By Dr Sotirios Varsamis & Ståle Eriksen
0 Point X / Departure
A “cyclist” about to travel the Golden Mile in two different directions.
Golden Mile: A Road Movie in Curved Time it is an artifact that we often we refer to as a film, road movie, participatory research project, a community site-specific methodology about architecture, a city, a road, its buildings and its people.
Its conception and first screening were part of the centenary celebrations for the Golden Mile organised for the London Festival of Architecture 2025. As this project operates across academic, civic and cultural contexts University of West London provided the research environment and pedagogic framework; Hounslow Council situated the work within the civic and urban future of the Golden Mile; and 180 Studios offered a cultural reference point for thinking about exhibition, screening and public-facing moving-image formats. Together, these bodies/institutions allowed the project to move between research, local urban identity, and experimental presentation.
The constraints of the project were both logistical, technical and conceptual. First was the very limited timeframe: we had only three weeks to develop the project, from the initial site visit through to the final screening, and this had to be achieved with a very limited budget. The second constraint related to the physical and technical conditions of the screen itself. Located within the Gillette Factory / 180 Studios spaces, the LED screen is approximately 50 metres long and 6 metres high. None of team (architectural photographer Ståle Eriksen, music producer Robin Morrison and the author) had previous experience working with a format or technology of this scale. Because of its unusual proportions and immersive presence, the screen could not be approached in the conventional way that screens are often used in architectural presentations especially for academic / student work, such as for slideshows, showreels, or linear project documentation. Instead, its scale required us to rethink the relationship between image, movement, buildings, architecture representation, and spectatorship.
Conceptually, the use of ‘constraints’ for this project were a tool for experimenting with the non-linear forms of spatial writing; a tradition that having its origins in antiquity explores shared methodologies of producing text and drawing between literature and architecture. Such constraints also link to the work of group OuLiPo where writers like Italo Calvino or Georges Perec employed ‘writing under constraint” as a way to free themselves from, as Raymond Queneau would put it, the “slavery of inspiration”. Hoping that constraints could offer also to us a tool or methodology to work in a very small timeframe, budget and new technology without having to be occupied at the same time with being original, creative or about what we have to say with this project.
Within this context rather than treating the film’s narrative as a fixed sequence of scenes, A Road Movie in Curved Time proposes a structure in which story/ies is/are distributed across route, architecture, diagram, image, sound, memory and participation. The curved screen and diagram structure of the film became a way to organise narrative spatially, allowing the project to move beyond a conventional linear film and towards an open narrative environment. In this sense, the work can be understood in relation to Barthes’s idea of the “plural” text, where text is entered as in a “galaxy of signifiers” and meaning is not simply received by the audience but actively produced through reading, interpretation and recombination. It also resonates with Eco’s concept of the “open work” in which the artwork remains deliberately incomplete, ever evolving and transformed, inviting multiple pathways of engagement. This openness is central to the project’s public and educational potential: cyclists, students, local partners, and audiences can contribute observations, archival content, drawings, sounds, memories, thoughts and speculative incidents, which may then be folded back into the evolving narrative diagram and / or screen; both in the way the film is produced but also experienced. The project is therefore not only a film about the Golden Mile, but a playful participatory system for generating and experiencing narratives of place.
Such a screen and diagrammatic narrative structure also offered a unique tool for public and educational engagement. Because the narrative is non-linear and spatially organised, it can invite participation without requiring contributors or editors to understand the whole film or their contribution to it in advance. Participants or students may “cycle” more freely to explore in their own personal way the route, record impressions, collect archival material, sketch buildings, capture sounds, note incidents, or imagine future and past versions of the Golden Mile. These contributions can then be inserted into the narrative lattice as new events, memories, anomalies or echoes. In this way, the project turns the road into a shared narrative environment: a site where local memory, architectural observation and speculative imagination can be collectively produced. Drawing back on Barthes’s or Eco ideas, the project positions audiences not simply as viewers, but as co-readers and co-authors of the urban narrative. This makes the work accessible, playful and expandable, while also supporting different forms of place-based learning and civic reflection. But also, our role as editors rather having total control of the finite product, we could instead observe the process of this artifact to build itself and constantly evolve within its suggested finite narrative structure like a “throw of the dice,” referencing Mallarme and his seminal work.
In more detail the narrative follows a lone cyclist who departs twice from the same spot, the Gillette Corner. In the morning, the cyclist rides forward in time, moving along the Golden Mile as if entering the road’s future. At night, the same cyclist begins again from the same point, but this time rides backwards in time, moving into the road’s past and towards the morning. The two journeys trace mirrored half-arcs. Along the route, architectural landmarks, cars, aircraft, trees, pedestrians and remembered or imagined inhabitants become incidents within the journey. Some events are encountered directly; others appear as reflections, echoes or reversals. At the midpoint of each arc, the two temporal branches touch a twin nexus before separating again. In diagrammatic form, the ride becomes an eye-shaped lattice of buildings, events, anomalies and mirrored trajectories.
The film therefore was conceived due to the physical (screen) and conceptual (non-linear narrative) constraints mentioned above as something not viewed frontally, but experienced bodily and spatially: the spectator encounters the cyclist’s movement across an extended horizontal field, almost as if standing inside the trajectory of the road itself. The screen’s length allowed the journey to unfold as a moving architectural diagram, where time, direction and urban memory or speculation could be read through the viewer’s peripheral vision as much as through a central image. This process transformed the screen from a surface of display into an experiential environment, one in which the audience was invited to inhabit the rhythm of the route rather than merely observe it.
The project needed to communicate a non-linear narrative without losing the simplicity of the ride itself. The diagrams therefore became a mediating tool: they translated a different temporal idea into a visual structure that collaborators, stakeholders and audiences could understand.
1 Morning / Forward Journey
A “cyclist” travelling forwards to the future of the Golden Mile
The morning route positions the cyclist as a figure of collective anticipation for the site. Departing from Gillette Corner at dawn, the rider moves along the physical route of the Golden Mile and looks forward to its projected future: a corridor of development, investment, cultural production, housing, employment, mobility and environmental change. The Golden Mile is no longer only a record of industrial modernity but also a space where civic strategy, speculative development and public imagination are projected and openly critiqued. This makes the morning ride a journey through a place that is actively being narrated as future. The cyclist encounters not only what exists, but what is promised.
The film translates planning from document into experience and participation, questioning if strategy documents and council websites are the best ways to communicate urban change.
The future of the Golden Mile is currently mainly communicated through a range of official and semi-public channels, including council strategies, consultation documents, websites or investment frameworks. While these are important mechanisms for making information available, this project questions whether such formats are always the most effective way to communicate urban change to the people who live, work, study, travel through, or have emotional connections to the area. Planning communication often assumes that people will actively search for documents, websites, read technical language, understand development terminology, and interpret drawings, maps or policy frameworks. In reality, this can create a gap between the future being planned and the public’s ability to imagine, question or contribute to it.
A Road Movie in Curved Time attempts to respond to this gap by exploring methodologies that are more active and could transform future planning from something that is only read into something that can be experienced. Rather than asking audiences to begin with a strategy document, the project begins with a simple, accessible action: moving through the Golden Mile – either as the real site or the screen – to assume the role of the protagonist / cyclist that either provides content or experiences the film and, in each case, creates meaning for the Golden Mile. The cyclist, either as a contributor or a viewer, becomes a device for activating the route, while the film translates urban change into a visual or experiential way with its open structure and images, rhythm, atmosphere, memories and speculations. In this way, engagement becomes an active process: participants for the production of the film can ride, walk, record, draw, photograph, speak, imagine and map their own relationship to the site. But also, viewers can generate their own critical response to the site by making original connections and allowing space for their own interpretations for the site. The project therefore does not simply communicate a fixed vision of the Golden Mile; it creates an open evolving framework which possibly makes it more interesting for people to be involved but also comprehend change.
The morning journey can therefore be understood as a form of future visualisation. Rather than presenting the Golden Mile through a planning report, the cyclist’s movement turns strategic change into a sensory sequence. The viewer experiences the possible future trajectories of the corridor through speed, light, surface, façade, traffic, signage, atmosphere and bodily rhythm.
This is very important because future plans remain abstract until they are visualised. Figures from public documents and communications such as “14,000 homes” or “25,000 jobs” are important, but they do not necessarily help local communities imagine what daily life, movement, public space, identity or atmosphere might feel like. The film can operate in the gap between technical strategy and lived perception. It does not replace planning communication, but supplements it with affect and spatial imagination.
2 Evening / Backwards Journey
A “cyclist” travelling backwards to the past of the Golden Mile
The Golden Mile as Memory, Archive and Architectural Residue.
The cyclist begins again from Gillette Corner, but this time travels backwards into the space of the film, the screen and the road’s past. The road is no longer a corridor of projection, investment and future planning. It becomes a corridor of memory. Architecture is still a temporal device invested by narratives for the site but instead of talking about the future of the Golden Mile each building, façade, trace or absence acts as a marker of previous industrial, social and cultural conditions. Darkness and backwards movement change the terms of perception. If the morning journey casts the Golden Mile as a site of anticipation, the evening or night journey reverses the direction of thought, and the site is re-encountered backwards through a feeling of uncanny familiarity. Buildings appear from the past or behind the cyclist as illuminated fragments, signs that attract their surroundings towards them, and the road begins to behave less like a route of progress than an uncanny but familiar corridor of memory.
Architectural landmarks of the site – factories designed for visibility from the motor road as symbols of power – like the Gillette Corner (Bannister Fletcher, 1937), Wallis House (1936-42, G.A. Warren, Wallis, Gilbert and Partners), Coty (1933, Wallis, Gilbert and partners) and the former Firestone Tyre Factory (1928, Wallis, Gilbert and partners) site appear to the cyclist from the past as thresholds between different versions of the Golden Mile. Some survive as they are or adapted buildings, but others are present through absence, documentation or local recollection. The cyclist’s movement allows these states to overlap without resolving them into a single history.
The former Firestone Factory is particularly important because its absence continues to shape the route in a form of an urban palimspest. It cannot be encountered in the same way as a surviving building, yet it remains active within the Golden Mile’s architectural imagination through its traces that are still remaining, as its surviving central gates, piers and railings (dated 1928) are listed by Historic England. Its demolition becomes part of the night/backwards journey’s logic: the past is not simply what remains visible, but also what has been removed, replaced or remembered through fragments while reflecting into the simultaneously appearing futures on the other part of the split screen. The backward ride allows the lost buildings to be remembered and registered as a part of the route’s forgotten narratives, as ghosts or as a form of urban amnesia. The cyclist passes a site where the past is felt through what is no longer there.
The film is not trying to reconstruct this past as a conventional historical documentary or as a heritage survey. Through reversed movement, repetition, narrations and diagrammatic mirroring, the past is made perceptible as a condition rather than as a sequence of facts. The viewer experiences the instability of a road where different times seem to touch. The cyclist’s body (contributor or viewer of the film) becomes the instrument through which this instability is performed.
The diagrammatic structure of the film’s narrative makes this tension between forward/future and backwards/past visible. Events on one side of the route return as echoes on the other. The twin nexus marks the moment where the forward and backward journeys touch, before separating again. This is not a meeting point in a conventional narrative sense. It is a fold in the structure, a place where the future-facing and past-facing readings of the road briefly occupy the same field. The Golden Mile becomes a “curved time” or a temporal surface, rather than a line from origin to destination.
In this sense the Golden Mile or the street itself and by extension the city around it becomes a kind of dispersed archive that is collectively created. The past of the Golden Mile is not held only in official archives, heritage listings or planning documents. It also exists in local memory, personal experience, family stories, informal photographs, workplace histories and everyday recollections. The film’s structure invites residents, former workers, students, cyclists and local communities to contribute their own fragments: memories of buildings, photographs of the road, stories of work, drawings of vanished elevations, recorded sounds, or speculative reconstructions of lost or remembered spaces. These contributions could be inserted into the evolving diagram as echoes, anomalies, incidents or archival nodes all to form a mnemonic device. A process that brings to mind Camilo’s memory theatre (1550) where he tried with his book / building to reconstruct all existed knowledge of his time using memory techniques where images arranged in places within a theatre like structure.
For students, this offers a way to approach history through active spatial research. Instead of treating context as a static background to design, the project asks them to investigate how a place carries time unevenly or “curved”. They are prompted to compare archival images with current conditions, draw missing elevations, record night sounds, map traces of former use, or translate local stories into visual fragments.
Like this the project suggests also a useful model for teaching contextual modules at a time when Artificial Intelligence is changing how students do research, write, visualise or present architectural ideas. Contextual studies can no longer rely only on the production of essays, because these formats are increasingly easy to generate without sustained engagement with the archive or place. A Road Movie in Curved Time proposes a different kind of learning structure: one in which students must move through the archive as a road, record it, interpret it, diagram it and test how history, memory and future speculation can be spatially organised. AI may support this process by helping students generate prompts, compare archival material, test narrative structures or produce alternative visualisations, but the core learning remains grounded in embodied observation, critical thinking and situated interpretation.
The decision to use of avatars to illustrate characters of the film was partly because of time limitation but also to experiment by extending such a pedagogic model like the above further. An avatar may act as a fictional guide, witness, former worker, future resident, planner or even as the road itself. This allows students to explore context through situated voices rather than neutral description. For example, one avatar could speak from the point of view of the Golden Mile’s industrial past, while another simultaneously describes its speculative future. A third could represent a local resident, a student researcher, or a non-human presence such as a tree, a car, an aircraft, or a demolished building. These avatars would make visible the different positions through which a place can be read. Used critically, avatars could help students or any contributor or viewer understand that context is not fixed information but a contested field of memories, projections, interests and experiences.
Figure 2 Some of the avatars designed to activate stories of the future, past or now of the Golden Mile.
3 Nexus / A Road Movie in Curved Time
A “cyclist” seeing and observing the Golden Mile
The two journeys of A Road Movie in Curved Time – the forward morning ride and the backward evening ride – are held together through the narrative diagram. From the beginning of the project, drawing was not treated as an illustration of the film, or a storyboard. It became the method through which the film could be imagined, tested and spatially organised, much like a drawing of an architectural proposition. This was especially important because the film was intended for a screen that was not only a surface of projection, but a space in itself. The first diagrams established a half-circle route. Later versions introduced mirrored curved journeys populated by architectural markers, incidents, anomalies, twin midpoints and dense lines of connection. Through this process, the diagram allowed the Golden Mile to be treated as a structure of spatial and temporal relations rather than as a simple line of movement. Each element emerging from the research could be positioned horizontally according to its location along the road, while also being mapped vertically depending from its distance from the future or the past of the Golden Mile. The diagram therefore becomes a practical and conceptual tool. Helps the project organise material within a very tight timeframe, while also organises the relations between buildings, events, memories, projections and contested urban narratives.
The project can be understood also through the idea of the chronotope, the narrative fusion of time and space. In Bakhtin’s terms, the chronotope describes the way time becomes visible through spatial form, and space becomes charged with temporal meaning. But this allows us to work with choronotopes as a blocks that could be arranged along the diagrams lattice either in a sequence or as mirrored chronotopes of palindromic revolution in Erika Greber’s terms. But also experiment with the genre of the “road movie” as a curved chronotope ora time / space structure in which one route produces two opposing experiences / journeys at the same time.
Like this all editorial decisions are arbitrary. Instead of arranging material according to preference, sequence or politics the diagram provides a system of placement by itself. A building, memory, planning document, student observation or speculative event is located based on the wider structure of the mirrored temporal fields. This means that the film did not organise content through any hierarchical system of importance. Instead, the diagram allowed buildings, incidents, memories, future projections and absences to enter into relation with one another. This arbitrariness did not neutralise the politics of the site; but we believe made these politics or tensions of the site easier to recognise. It opened them to a dialectical process, activated through the contributor’s or viewer’s experience of the film as an environment. Questions of heritage, development, public engagement, absence and future projection could all be held within the same visual field without being forced into a single interpretation. Such a process recalls Mallarmé’s understanding of the page or book as a spatial field, most famously in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, where the throw of dice does not abolish chance, but gives it form. In a similar way, the diagram in A Road Movie in Curved Time stages chance that becomes visible as a “constellation” or galaxy of signifiers; a field that meaning is opened through the chance proximity of elements, or chronotopes, that might not otherwise meet. A surviving façade beside a future planning ambition; a demolished building beside a student observation; a traffic incident beside a memory of industrial labour; a speculative resident beside an architectural fragment. These encounters are totally accidental field of relations and the viewer must actively read, connect and interpret them. The result is not a finished story about the Golden Mile, but an open textual-spatial apparatus through which the site can be read, misread and retrospectively experienced or rewritten.
4 Point X / A Return / The curve of time
A “cyclist” returning to the centre or the beginning / starting again?
The return is the moment when the project turns back into itself; towards the site that produced it. A Road Movie in Curved Time returns to the Golden Mile and the other way round (the Golden Mile returns to the A Road Movie in Curved Time) as method and invitation. The site is researched, filmed, diagrammed and projected; then it is returned to its own public context in an altered form. The Golden Mile is no longer encountered only as a familiar or unfamiliar road that you can visit or not but becomes a field of relations that can be seen, questioned and re-entered.
The project does not end with the screening but the screening is better understood as a moment of re-entry. The film gathers material from the Golden Mile and gives it back as a method. The audience does not simply watch a representation of the road but they encounter the road differently: stretched across a long screen, folded through past and future, interrupted by buildings, absences, incidents and possible projections. They cannot re-enter the same “river” again, or watch the same film again as every time it is different depending on their position within or the additional material the film includes. The return therefore produces a shift in perception and the Golden Mile with its surfaces, voids and histories becomes available for discussion.
The work sits between the university, civic partners, cultural production and local publics. For Hounslow Council, the project offers a way to communicate the future of the Golden Mile beyond the conventional formats of strategy documents, consultation pages and planning language. It does not aim to replace those forms of communication, but it can make urban change more visible and experiential. For 180 Studios and the Gillette Factory, the project activates the site as more than a heritage venue to be regenerated. The building becomes part of the work’s meaning: a former industrial landmark hosting a film about the road’s industrial past, speculative future and changing cultural identity. For UWL, the project returns as a pedagogic and research framework, one that connects live briefs, site-based learning, moving image, public engagement and redefining teaching methods for new technologies like Artificial Intelligence.
Each stakeholder therefore receives a different form of return. The council receives a possible public engagement tool. The cultural partner receives a site-specific screen work that activates the building’s architectural and symbolic position. The university receives a method that can be tested through teaching, research and future collaboration. These returns overlap without becoming identical as the film can speak in different languages.
A Road Movie in Curved Time proposes another route into engagement. Participation does not begin with the requirement to understand policy but begins with the act of noticing. Someone can notice a façade, a sound, a light, a memory, a demolished building, a traffic condition, a future possibility. The diagram gives these observations somewhere to go. They can become incidents, echoes, avatars, anomalies or speculative fragments within the wider structure.
In this sense, the return transforms spectators into possible contributors. A viewer might leave the screening with a different awareness of the Golden Mile and later contribute a photograph, a memory, a drawing, a sound recording or a short written fragment like the poem by student Carla da Silva Pereira who contributed the poem “river fold” that introduces the film and unfolds the process of reading the Golden Mile. A cyclist might repeat the route and record their own version of the journey. A resident might identify a site that carries personal significance. A former worker might add a memory of labour, routine or daily movement. A student might translate a building into a diagram or construct an avatar through which a lost fragment of the road can speak. The project becomes active because it creates a framework through which such contributions can be received without needing to resolve them into a single narrative.
The return is therefore also archival, but not in a conventional sense. It does not aim to produce a complete archive of the Golden Mile. It proposes an evolving public archive made from fragments. Its value lies in its incompleteness. The Golden Mile’s past and future are continually reconstructed through the people’s contributions and what the diagram allows to come into relation.
This has direct relevance for teaching contextual modules in architecture and interior architecture. The project offers a way to move students away from passive forms of contextual research but instead context becomes something produced through movement, observation, selection, encounter and interpretation. Students can walk or cycle the route, record sounds or images, compare present conditions with archival images, map relationships, build narrative structures and test how different voices alter the reading of place.
The return also has a role in place identity. The Golden Mile has a strong architectural history and a significant future within local planning and regeneration, yet its identity can remain hidden or fragmented for those who pass through it quickly or encounter it only through documents. The film gives the area a narrative and visual form. This is branding in a deeper sense, not as a logo, poster or promotional material for future plans, but as cultural legibility. The project makes the Golden Mile memorable as a road of industry, movement, memory and future imagination. It gives the site an image or a product that can circulate, but also a structure and method that can be revised; or even applied into other sites.
At the same time, the project must be understood through its limits. The first version was developed within a very short timeframe, with limited resources and with a screen technology that required rapid experimentation. This makes it more of a draft version of a methodology that demonstrates the potentialities of such a project. Public participation was more potential than fully realised system. The diagram was more of a prototype or a version that could be developed further into more detail. These constraints matter because they prevent the project from being overstated. The work should be understood as a proof of method: a first attempt to test how film, diagram, site and participation might be brought together within the Golden Mile context.
The next stage would be to develop this prototype into a more sustained framework. This could include workshops with students and local communities, a public call for memories and route fragments, a digital version of the diagram, further screenings, walking and cycling prompts, oral history collection, and collaborations with Hounslow Council and 180 Studios. The project could also be embedded within future UWL modules, allowing students to contribute to an expanding archive of the Golden Mile or even other sites over time. Each new version would return to the site differently, adding material without closing the system; in an on going process.
The return completes one loop of the project. The Golden Mile returns to public discussion as an open structure. What begins as a cyclist’s journey becomes a method for making urban change visible, debatable and collectively imaginable. The return therefore gives the project its broader value. It moves from the road to the screen, from the screen to the viewer, and from the viewer back to the site; and so on again and again. In doing so, A Road Movie in Curved Time proposes that a film can create the conditions for people to see, remember, question and contribute to a place in transformation.
Appendix
Prompts / invitation towards the students to contribute material for the film. Also the first iteration of the diagram that developed later into the double curved one:
Ride the Golden Mile—join a time-bending road movie!
We are mapping The Golden Mile, Brentford’s iconic motorway strip, as a living diagram.
From today – 6 June we need pedestrians / cyclists / car or bike drivers to travel the exact half-circle, gathering tiny creative fragments—photos, 10-second clips, reversed sounds, whispered thoughts.
You will need to travel the Golden Mile twice at a time or day/s you chose. — start on the hour – return on the reflecting hour.
You will travel the Golden mile once starting from the Gillette Corner towards Brentford station and once from Brentford station towards the Gillette corner.
You don’t need to learn or research the Golden Mile at this stage. Just travel the route and collect things that excite you, remind you of something or you just like.
Follow some playful prompts:
| Future Graffiti |
| Photograph a surface where you imagine tomorrow’s slogan. Write down the slogan and make a collage or image with the slogan on this surface. |
| Invisible City |
| Describe, in 20 words max, a building that isn’t there but should be on the Golden Mile. Voice memo. Make a collage / drawing / sketch of the building. | |
| One-Colour Hunt | |
| Pick the hue of the next car you see; capture three items of exactly that colour along the route. | |
| Shadow Passport | |
| Snap your / bike / car’s shadow when it first touches a white line. Keep the line straight / vertical or horizontal. | |
| Temporal Triptych | |
| Fold a small sheet into thirds. Panel 1: what this spot looked like 100 yrs ago; Panel 2: now; Panel 3: 100 yrs hence. Write / draw / sketch or record your thoughts. | |
| Loop Glyph Invent a new symbol for “time loop” using only circles and arrows from objects you discovered in the Golden Mile | |
| Blind-Contour Mile |
| At any safe stop, draw the horizon without looking at your paper for 30 seconds; Never lift your pencil from your paper. |
Mix, remix, or invent new constraints
- Any way you prefer, walk / bike / car, any speed — start on the hour – return on the reflecting hour.
- Follow six playful prompts (no special gear needed).
- Upload your finds HERE
- We’ll weave them into a giant curved-screen graphic + short film “Golden Mile; A Road Movie in Vertical Time.”
- Tag the location of your activities and photographs.
- Add a folder with your name in one-drive for identification.
- You’ll be credited and invited to a projection-ride.
Questions? or email
Let’s stretch time – and the Golden Mile – together.
#GoldenMileVerticalTime
Notes
1. LFA, London Festival of Archtecture (2025) GM100 – Gillette Factory Screenings. Available at: https://2025.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/event/gillette-factory-screenings-tour/ (Accessed: 19th of June 2026).
2. It was seen as an opportunity to explore the boundaries of what it means to make a film nowadays about architecture. Reflecting to our visit to the Architecture Biennale in Venice (2023) where film, video and all sorts of different screens in all their possible configurations, covering walks, ceilings, flours, becoming architectural features or furnishings or projections with all sorts of different narratives were overtaking other traditional, familiar or more expected methods of architectural representation; like drawing or model making. Within this context what does it mean for our times another film on or about architecture?
3. The author has first defined the term “Spatial Writing” in his doctoral thesis. “This kind of writing that could be expressed spatially in text and textually in architecture, I call Spatial Writing” Varsamis, S. (2010) Spatial palindromes/palindromic spaces: spatial devices in Vitruvius, Mallarmé, Polieri, Perec and Libeskind. Doctoral thesis. UCL. Available at https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/20479/ (Accessed: 19th of June 2026).
4. Quoted by Marcel Bénabou in Rule and Constraint, ‘..responding to those who were trying to confound inspiration, liberty, chance, and the dictates to the unconscious, the terms that Raymond Queneau employed in 1938 are well known: “…inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery.:”’ Bénabou, M. (2007) ‘Rule and Constraint’, in W. F. Motte (ed. and trans.) Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, pp. 40–47.
5. “In the ideal plural text the networks are many and interact, without any of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifiers; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable (meaning here is never subject to a principle of determination, unless by throwing dice); the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language”. Barthes, R (1975) S–Z. London: Cape, p.5.
6. Eco’s notion of the “open work” is introduced in Opera aperta (1962), where he argues that certain modern artworks are deliberately structured to invite the active participation of the interpreter, performer, reader or viewer. Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
7. The seminal poetic work first published 1986-1897 as an example of an “open” or “plural” text that defined modernity. Mallarmé,S. (1980), Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard: Edition Mise En Œuvre Et Presentee Par Mitsou Ronat, Paris: D’Atelier.
8. The Golden Mile is currently being framed by Hounslow as one of west London’s major future growth corridors. Official descriptions position it as a four-kilometre stretch of the Great West Road, running from Chiswick Business Park through Brentford to Syon Lane, with links to Boston Manor, Kew Bridge, Heathrow and major employers such as JCDecaux and Sky. Hounslow’s recent investment framework presents it as a fifteen-year project of economic growth, skills, public realm improvements, cultural facilities and mixed-use regeneration. The Council’s published ambitions include up to 14,000 homes, 14,000–25,000 jobs, around £5 billion of public and private investment, new green and blue spaces, and improved cultural, community and leisure facilities. London Borough of Hounslow (2026) Hounslow Council Approves £1 Million Investment for the Golden Mile London. Available at: https://www.hounslow.gov.uk/news/article/10161/hounslow-council-approves-1-million-investment-for-the-golden-mile-london (Accessed: 22nd of June 2026)
9. Hounslow Council news releases, the Golden Mile London website, the Let’s Talk Hounslow engagement platform, consultation documents, investment frameworks, launch events, surveys or public workshops but is a question of how these are accessed and by whom? And how much the local community is engaging with these? Golden Mile London (2026) Our Vision is for Golden Mile London to become the World’s Largest Creative Tech Innovation District. Available at: https://goldenmile.london (Accessed: 22nd June 2026).
10. Sources from Historic England “up to date register of all nationally protected historic buildings and sites in England”. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/ (Accessed: 22nd of June 2026).
11. “Every conservation society needs a martyr – a demolition so outrageous and shocking that the press and public realise the need for the society. With the Georgian Group, it was the Adelphi; with the Victorian Society, the Euston Arch. For the Twentieth Century Society (then the Thirties Society) the Firestone Factory became its martyr in 1980.” Twentieth Century Society, 100 Buildings 100 Years, 1928: Firestone Factory, Brentford. Available at: https://c20society.org.uk/100-buildings/1928-firestone-factory-brentford (Accessed: 22nd of June 2026).
12. Originally published 1550 in Florence. Camillo, G. (1990). L’ Idea del Teatro e Altri Scritti di Retorica. Torino: RES.
13. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope describes the intrinsic connection between spatial and temporal relations in narrative. In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” first written in 1937-38 and translated in The Dialogic Imagination in 1981, Bakhtin argues that different narrative forms are organised through distinct configurations of time-space. The road is one of his key chronotopes: a site where movement, encounter and historical time become narratively charged. Bahtin, M.M. (1981), ‘Forms of time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics’, in Holquist, M. (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 84-258.
14. The palindrome is not only a formal game of symmetry. For Greber, it is a cultural and semiotic structure that breaks linearity. It allows language to move forward and backward at once, disturbing ordinary sequence, causality and historical direction. In this sense, the palindrome becomes a revolutionary form: it reverses, cuts, reorders and transforms. Greber, E. (1998) A Chronotope of Revolution: the Palindrome from the Perspective of Cultural Semiotics. Available at: https://www.realchange.org/pal/semiotic.htm (Accessed: 22nd of June 2026)
15. For a further analysis of Mallarme’s poem as a space / spatial field check the authors analysis in: Varsamis, S. (2010) Spatial palindromes/palindromic spaces: spatial devices in Vitruvius, Mallarmé, Polieri, Perec and Libeskind. Doctoral thesis. UCL. Available at https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/20479/ (Accessed: 19th of June 2026).
16. ‘This River is the river of Time. It casts souls only upon its bank; it carries away everything else without effort.’ Αξελός Κ, (1976), Ο Ηράκλειτος και η Φιλοσοφία, Αθήνα: ΕΞΑΝΤΑΣ, 1976, p. 58.
