Savage Messiah – review

Laura Oldfield Ford creates portraits of the city in her new anthology

Savage Messiah offers a complete anthology of Laura Oldfield Ford’s ’zine to date. Through a mix of sketches, photographs and newspaper clippings, it drifts through London, looking for hidden narratives and puncturing the status quo of urbanism.

The punk feel of the cut-and-paste collage form reflects the book’s complete rejection of gentrification and the order of the urban landscape. Visually arresting, the overlapping sketches and pieces of text provoke the reader into questioning their acceptance of the environment they find themselves in.

Part psychogeographical exploration and part polemic, the book rails against regeneration, with particular vitriol reserved for “the looming megalith of London 2012”. Instead it presents the city as the marginalised see it, teasing out places repressed by neoliberal modernisation.  London is seen as transient and mutable, a cityscape which can be endlessly reconfigured.

The fragmented feel of the collage aesthetic certainly heightens the sense of dislocation from the urban environment that the book examines.  However, it also makes the volume a bit difficult to engage with, and at 480 pages it can be slightly heavy going at times.

Replete with references to Ballard, and nods towards Le Corbusier and unitary urbanism, the book does not feel broadly accessible.  Perhaps this is an exposition of the sense of alienation Ford so accurately portrays. The excoriating voice of the text and the manifest anger within it are as striking as the point the author makes. The book candidly captures a city which she seems to suggest cannot be chronicled.

Savage Messiah is published by Verso
ISBN: 9781844677474
RRP: £19.99 paperback