We often associate the word ‘text’ with a book or a letter -in any case, something written. But almost anything can be a text as long as it has a message that can be interpreted and understood. And much like a book, every house, road and neighbourhood tells a story, which allows us to use them as a medium to interact with the areas we inhabit.
This is the Vincent Street fireplace, a relic from a pre-war house in London. As a result of bombing, the surrounding neighbourhood was demolished, leaving just one fireplace from a whole terraced row of houses standing.
Despite being a static environment, the Vincent Street fireplace tells the story of those who lost their lives in the bombing, and also of those who survived -the people of the neighbourhood who no longer had a home to return to, whose photo albums and memories had burned. But it reminds us of the existence of a more remote past as well, when there were coals in the hearth and people crowded round the fire.
Yet if you were to visit today, what may be even more striking is the juxtaposition of this humble fireplace against the backdrop of highrise London. The neighbouring blocks of flats, symptomatic of a need for cheap accommodation, form a different chapter of this fireplace’s text: the economic hardship of the years following the War and the explosion of population in London.
The fireplace itself is the intersection through which all of these points in time are accessible, and if it had been demolished along with the rest of the neighbourhood, we wouldn’t be able to interact with the stories it has to tell.
In the same city, London, there are buildings that tell a very different tale: palaces and mansions built on the wealth of an empire, and prisons constructed in response to social change. Enshrined within their walls is not just the legacy of an institution spanning over a thousand years and the cruelty that was exacted on those it ruled, but also of the individuals who frequented those places.
Names etched into the stone walls of cells and pictures carved into the wooden floors of palaces: the buildings we inhabit become filled with our lives as a book does with words. If an author writes a book to tell a story, so too do the hundred pencil marks on the wall measuring how much you grew as a child. In fact, they display a far deeper meaning than any book can -they are a proud proof of life, of having lived.
Jot & Scribble 