LINKED: a sound walk by Graeme Miller

About

Commissioned by the Museum of London and launched in 2003, LINKED is a sound work installed on lampposts across 3 miles of East London. It is an artistic response to the creation of the M11 Link Road in the 1990s which involved the demolition of 400 homes, including Graeme Miller’s own, amid dramatic and passionate protest.

It has endured as perhaps the largest sonic installation and sculptural entity in London for 20 years. Since 2003 its transmitters have broadcast over a million times the voices of people who lived or worked in the buildings erased by the road.

The work has now been technically restored and can be experienced by joining one of a series of open days in person, hosted from Leytonstone Library in London.

Along a 3-mile route between Hackney Marshes and Redbridge Roundabout, 20 analogue radio transmitters can be heard by anyone with a special radio receiver, revealing the voices of people who once lived and worked in the area – resident families, road protestors, railway-workers, teachers, disco-goers, and artists from the substantial community living in houses destroyed by the road including Cornelia Parker, John Smith and Christine Binnie. Together the assembly of voices evokes a cross-section of ordinary East London life and in some way recovers the lost buildings.

Over the passage of time this work about the politics and poetry of place has come to reflect issues relating to community, environment and protest and the impact of sudden, top-down developments on people and place.

CREDITS

LINKED was originally produced by Artsadmin and commissioned by Museum of London in 2003. The making of LINKED was generously supported by Arts Council England, Heritage Lottery Fund, London Boroughs Grants Committee part of the Association of London Government, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the London Boroughs of Redbridge and Waltham Forest. The restoration of LINKED (2022 – 2024) is supported by Arts Council England.

With thanks to all the many interviewees, production teams and friends involved in developing LINKED and to the researchers who developed the interview content for LINKED (2003): Lucy Cash, Myra Heller, Dan Saul, Michael Sherin, Helen Statman. Original technical design by Simon Beer of Integrated Circles.

Production (2023/24): Steve Wald, Mike Harrison, Lydia Newman, Chris Warner, Lou Doyle, Vida Vojić
Executive Producer: Nikki Tomlinson