The Evening standard article about the secret ring of steel rather shocked me, though sadly didn’t surprise me as much as it once would have. Very quietly rounds around the city have been being blocked, changed from public highways to private property with private security and controls on what people on those streets can and can’t do. Two thirds of the roads into the city have been closed leaving just 19 ways to drive in all of which are monitored by CCTV camera’s recording car number plates and the occupants.
Whilst the city has always been different and a bit of a city state, this very quiet change to the urban infrastructure represents a massive retrograde step to when the city was an actual walled city. Given how quietly they’ve achieved it round the city, I’m sure they’ll manage to do the same sort of thing elsewhere with just as little uproar.
I sadly can’t make the exhibition mentioned in the article or go on the walk, but I think I have a new project a modern day beating of the bounds, just repeating the work done by Henrietta Williams and George Gingell for myself mapping the ring and photographing what I can.
The exhibition part of This is not a gateway runs from the 22nd to the 24th Oct at HANBURY HALL, 22 HANBURY STREET, E1 6QR
The full details of the exhibit on the ring of steel are as follows:
Henrietta Williams, George Gingell: Ring of Steel: Entering the Panopticon The so-called ‘Ring of Steel’ is a security installation that carefully guards the City of London. Ushering in a new phase of fortress urbanism the ‘Ring of Steel’ creates a digitally hermetically sealed security installation. A system of CCTV, narrowed streets, sentry boxes and bollards preventing access is used to carefully monitor the square mile. Through maps and photographs this project aims to make visible the function, nature and effect of the Ring of Steel, its role as a Panopticon, demonstrating how it follows an ancient line of city defense whilst generating a very 21st century approach to control. Rosa Luxemburg Hall
And remember children, walls can be used to keep people in as well as out.
True, and as Wonko The Sane teaches us it’s often all just a matter of perspective. Mind I think no matter what side of the walls I happen to be I think I’d quite like to understand how they’re being built, why and where. It seems a useful sort of thing to know.
I suspect they may use the same sort of ideas around the Olympic sites and such (I know I would if I were doing it)