The concept of the North Circular Wall

The economy of London, the prices of sandwiches, transport, beer and homes is now inextricably linked to the presence there of the financial sector and related service sector industries sitting alongside the wider establishment, press and burgeoning new media. 

Despite keeping all these people happy, there is another view on this.

Over the last 30 years, from the time I first moved to London from the South Wales valleys, Londoners have found themselves living together in an enclave that becomes more and more exclusive as its population gets wealthier and wealthier. But if things continue in this way, and the differential between London and the rest of the country escalates such that enough people outside London smell a rat, how will London react to keep out the pesky northerners and the like?

The North Circular Wall is a fiction that in a literal sense will never happen. But it already exists in the sense that many of those inside the wall want to keep others out and succeed. This desire for exclusivity is mainly at a sub-concious level right now, Boris would never admit to it, but it is the way things are developing.

Right now I’m not sure how exactly my project will evolve around new photographs I will take and those I have previously taken. At a personal level, once I was part of things and now, just over three year after I left the London area and twelve years after choosing to leave a life of work in a major accounting firm in the City , I feel quite removed from it all. I could even say excluded if I consider whether my wife and I could move back there.

So I intend to visit places where I have lived and look at on what terms it would be possible to move back now. And places where I worked to see how they have evolved, who went bust and who is still there. I may even revisit one or two places where I bought a beer, and the North Circular Road - just to check that it is still passable…

(Photo ©Scott Hortop - the peace camp set up by various activist groups in Parliament Square, May 2010)