The Monuments of Kings Cross: a visit to the new ruins of London. 2017. JOURNAL OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY, 2017 VOL. 34, NO. 1, 93–114
Nick Ferguson. 2016. The Monuments of Kings Cross. Map.
Nick Ferguson. 2016. Tower Monument
Nick Ferguson. 2016. Historical Ruin
Nick Ferguson. 2016. Gasometer Monument
Nick Ferguson, 2016. Pond Monument
Nick Ferguson. 2016. Arches Monument
When in 1967 the American land artist Robert Smithson visited the New York neighbourhood of Passaic, he travelled from city centre to periphery. There, on the edge of town, he saw an entropic future. But would he have gone in the same direction, or looked in the same places, were he seeking a similar experience today? What if it is from the core that the metropolis now decays? What if, in an era of the global city, it is at the heart, rather than the extremities of the city that the extraordinarily ordinary is to be found? The Kings Cross development in central London suggests as much and its vast incompleteness invites a reworking of Smithson’s seminal vision. This is the record of that undertaking.
In an inversion of the Passaic narrative, but using the same artform, the viewer is taken from one of London’s outermost suburbs Surbiton, to the structures rising in its newest centre, Kings Cross. Here, in the name of regeneration, and powered by corporate finance, the remains of an industrial past are being incorporated into reformed spaces of leisure and information. The urban transformation is skillfully choreographed. But erupting into the display, and enacted through chance encounters, are primordial instincts that not even real-estate marketing has managed to sublimate.
This artwork consisting of a 5000 word text and 16 photographs is positioned within the Journal of Cultural Geography as part of the artist’s wider engagement with how artworks might be sited outside the gallery context.
To read the ‘accepted’ version of the article online click here: https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/36956/