The School of Communication Art and Design at the RCA uses the following categories for research activity:

• New Hybrids
• Landscape, Environment and Culture
• Analogue/Digital
• New Narratives
• Moving Image

Building on the architectural context of the Narrow Gate drawings, Anne began a research project around the Regeneration Developments at King’s Cross, where she has lived for 25 years (see King’s Cross Regeneration below). The project fits within the area of Landscape and the Environment but includes narrative elements that look at people’s lives both currently and historically. She collaborated with a poet, whose poetry responded to her work and acted as an independent comment on the changing nature of the environment at St Pancras, while referencing its historical and literary contexts. Costs towards exhibiting the work and a catalogue for the exhibition were awarded through the College research programme. The first part of the project was exhibited in the Arrivals festival for the opening of the Eurostar in November 2007; the second part is ongoing.

Research has included a range of activities: looking at early photographs in the Holborn Library archives, publications by the Camden History Society and by local contemporary photographers such as Richard Wentworth and Angela Inglis. Making ongoing digital photographic records, (both by day and night) as well as drawings on site. Making official and unofficial site visits to ensure that the drawings have a concern for local people’s everyday lives, both currently and historically, and accessing the Biographies of deceased literary residents.

King’s Cross Regeneration Part One: Arrivals, November 2007

For some time, Anne has been making drawings about the neighbourhood of King’s Cross as it goes through regeneration. The work responds to the idiosyncratic mix of architecture, communities and cultures. Earlier images showed the shop fronts of the Caledonian Road, and the prostitutes who stood in Goods Way (as seen in Neil Jordan’s film, Mona Lisa). Later drawings record old tenement blocks and warehouse buildings, and landmarks of recent regeneration like the Barlow Shed and Eurostar.

A selection of the work was shown in November 2007, when the first train left St Pancras Station during the Arrivals festival. This exhibition made connections between the architecture of the past and future, focusing on the idea of journey and arrival. Some of the images were in monochrome (conte) others in a limited colour range of blue and orange suggesting twilight and street lighting. The drawings celebrated the early Victorian buildings surrounding St Pancras and King’s Cross, contrasting them with the modern Eurostar track emerging from the Barlow shed en route to Europe.

An earlier project, set partly in King’s Cross, was an exhibition called Business, on the subject of prostitution. Some of this work was inspired by the streets behind the station, including the gasometers and buildings of Good’s Way. The exhibition was the subject of an article in the Guardian by Waldemar Januszczak.

King’s Cross Regeneration Part Two

The project is ongoing, as King’s Cross/St Pancras will be in the process of transition for the next ten to fifteen years. The current focus is the exploration of architectural change, and its impact on communities. In addition to making a simple commemoration of the old and lost buildings, the drawings invent a semi fictional near future in the transformed neighbourhood. Most of the work is architectural, but occasional figures have supporting, semi abstract roles.

An exhibition of the KX drawings will be held at the new Guardian headquarters, 90 York Way, London, N1 from 29 September to 16 October 2009.