Visit Westminster!
To many people the word Westminster evokes images of the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, shopping in the West End, concerts and shows, comforting images of urbanity, power, tradition and stability. Westminster is indeed an international metonym for the British government. But there is another largely hidden Westminster, the pressured inner city of Westminster whose spaces are under-valued in contrast to the over-valued spaces of the Westminster of the popular imagination.
Visit Westminster! looks at space and language. It uses the medium of audio-visual tape-slide to simulate an invented Westminster which, though existing only as sound and vision, is designed to question the conventional/dominant/officialised representations of "The Heart of London". All the images utilise the outdoor studio of Westminster-by-night. The texts and graphics are pulled from a variety of sources which in some way are concerned with values in urban space.
The images presented here have been superimposed and/or combined with text/graphics using Photoshop, in order to simulate the dissolve effect in a tape-slide programme.
Visit Westminster!: a selection
Visit Westminster!: autosequence (60 seconds)
All images copyright Sam Appleby