An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty: press coverage

Metro, 3 September 2002

Big Issue, 19 August 2002:
"As an area, King’s Cross in north London is probably unique. Named after a monument to King George IV that was built there in 1835, it’s been the central hub for the transport of goods and people in and out of London by canal and rail ever since. It has a hidden river running beneath it and a church that can trace back its Christian origins over 1,600 years. Its slums inspired Dickens to set Oliver Twist nearby, an association with the seedier side of life that still persists, and readers of contemporary fiction will be aware that trainee wizard Harry Potter’s adventures also begin in King’s Cross on a train leaving from platform 9¾.

"With the building of the high-speed Channel Tunnel rail link beginning a new phase in the location’s history, artist and long-term local Richard Wentworth is extending his own ongoing exploration of the area with an Artangel commissioned project titled An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty. Setting up an HQ in an old plumber’s warehouse on York Way, in conjunction with Artangel Wentworth will be co-ordinating a 10-week programme of walks, talks, films and events that tap into the energy, geography and psychogeography of the area and how we relate to it." (Helen Sumpter)

Time Out, 21 August 2002:
"‘I have no sympathy,’ says Wentworth, ‘for people who say “They’re going to spoil King’s Cross.” Not long ago, before the railway marched into London, there were sheep grazing here! Preservation culture is a serious English disease. When Norman Foster revealed his intention to site the new station between King’s Cross and St Pancras, the Victorian Society rushed to prevent it by putting a preservation order on the Great Northern Hotel. Change is relentless, there’s no way of stopping it; but I think in terms of mutability and exchange – transmogrification – rather than of loss. You can’t presume to possess or lay claim to a city. We are only guests.’" (Sarah Kent)

The Architects’ Journal, 26 September 2002:
"There were anxious opening night enquiries about what was art and what was not, but the answer mattered less than the question. Wentworth did not need to touch some of the best things, like the big sign for ‘Plumbing Supplies’ listing the basic ingredients of the city: ‘manhole covers, cement, waste disposal, electrical goods, copper pipe’, etc. His approach is apparently casual , but if the job of an artist is to persuade people to look for themselves, and see things afresh, he is remarkably successful.

"The project’s title subverts the dreary legislation of preservation, and raises the question: should we, or can we, preserve what is wonderful about this place? The past is at the centre of Unnatural Beauty, but if it merely indulged in picturesque decay it would be no more that National Trust nostalgia. In fact Wentworth has achieved the opposite: a joyous riposte to those who think change means loss, and for whom character and identity (particularly Englishness) exist only in the past." (Michael Copeman)

Evening Standard, 10 September 2002:
"There are flight-path charts, old maps, waterway plans, and (my personal favourite) a London Wildlife Trust map confirming positive and negative sightings of frogs in N1. There are also Books about the taxi-drivers’ test, The Knowledge, and an A-Z jigsaw." (Claire Bishop)

Modern Painters, Winter 2002:
"There are ancient maps, geological maps, road maps, demographic maps and street maps. There are maps which have been overlaid, as transparencies, on to other maps – by becoming unreadable they suggest that, though maps can outline a number of certainties, there is no determinate way of looking at the facts. One map is Charles Booth’s 1889 economic survey of London’s Victorian populace. Those at the bottom of the heap – as the footnote describes them, the ‘vicious and semi-criminal’ – are picked out in black, while ladies and gents appear in bright yellow. Looked at like this, you see that some things never change. Just look at the cranes marking the sky around York Way and you’ll see that the area is undergoing yet another process of evolution." ("FG")

Telegraph, 04 September 2002:
"Thanks to Wentworth’s engaging, humorous take on everything he touches, the show is hugely entertaining - so much so that I forgot to ask myself what it all had to do with art. Then, after I’d left the show and stepped out into York Way, I realised that the work of art wasn’t to be found on the premises of General Plumbing Supplies, but in the streets around me.

"As I walked back to my car, I noticed the Italianate villa from which taxis are despatched at the side of King’s Cross station. I stopped to read faded signs for shops that vanished long ago, and peered into old-fashioned cafes cheerfully dishing up the kind of food the Brussels health police will soon make it a criminal offence to serve.
Above your head you see planes you hadn’t noticed before, and at your feet you become alert to the sheer complexity of road markings we spend our whole lives obeying, and yet never really see.

Wentworth’s genius is to make us see the world from the fresh and original perspectives that he does, and to make us aware that, if London is a living city, it is simultaneously a dying one. Places we have known all our lives will become a memory in 10 years’ time.

In choosing to chronicle a transitional area like King’s Cross, Wentworth reminds me of Manet, another sophisticate whose scenes of urban life tended to avoid the open spaces and grand perspectives of Haussmann’s Paris, in favour of the city’s bleak railway bridges and back streets." (Richard Dorment- read full article)

Guardian, 19 September 2002:
"The inconclusive arrangement of tables, TV monitors and periscope platform creates a pleasurable disorientation. When you look through the periscope, the rooftops, railways and canals don’t resolve themselves into a pattern; London seems thrown together carelessly.
Among the maps is a comparison of the street plans of London, Paris and New York. Next to Haussmann’s boulevards and Manhattan’s grid, London looks like noodles spilled on the pavement. Which is just the sort of thing you are likely to tread in if you get too dreamy around King’s Cross." (Jonathan Jones - read full article)

Highbury & Islington Express, 25 October 2002:
"A British Library employee and a cab driver are hotly tipped to meet in the final )of an unlikely art project in King’s Cross.

"In an old plumbing supplies centre in York Way, art has made a giant leap to meet table tennis in a quirky bid to celebrate the area’s diverse identity before it is lost to redevelopment.

"Ping, as it is called, has become a hot phenomenon with residents and workers, and the knockout tournament’sa Sibley leader board reads like a list of local companies and landmarks." (Fiona Sibley)