Regent Street ⁄ Regent’s Park (Dickens thought it looked like a racetrack), 2009

Regent Street / Regent’s Park (Dickens thought it looked like a racetrack), 2009, began with two days of walking.

For 2 days I walked Regent Street photographing every sign and every bit of text I found in public space. I then spent 6 months redrawing each of these by hand and assembling them into a large print. The result is two worlds in one image: the park, legible as a map, its circular road traced in sparse architectural detail with open white space at its centre, and Regent Street, dense, almost overwhelming, an accumulation of colour, commerce, and instruction that grows more suffocating as your eye moves along it.

Inspired by Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone, in which he argues that Regent Street was a landmark moment in urban design: a street built not for gathering but for movement, one that made it structurally difficult for a stationary crowd to form. Both street and park were designed to privilege the individual moving body over collective assembly. The emptiness at the heart of the park and the density of signs along the street are two faces of the same logic. What I photographed and redrew, sign by sign, are its contemporary descendants.