Karls Contrast Workshop

"There are at least two sides to every story" - Karl's caption to make his workshop intriguing enough for us to chose it...or in his words 'so if you don't fancy Darren, and not up for David but fancy a bit of me..come to my workshop!"
Excercise 1 Perceptions: A non-visual London
sounds
traffic
accents
feelings and moods
temperature changes
A non-aural London
smells
taste
A non-verbal London
touch
when you close your eyes you hear an absence of noise
London as Time
Fast paced, always moving
You have to keep up with it otherwise your left behind
Street lighting
The City
London as Sound
Big ben
Tube
Thames
London as Words
Cockney colloquialisms
Maps
London as space
Few high Rise Buildings
Contrast in where we live:
My friend and I entered our addresses into google maps to achieve a satellite image of where we live and the contrast between the places, (she lives in London and I live in Kent)

Kensington, London

Penshurst, Kent

I loved showing everyone the contrast between where I commute from everyday to London. I think it is the first time they realised the difference in the attitudes and personality of villages, towns and cities across the UK.


In 1 Word how would you describe London?
Busy
Fast
Huge
Heavy
Vast
Flat
Relentless
Isolated
Old
Modern
Rude
Fickle
Adventure
Schizophrenic
Bitch
Coat of Arms

Design a coat of arms for your chosen area of London. Produce your design using the following as guidance:

Methods of creating contrast among elements in the design include using contrasting colors, sizes, shapes, locations, or relationships. For text, contrast is achieved by mixing serif

and sans-serif on the page, by using very different type styles, or by using type in surprising or unusual ways.

This was just my designs playing around with the V&A's coat of arms creator. The extension of the workshop is to design a coat of arms for each of these parts of London: North, South, East and West, being from Kent I will be honest and I really am not aware of the stereotypes of these parts of London so I did a bit of quick research! (these are not my thoughts!)

North London

'is full of moustachioed, skinny-jeaned men in vintage Wayfarers clutching iPads and jojoba and celery smoothies yowling “Have you got free wi-fi?” hopefully into the mid-morning air'

South London

'Sarf London is usually seen as the poorer side whereas North London tends to be more expensive

'a barbaric wasteland perpetually stuck in 1952' - Josh Surtees

West London

Contains many of the city's major tourist attractions, businesses, headquarters and the commercial West End theatres.

The West End is the entertainment centre of the UK with the largest shopping district in Europe, the home of the UK theatre and film industry as well as numerous up-scale bars, restaurants, hotels and nightclubs.

The West End is the most expensive location in Europe it was long favoured by the rich elite as a place of residence because it was usually upwind of the smoke drifting from the crowded City.

East London

The East End became synonymous with poverty, overcrowding, disease and criminality the closure of the last of the East End docks in the Port of London in 1980 created further challenges 

The East End represented the structural and social changes affecting the UK economy in a microcosm. The area had one of the highest concentrations of council housing, the legacy both of slum clearance and war time destruction.

The progressive closure of docks, cutbacks in railways and the closure and relocation of industry contributed to a long term decline, removing many of the traditional sources of low- and semi-skilled jobs.

"Of course nobody’s perfect, and nobody’s really better than anyone else, either. It just grates on us Southerners that we’re sneered at for living in a part of London that is exactly the fucking same as North London, except that – for the most part – it’s substantially nicer. It’s like being married to Scarlet Johansson and having Pat Butcher’s husband call your missus ugly all day long." - The South Londoners’ Guide To North London by JJ Dunning