Patrick Langley

Major Project: Ordinary Voids

'Ordinary Voids' is an extended essay on the Silvertown and Beckton areas of London's Docklands. Working with photographer Ed Aves, this piece explores the aesthetics of urban bleakness through the films made in the area by Derek Jarman and Stanley Kubrick. Written in a fragmentary mode that blends critical analysis with storytelling and reportage, it seeks to forge a new approach to writing on place.

Bleakness is born of distance, a feeling of grand and unspoiled isolation predicated on the perceptual gap between self and surroundings. Although it inspires hopelessness – perhaps because it does – bleakness can be actively, enjoyably consumed. Drawing on extensive research of the Docklands, this essay is an implicit critique of the dominant mode of urban writing: psychogeography.