Our fourth field trip to London took place at a relatively advanced stage of the project. By then, we had already spent over a year reading one another’s case studies, exchanging articles, debating concepts, and gradually developing a shared comparative language around theatre and gentrification. We had also become increasingly accustomed to our own “walking methodologies”: moving through cities together, observing, discussing, comparing, and testing ideas against the material realities of urban space. As a result, London was not simply another city to explore, but a place we were already approaching through layers of prior knowledge, assumptions, and theoretical expectations.

In that sense, to me at least, the anticipation of this field visit differed somewhat from our earlier trips. Even when the routes Joseph Prestwich guided us through — from central London to rapidly transforming outer districts — were unfamiliar to me personally, they still felt partially known through previous conversations, readings, and discussions within the group. Like my colleagues, I had also visited London many times before, so I found myself wondering whether it would still be possible to preserve the same attentiveness and openness of interpretation that often accompanies a first encounter with a city. Could familiarity dull my observation? Could prior theoretical frameworks begin to shape what we expected to see too strongly?

Yet these assumptions dissolved remarkably quickly once we began moving through London itself. What struck me almost immediately was the sheer scale, ambition, and velocity of urban transformation. Compared to the cities we had previously visited, London’s development felt almost overwhelming - cranes dominated the skyline in multiple districts, and most neighbourhoods we’ve seen conveyed a sense of perpetual reinvention.

More than anything, however, the experience made tangible something Joe had repeatedly emphasized throughout the project: the particular temporality of urban change in London. Here, only a few years can be enough for entire streets or districts to become almost unrecognisable. Reading about such processes is one thing. Walking through them — and hearing how quickly familiar places had already changed even for those who knew the city well — produced a much more immediate understanding of what accelerated urban transformation actually feels like in practice.

Two more years

On Friday morning, we took the Tube to Stratford and walked toward Hackney Wick through Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Redeveloped for the 2012 Olympic Games, the area immediately conveyed the atmosphere of newly manufactured urban space: expansive pedestrian routes, carefully landscaped public areas, polished glass façades, and an almost unsettling sense of spatial order. Despite the scale of the investment, parts of the district felt oddly empty as we walked through them on a Friday morning — vast, polished spaces seemingly still waiting to be inhabited. Beyond the monumental sports venues — most visibly the London Stadium — it quickly became apparent that the Olympics had served as the starting point for something much larger than a sporting event alone. East Bank, with its growing concentration of cultural, educational, and media institutions, exemplified London’s ongoing attempt to consolidate itself as a global creative city.

We first entered the newly opened Sadler’s Wells East theatre and dance academy. As one of Europe’s most prestigious dance institutions, Sadler’s Wells occupies a uniquely influential position within the international ecology of contemporary dance. Its network of associated artists — including figures such as Akram Khan, Crystal Pite, Hofesh Shechter, and Matthew Bourne — has long functioned as both artistic recognition and institutional elevation into the highest tier of international contemporary choreography. Walking through the building, I found myself thinking about how strongly institutions like these shape not only artistic production, but also cultural prestige itself: legitimising certain aesthetics, careers, and artistic geographies on a global scale.

Nearby stood the London College of Fashion and the future BBC studios, reinforcing the sense that the area had been carefully imagined as an integrated cultural ecosystem. We also visited the V&A East Storehouse, which proved to be one of the most memorable spaces of the trip for me personally. Somewhere between an archive, museum storage facility, and partly curated exhibition, the Storehouse presents its collection through a deliberately semi-ordered logic. Objects from radically different periods, cultures, and aesthetic traditions appear side by side with little immediate explanation: fragments of architecture, sculptures, textiles, furniture, industrial objects, contemporary artworks. The effect was at first slightly disorienting, but soon became deeply absorbing. Instead of leading visitors through a clear historical storyline, the space seemed to encourage associative forms of looking — inviting the eye to search for accidental resonances and unexpected relationships between otherwise incompatible artefacts. I realised, somewhat unexpectedly, how refreshing I found this mode of encounter. One could easily spend hours there, tracing unexpected connections and associations emerging from this semi-curated assemblage of objects, that perhaps were never intended to speak to one another at all.

These impressive new “temples of culture,” however, stood in striking contrast to the still recognisably artistic atmosphere of nearby Hackney Wick. Along the canals sat residential barges; former industrial buildings housed cafés, artist studios, co-working spaces, and bars, many of them retaining a visibly improvised DIY aesthetic. Even during a relatively brief walk through the district, the area projected a particular atmosphere that felt at once creative and provisional. The neighbourhood still carried traces of the alternative artistic ecology that had emerged there in previous decade(s), yet it also seemed impossible to ignore how fragile that version of Hackney Wick now appeared, surrounded by newly constructed apartment blocks and office developments, Ironically, the very qualities that once made the area attractive to artists — its industrial architecture, affordable studios, informal social spaces, canal-side warehouses, and a certain sense of marginality — now appeared actively incorporated into the branding logic of redevelopment itself. Yet another example, how “authenticity” had become part of the aesthetic language of investment.

Andy Pratt, who generously guided us through the area, offered particularly valuable insights into the material conditions underpinning this transformation. His remarks about public investment proved especially illuminating in a comparative context. As he explained, mega-events such as the Olympics are never simply about sport; they are long-term urban projects aimed at transforming land values, infrastructure, and the symbolic image of the city itself. Equally revealing was his discussion of the former industrial terrain on which much of this redevelopment now stands: highly contaminated land that once possessed effectively negative market value, requiring enormous public expenditure simply to become viable for future investment. In that sense, the Olympics operated not merely as an event, but as a political justification for large-scale urban restructuring.

During our walk, we eventually arrived at Two More Years, a multi-purpose venue combining co-working spaces, bars, and performance infrastructure. The name immediately struck me. Slightly ironic, slightly melancholic, it seemed to capture the precarious temporality of the neighbourhood itself. “Two more years” sounded both hopeful, and like an acknowledgment of how uncertain the future of such spaces had become amid rising rents and accelerating redevelopment. I found myself returning to that phrase repeatedly after we left Hackney Wick. Throughout the remainder of the trip, passing through various cultural places in London’s most rapidly transforming districts, I repeatedly caught myself silently asking the same question: how many more years?

Between Play and Playing

On Friday evening, we attended a performance of The Authenticator by Winsome Pinnock at the Dorfman Theatre, part of London’s National Theatre complex. The play follows character Fenella Harford, an eccentric artist who, after inheriting her family estate, uncovers a hidden collection of diaries and invites a young academic, Marva, to verify their authenticity. Together with Marva’s mentor Abi, the three women gradually uncover a history far more unsettling than any of them anticipated. Combining elements of psychological thriller and gothic mystery, the production explored the uneasy entanglement of English national heritage and the histories of slavery that continue to haunt it.

Pinnock’s script drew attention to structural exclusions embedded within official heritage itself — to the ways entire communities have historically been denied visibility within institutional archives and cultural memory, their histories often preserved only through oral tradition. While rooted in the history of slavery and its afterlives, the play also raised broader questions about cultural ownership, historical legitimacy, and social justice. Importantly, however, it resisted simplistic divisions. Both the writing and the performances avoided reducing these tensions into clear ethical oppositions, despite the sensitivity of the material. The result was intellectually sharp theatre that left the audience with an open-ended conclusion.

The performance also prompted another comparative reflection on the theatrical experiences that had accompanied our project. Although our field trips primarily focused on the material and social positioning of theatres within processes of urban transformation, the performances themselves inevitably became part of the research experience. Across the different cities we encountered productions that were often difficult to compare directly: immersive and entertainment spectacles, independent and experimental theatre, movement-based performances and installations, as well as large institutional productions. The Authenticator clearly belonged to the latter category: a carefully crafted evening of text-based theatre, centered on dramaturgy, language, and performance.

At the same time, the production made me reflect on differences between theatrical traditions that had repeatedly surfaced during our travels. I remembered Joe’s remarks during our Warsaw trip about a certain skepticism toward overly interventionist directing within British theatre culture, where audiences often place particular value on strong writing and accomplished acting. The Authenticator seemed to perfectly exemplify this approach. Every theatrical element — scenography, lighting, sound, pacing — appeared carefully calibrated to support the text rather than compete with it. The production’s priority was not directorial reinterpretation, but the clearest possible realisation of the play itself.

This stood in noticeable contrast to many productions we had encountered in Poland and Germany, where auteur-driven directing traditions remain far more dominant. In those contexts, the director often functions as the principal artistic author of the performance, shaping all theatrical elements around a distinct conceptual vision and multi-layered theatrical metaphor. Even though I was fully aware of these differences in theory, I still found myself slightly surprised by my own reaction in practice. Part of me kept anticipating a more visible directorial gesture, a stronger formal intervention. That reaction itself made me wonder how deeply our aesthetic expectations are shaped by the theatrical cultures in which we learn to watch theatre. To what extent do national and regional traditions shape assumptions about what theatre is supposed to do? How are aesthetic hierarchies formed, and what broader cultural conditions sustain them? Questions of particular traditions, cultural policy, funding structures, institutional prestige, audience composition, and even local art markets all seem implicated in these differing theatrical sensibilities. The comparative dimension of our experiences throughout the project repeatedly brought such questions to the surface. By the end of the evening, I found myself thinking less about the production alone than about the cultural frameworks through which theatre becomes meaningful to its audiences in the first place.