never entirely joining up, Hatherley will look at the scattered traces of the ‘People's Plan' for the Royal Docks to the John Major era conservative nostalgia of 'Britannia Village', next to the almost wilfully placeless Dubai-on-Thames of the 2010’s, ending at the current frontier of the derelict-for-decades Millennium Mills. Participants will be invited to listen and reflect on how architecture has responded to socio-political and economical changes to the area and altered the conditions for navigating the urban landscape.
All walks will later be made available as self-guided walks through a series of downloadable podcasts and printable maps as a lasting legacy of the project.
All Making Space walks will take place in person in the Royal Docks, Newham. COVID-19 social distancing and guidance will apply.
Making Space and the associated walks programme has been curated by UP Projects and commissioned by the Royal Docks Team.
About Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England in 1981. He received a PhD from Birkbeck College in 2011 for the thesis The Political Aesthetics of Americanism, and writes regularly on architecture, culture and politics for Architectural Review, the Guardian, Jacobin and the London Review of Books, among others. He has published the following books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon – An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012), A New Kind of Bleak (Verso 2012), Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016), The Chaplin Machine (Pluto, 2016). Trans-Europe Express (Penguin, 2018), The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space (Repeater, 2018), and Red Metropolis (Repeater, 2020). He is also the editor of The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs (Open House, 2020).