Currently on display at the Margaret Howell shop in London’s Wigmore Street is a series of photographs. They document disused Cold War bases and infrastructure; follies and religious sites; brutalist and modernist factories and plants.
The exhibition is an accompaniment to Slacklands: A Guide to Rural Contemporary Architecture, a recently launched book compiled by the architecture writer Corinna Dean. Slacklands is the first publication of the Archive for Rural Contemporary Architecture (ARCA), an online archive that aims to map 20th-century rural buildings in Britain and what they tell us about our relationship to the nation’s countryside.
‘Corinna Dean has a mission – to show us just how rich and strange the architectural heritage of the Twentieth Century really is. She wants to reclaim the neglected monuments to the past we so easily forget: military, industrial, devotional, recreational. Corinna shows us a less familiar Britain and less familiar forms of architecture.’ – Margaret Howell
An exhibition featuring photographs from the book will run from Friday 9th May to Sunday 1st June at Margaret Howell: 34 Wigmore Street, London W1. 10am to 6pm (12pm-5pm Sunday).
