Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Bryant and May Match Factory












This is my final illustration for the reportage project. The brief required me to produce a black and white image with text in one colour. (The text is written in full below). The building was printed using a cardboard plate, which allowed me to add all the brick texture to the surface of the cardboard. I have included a group of the Match Girls in front gates. I really wanted to include them in the image, after reading about the horrendous way they were treated I felt it was important to make them central to the message. This is also why I have used a quote from Annie Besant who lead them in a successful strike in 1888.

Bow quarter, once the site of the Bryant and May Match factory, was one of East London's first urban renewal projects. it is comprised of nineteen town houses and seven hundred and fourteen apartments with rent at approximately three hundred pounds per week. The development boasts its own supermarket, leisure centre, bar and restaurant. The Bow Quarter.

'Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on the streets provided only that the Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent.' Annie Besant, 'The Link: A journal for the servants of man', Saturday 23 June 1888.

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