Green concrete

Published Categorised as UK 3 Comments on Green concrete

 

Here’s an illus­tra­tion of a car park in Brack­nell. Like the one I did yester­day, the origin­al artwork was a pen and ink draw­ing, and the colour was added digit­ally. It’s avail­able as a print in three differ­ent sizes, from £6 to £24.

(If you want to colour the picture in your­self, then the same artwork is also avail­able in colour­ing book form.)

The photos it’s based on can be seen here. I took them in 2005. At the time I was study­ing at the Univer­sity of Read­ing, and work­ing part-time in a camera shop/​photo lab. Every so often they would send me to cover the Brack­nell branch. Brack­nell is a New Town near Read­ing built in the 1960s, with a repu­ta­tion for being bleak At the time I took the pictures, 60s Brutal­ist build­ings were still considered ugly by many, before the reas­sess­ment that Brutal­ism has had in the last few years. The concrete wasn’t green in real life anyway, that’s just from the chem­ic­al process used on the film.

The shop was in a window­less 60s shop­ping centre, and there was no staff room, so rather than eat my lunch in a cupboard I would go and wander amongst the concrete. I haven’t been to Brack­nell since 2006 or so, so I have no idea if it’s the same or differ­ent nowadays- I know that the mirrored 3M build­ing in my photos has been demol­ished for sure. In 2005 the centre of Brack­nell felt completely dead, it would be inter­est­ing to see if that’s still the case now.

 

Receive new posts via email. Your data will be kept private.

3 comments

  1. Bracknell’s liter­ally just had a massive massive revamp, to the point where some consider it “better than Read­ing”. High praise! Not actu­ally been, but i imagine most of the places in your pics are gone now.

    1. I haven’t been to Read­ing in a long time either actu­ally. Prob­ably the last time was when I was at the station about two or three years ago, and that was just to change trains.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.