Love Letters
to the Buildings

An exhibition of site-responsive installations will take place across five buildings at LCF: Lime Grove, John Princes’ Street, Curtain Road, Golden Lane, and Mare Street. The installations will transform recycled materials and machinery into artworks, showcasing treasures from the College archives and presenting a new oral history of the buildings and the memories they hold. These installations will reveal the College's origins as trade schools for London’s renowned garment industry, including Barrett Street, Shoreditch, Clapham, and Cordwainer's School.

This exhibition is a collaborative project led by Sal Pittman. It incorporates research conducted by students on the history of the buildings, sound design collaborations with Jonathon Baker (Klanghaus), site-responsive illustrations created by students, and donations of objects and materials from courses that are being cleared as the buildings are prepared for the move to East Bank, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in autumn 2023. Sal also worked closely with materials from the College archives, remixing, manipulating, and re-imagining them into video works, large-scale installations of objects, and image interventions.

At the heart of the exhibition are the voices of staff, students, and alumni who participated in interviews, sharing their stories and recounting their memories and histories of the buildings. These accounts will be presented as quotes, audio recordings on vintage telephones, and films spread across the buildings.