Spice Cottage

This is the latest landscape I have been working on and this scene depicts the East End of London representing the lowest end of the social income scale and is a locality of which the majority is surviving off welfare or otherwise on a very low income.

The title of this image 'Spice Cottage' suggests what a Halal fast food outlet may call its self and demonstrates a functional re-appropriation of usage and also the cultural shift that has taken place over time in this impoverished migrant zone. This Victorian building implies that it serves two trades at ground level the shop dispenses blessed processed food through a sterile utilitarian operation and the top red window conspicuously offers one of vice. They are similar in the fact that one serves live flesh and the other dead flesh but nether the less it's a forced co-habitation of contrary ideologies.

An ad hoc vista is assimilated from the remorseless post war redevelopment that surrounds the subject matter. With an office butted tightly up against the shop with tower blocks rising ominously further behind. A flyover intrudes from above to cut up the city and communities with its inappropriate town planning.