Alternative Open Top Bus Tours of East East London

Tour 1: High Street 2012: 1000 years in 1.5 hours

Meeting point: St Botolphs-without-Aldgate church, Aldgate High Street, London, EC3N 1AB
Tour will depart promptly at 2.00pm

An open-top bus tour of High St 2012 though the past 1000 years and into the future, led by Jonathan Nichols and Design for London. From the former gateways to Europe of Aldgate’s post-houses, to Stratford International’s new Eurostar hub, a look at the marks and traces of use and time, the present state, and the projected futures, of this historical gateway from London to the surrounding country.

Further information on HS2012 and DFL's vision can be found, here and here.

Tour 2: Savage Messiah’s Guide to East London

Meeting point: Great Eastern Road (Left upon exiting Stratford Rail Station), Stratford E15
Tour will depart promptly at 4.30pm

A round-trip open-top bus derive around the East East End of London, led by artist Laura Oldfield Ford and architect and writer Douglas Murphy. Contrasting the shopping centres of Stratford, traveller sites and industrial estates, and ruins and new builds alongside the A11. The tour will incorporate a visit to the Old Sunday market at the dog track, the liminal zones around the Olympic Site, Lammas lands, squats, a walk along The Greenway to the Olympic precipice and more, in a subjective mapping of this brink of the city, and a charting of a slice of London both rapidly vanishing and appearing at the same time.

Laura Oldfield Ford is an artist well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism - a psychogeographic investigator seeking the point of transition between aesthetic practice and a radical critique of urbanism, through documentation of a transient city in flux and a chronicle of a disappearing London, the topic also of her highly regarded urban fanzine Savage Messiah, a compendium of which will be published next year on Verso Books.

Douglas Murphy is an architect and writer living in London. He is currently architecture correspondent for Icon magazine, and writes the blog 'Entschwindet und Vergeht'. His first book, "The Architecture of Failure" is forthcoming on Zero books.

Image: Courtesy Laura Oldfield Ford

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