20 Slideshows
In 1973 Jones and Higgins was still an old-fashioned department store. The building on the left had burned down that year but sported a notice telling customers (it had been a furniture store) that rebuilding was to commence soon. On the right we see buses at the bus stop at which a bus inspector has his own telephone. People are crossing towards the camera in this relatively busy shopping street.
As if to give the project a cyclical character the hoardings erected round the burned building advertise Marlboro (cf Site 5) and in 1975 Marlboro is accompanied by the YES/NO poster of the Common Market referendum (cf Site 6). Marlboro continue to advertise for seven years but then give way to Chesterfield, the fashionable Perrier (1982) and Fray Bentos. At the crossing place a bollard is demolished and replaced with a replica (which later itself disappears). In 1980 there peeps just above the level of the hoardings the top of a tree which by 1987 is large and flourishing. In 1990 the tree is cut down. In 1992, however, a green shoot or two appearing over the hoarding once again, show how the whole circuit of 20 Sites could be a forest in the space of a decade.
Meanwhile throughout the whole series so far a beautiful décollage takes place on the newly exposed walls of the destroyed furniture shop as the various layers of paper fade and peel to leave at last the barely covered brick. It is only in 1982 that we learn that the street being crossed is Bellenden Road, the road in which by 1986 my new studio is being built. The phonecall of the inspector lasts several years. In 1992 a particularly apocalyptic moment in a generally showery day plunged the view in gloom.