Spa Road, Bermondsey
What lay beneath a Bermondsey street corner.
When the corner of Dockley Road and Spa Road was redeveloped, planning required the developer to show the public what the excavation had found. AOC Archaeology asked us to turn their findings into a single A1 board for the new building. One panel carrying everything from the Thames floodplain to the Blitz.
Written from where you stand.
AOC had the findings and the archive photographs. The board had to make sense in passing, to someone on the pavement who didn’t know a dig had happened. We sorted the copy into three stories: the origins of Bermondsey, Spa Road Station, and life and work around the site. Each opens with a title and a lead paragraph set large, so the gist is there at a glance and the detail is there for anyone who stays.
Every caption is written from where the reader is standing, so Spa House stood ‘to the left’ and the station ‘to the south and east of the track’. The layout keeps the same discipline: one grid throughout, so the eye always knows where the next caption will be.
The work
Archive photography, x-rays from the excavation and captions written from the reader’s point of view, all locked to one grid.
