This video I found on YouTube is shot where I propose my thesis project to be based. Billingsgate Market is the largest inland fish market in the United Kingdom and its 54 market traders distrubute much of the fish eaten in London’s restaurants. Open daily from 5am to 8:30 am this market is finished even before the majority of the bankers have sat down at their desks in the adjacent Canary Wharf. Therefore you might say it was an area of complete contrasts.

However much of the fish you see on display is not indigenous to Britsh waters and is often flown to the UK to suit consumer demands. In a time when global fish stocks are dwindling there does seem to be the need to demonstrate more accountability for the sourcing of fish. So perhaps in a way Billingsgate Market, in its current guise, does reflect a time of greed and prosperity as much as its neighbour.

Intellectual merit

Varanasi is a city whose spirit combines real and imagined space realised in the theatricality of daily Indian life played out by the chaotic mass of people in amongst a haphazard array of buildings.

It is an architecture generated in the mind- lived space- where space is produced through people’s movements in the city informed by associations with tradition and history. It is a landscape that exists not only in physical space but in the minds of each one of the city’s inhabitants.

Process

My proposition is the development of this ‘in-the-mind’ environment, a reversal of people extracting information from the land, as I try to map the cognitive mind of this society onto the physical environment.