_____________Gravesend
The Death Of Community

98 page
Silk screened / digital print
Printed on 120gsm Nautralis Smooth recycled 135gsm Colourplan 2000mic Nomad
Typeset in Deadend
Edition of 1

Gravesend is a small town situated in the borough of Gravesham, Kent. Built in 2002 for the Metropolitan Police, the 300 square meter site was constructed in facsimile of an urban complex to meet the training requirements of the police. Segregated into two districts by an 8ft high breezeblock wall, the site is used by two police training groups; the CO12 Public Order Unit and the CO12 Firearms Unit. In the interests of accurate riot training, Gravesend was developed to simulate the environment of urban community with all the façade of human presence, except that presence itself.

The streets of Gravesend are eerie to peruse. Constructed almost entirely from breezeblocks, the buildings cast grey shadows across grey roads onto grey pavements. Out of training hours it is a ghost town, deserted and devoid of life. Most haunting are the blank billboards and internally boarded up shops, named after people who don’t exist, always open but never in-stock. The traffic lights run on an automatic control system, always changing but never obeyed. The community infrastructure is in place, the town has an estate, a football stadium, a park, a nightclub, even a disconnected tube station called ‘Denton’. Most of the front doors in Gravesend are unlocked, but conceal only desolate stretches of wasteland.

This surreal installation serves as a chilling account of the death of community in 21st century Britain. While the global village expands, local collective identity and communication have dwindled, to the detriment of communal interest. We have estates, parks, nightclubs, tube stations, but is the community missing from Gravesend significantly more present in our inhabited cities and towns? The site’s publicly oppressive purpose bears ironic testimony to the negative associations our society now has with regard to collectivism. Our country’s apathy towards politics and its willingness to retreat into privatised lifestyles is in danger of reducing it to an island of individuals. In some ways, Gravesend can be interpreted as a warning –a prophecy of society’s potential to alienate itself from itself, and kill its collective identity.

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