Walkative: Laura Oldfield-Ford

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A walking tour of the perimeter of the Croydon BID Zone led by Laura Oldfield-Ford, an artist and writer 'concerned with issues surrounding contemporary political protest, urbanism, architecture and memory'.

As part of Turf exhibition 'Low Batt.'

Croydon - locked down and sanitised centre surrounded by a ruined periphery. // Walking the perimeter of the Croydon Business Improvement District (BID) exposes a contemporary urbanism where the central zone is preserved and everything outside is sacrificed. // The BID zone is funded by private investment and is patrolled by teams of private security firms, cleaners and 'street ambassadors'. Democracy is no longer enacted on the streets, the only permitted mode of behaviour is consumption.

Cities are not centrally planned, schemes are imposed by different bodies across contingent zones leaving interstitial breaks. Sometimes the edge of the city folds back in, the liminal emerges in the centre. It is in these gaps where political life emerges as a current. These are the spaces where excluded voices become audible, where the stickers, flyposters, scrawls and scratches become the expression of a collective unconscious, a marking of territory, a set of warnings.