Surveying the St Georges' Square and Railway Station

Well, I kind of did a 'Live Performance Art Piece' yesterday morning in the square.... I donned a bright fluorescent green hi-vis jacket and put on a hard hat. Together with my trusty hand held laser measuring device I took various measurements of distances around the square, photographs of some new scenes, and dimensions of the Corinthian pillars on the Railway building steps, properly posing as a senior town architect or such-like, especially with the expensive looking camera around my neck...


The amazing thing was, nobody challenged me nor asked what I was doing.  If I had not worn the usual garb of semi-officialdom, and its' accoutrements,  then I would no doubt had answered every other semi-official or council worker out on their daily promenade...

I also wanted to look deeper into the intersections of things, such as the paved areas on the approach to the square, but also how buildings are juxtaposed and subsequently split apart from their original purpose to be re-purposed as new offices or premises that only occupy a portion of the former.  (see Lion Buildings and scaffolding etc below;


On my return to the Studio, I recreated some of the measurements and looked at how I could create some form of fictitious narrative from the measurements taken.
I've had the notion of trying to make connections (obvious perhaps, railways / squares / connections all go together), but in a more artistic and contemporary suggestive way.   So I used the measurements from the Britannia Building (The former Huddersfield Building Society),  as a starting place and linked them in space to the Rail station itself.   The next notion I had was to use the measurements as a sort of list.  It seemed a natural progression to use these dimensional measurements, no longer of space, but of time itself... So I made some well informed guesses of the time it might take to travel to certain other urban centres, both within the UK and in Europe.  The following experimental piece was the outcome.

I'm still keen to create something that not only reflects the sense of space in the St Georges Square, but also some sort of narrativee comment to try and connect it with the history, or pedigree(?) of why Huddersfield had a rich foundation, yet, at the same time, connect it with the town in a contemporary way.

I keep being drawn to the grid structure of the cobbled setts.  Is this something that I can explore further perhaps?   I made a mental note to revisit this notion of the grid.

The paved area is so important to the concept of "the square".....