Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a process-led project investigating the site as a space layered with history, memory and ongoing change. Approached through psychogeographic methods, the project combines walking, observation, drawing, photography, and printmaking to explore how social, spatial, and emotional narratives are accumulated, performed, and embodied within an urban environment.
Through repeated visits and dérives, I engaged attentively with the everyday flows of the site, observing its interactions, architecture, and rhythms while reflecting critically on my position as an outsider and observer. My relationship to Covent Garden is shaped by both distance and familiarity: while remaining objectively external to the space, sustained engagement over time allowed for a nuanced, process-led understanding to emerge. The work reflects on how Covent Garden continues to shift in response to wider political, social, and economic forces, with particular attention to atmosphere, gentrification, memory, and displacement.
Rather than aiming for a comprehensive or representational depiction, the project offers a layered, subjective mapping of the site formed through my experiences and encounters. Documented through visual fragments, traces, and recordings assembled intuitively, foregrounding duration, attentiveness, and personal encounter. This approach demonstrates how I work site-responsively, translating lived experience into layered visual material through careful observation and sustained engagement.
The project also functions as a method of research and pedagogy. My investigative approach was extended into workshops and learning resources, inviting others to explore, interpret, and respond to place through drawing and observation. By combining making, reflection, and discussion, the work situates illustration as a tool for understanding and communicating complex urban experiences, emphasising relational, temporal, and spatial dimensions over purely representational outcomes.
This publication documents an investigation of Covent Garden as a site layered with history, memory and change. Approached through psychogeographic and multidisciplinary methods that reflect on embodied experience, observation, and historical research. I approach this site as an outsider an d observer - not someone with a rooted personal connection but instead someone moving through the space with critical curiosity returning repeatedly over time.
Based on a series of dérives documented through photography, drawing, and printmaking, these works explore how social, spatial, and emotional narratives are embodied and accumulated within the site. Through these methods, the project reflects on the ways
Covent Garden continues to change and be shaped through its wider political and social factors. This project is grounded in my developed personal relationship with Covent Garden. My position is one of an observer formed by both distance and intimacy: I remain objectively an outsider in the space but have come to know it through repeated dérives, sketching, photographing, and recording. My interest lies in how aspects intersect and are presented - how gentrification, memory, and displacement are exemplified through atmosphere
This work does not aim to represent Covent Garden holistically - instead it offers a layered, subjective mapping of the site through different personal recordings. Presenting layered visual fragments that capture the shifting changes of a central urban site assembled and curated intuitively through repeated personal engagement.
