Charlotte Wilson

On 8 May 2015, the Conservative party were voted into power; a party currently urging fracking’s go-ahead in our country. Sixty four per cent of the UK territory is now ‘up for fracking’ – including London – aided by the 2015 Infrastructure Bill which stipulates 'maximum economic recovery of UK petroleum'. London Local Energy have applied to frack national grid squares TQ18 and 28 covering North, West and central London, while Boris Johnson believes that, 'if reserves of shale can be exploited in London, we should leave no stone un-turned, or un-fracked, in the cause of keeping the lights on'.

Fracking is a highly controversial topic. Its social, economic and environmental consequences are largely intangible, predominantly due to the censoring of information causing a lack of transparency.

Urban Fracktures uses architecture as a language to critique fracking. Set in a speculative future – in which our capital is being fracked in its very heart – the project imagines the impact of fracking on urban life, from the geological to the atmospheric scale, through the stratum of the inhabited cityscape.

Set in the old War Office of Whitehall – a public asset once up for sale by the government until they realised its potential worth of £1 billion as a fracking site – the project claims this territory of uncertainty, speculating the proposal of an elite architecture of transparency while drawing upon its consequences.

Could an architectural response to an imagined fracked future act as a tool for negotiation and political agency in our country?