Londons Calling

My narrative will be set in London around the year 2020 / 2030. I have had a basic idea in my head to how I want the city to look and feel both in the narrative and visual styles. But I thought it would help to write it down so a comparison can be drawn between my intended vision and my current visual and narrative output.

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The city is remains basically the same city as it is today. An architectural pix’n’mix of the old, the new, the historic and everything in between. It remains one of the world's leading cultural, business and financial centres. The tube still remains the preferred mode of transport, more so after the congestion charges became so high, many simply got the hint and stopped driving into central London, so bar taxies and buses, the centre of the capital is allot quieter in terms of traffic volume and noise. The streets are still home to tourist shops and stalls that reside on almost every street corner.

Modern technology has continued to make a noticeable impact. Information floods the urban landscape. Everything from buildings and streets, cars to clothes, everything exchanges information and data around the clock. Even everyday objects in people’s homes are constantly talking to each other. The city is essentially a giant internet where everyone and everything is connected and always online in some shape or form. Much of the architecture, be it the pavement, walls, advertisements, even the vending machines have some degree of interaction or visual medium, displaying information or services. Many can also be used by the public to display their own information if needed, however more often than not the public utilise public booths or surfaces created solely for the use for people to use to display information in a larger scale from their array personal devices.

Everything needed to run the city, police and fire services, power plants, and hospitals are all controlled from one control point. As we become more dependent on technology, we have to remember that even in the future, computers can crash and technology can fail. Because the urban landscape is so intricately wired it is also highly venerable. A virus, lurking in an obsolete computer could bring down the system. Modern citys and networks will no longer have a defence against such an ancient piece of programming. Its not just computers that will be effected, the whole city network would start to crash. And it is that notion which will form the basis of my narrative.

One major event in the city’s history however has reshaped the city’s infrastructure in recent years. Around 2011 / 2014, a mixture of rising sea levels and an unusually large storm surge created a huge surge of water which made its way down the north east coast of the UK. Reaching London, the Thames barrier was overwhelmed and unable to hold back the immense pressure caused by a mixture of the storm surge and high tide. The vast majority of the Thames Valley and other low lying parts of London became submerged. The affected areas where home one and a half million people that lived and worked in the danger zone.

Hitting at rush hour, the evacuation failed to clear all the predicted danger areas, with the loss of over a thousand people. The city has never fully recovered. While many of the affected areas where recovered for their financial, economic and historical value or location. Many other areas remain in bad condition, with many of them still awaiting regeneration with some still remaining untouched since that day.

So the city has developed two distinct sides. The relatively new and highly developed areas of the city that sprung up post flood financial infusion which compliment the still developed and undamaged parts of the city, and the flood hit areas, forget about, or still awaiting planning permission. Many of these areas might have already been regenerated if it had no been for a catastrophic plague in 2017 had stratified society sharply according to social class.

The plague, which culled 5-10% of the male population in every European country, caused panic in much of the western world both socially and financially. Sporadic discontent became a mass movement that swept the centre-left out of power. With intruders now seen as a source of disease as well as crime, the middle classes seized on the new menace of plague as a pretext for protecting their estates against the underclass.

For a time, many people now live on enclosed estates or blocks with restricted access. Membership of your home estate might give you access rights to confederated estates. However, the underclass, including anyone convicted of a serious offence, was obliged to live in the so-called `free' or `unrestricted' zones, where crime and poverty were rife, and public services were minimal. While many zones have since been lifted some areas and estates have grown accustomed to a private and inclusive way of living, so while the zones may no longer officially exist, walking from zone to zone you still get a sense of community, with many zones having their own distinct feel and character.