Desire Line 2026 – Anna Fairchild

Desire Line

Saturation Point, London, 2026

A Desire Line (or Desire Path) is an undesignated route taken on foot through urban or peripheral urban (peri-urban) spaces. Often physically recognisable as rough path lines across urban green spaces, or worn-out areas of paving, or evident in the broken edges of kerbstones, re-patched with other materials. In some cases, we may observe a surprising use of materials such as pieces of carpet, broken bricks or fragments of wood.

I have previously used a Desire Line technique I call ‘Brutal Foraging’, to explore often overlooked and under-examined corners of urban and peri-urban spaces. I maintain that this intuitive way of navigating these spaces by taking unmarked and less used routes, can act as both a quiet form of resistance against the ways in which urban planning often has designs upon us, and as a way to generate visual ideas which propose alternative ways to think about how we might share and inhabit these spaces.

Continuing this abiding interest in these under-examined spaces, Desire Line looks to what is noticed, looking down, underneath, and at the edges, corners and the rear of buildings, primarily within UK but inflected with observations and recollections of my time spent living in Istanbul, Turkiye (1989-2001). I acknowledge that colour, surface pattern and geometric shapes and forms within the culture have heavily influenced my work. In addition to this, the way that a city such as Istanbul is organically & socially navigated on a daily basis has provided many of the starting points for my work since the early 1990s.

Photographs: Andrew Moller