The photographs in this project seek to question and re-evaluate urban spaces and Architecture and the psychology of these places on the individuals that inhabit them. Made more pertinent when viewed in a context of a global pandemic like Covid 19 and a shift in the political landscape of the UK through Brexit. In his book the Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton suggests “One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings, and streets that surround us.” During the Covid 19 pandemic there have been plenty of photographs documenting people confined to their homes, but what is the psychological effect of quiet city spaces on the individual that encounter them. How does the city and its architecture shape the way we feel when its functionality and design are suddenly being questioned and contradicted. Can viewing the fabric of a city or urban space reveal a reservoir of meaning and memory, a shared unconscious. The study of Urban Spaces can be related to Psychogeography which was defined by Guy Debord in 1955 as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” We now know, for example, “that buildings and cities can affect our mood and well-being, and that specialised cells in the hippocampal region of our brains are attuned to the geometry and arrangement of the spaces we inhabit. michael bond.” (the hidden ways architecture affect how you feel you feel) Our understanding of space and architecture is challenged through a pandemic like Covid 19. Spaces seem alien without the people to fill them, Architecture more foreboding when encountered by one person alone. Here the urban sublime manifests itself as individuals drift through time and space in their existential bubble. As Marc Whitman points out in his book Sense of Time. “Time is inseparable connected to built space” Social isolation is now seen as a major risk factor for many illnesses. One thing that is guaranteed to make people feel negative about living in a city is a constant sense of being lost or disorientated. Through the Covid 19 pandemic all of a sudden common everyday places that we inhabit hold a different atmosphere. “Place” according to Edward Casey and “place experience is an integral part of human life, Place belongs to the very concept of existence.” The modern day Psychogeographer Will Self wrote at the start of the first lockdown in the UK “I believe that in many ways the lockdown we have experienced has only sharpened my conduction that the most expansive engagement with place and space that we can have consists of reengaging with what is right in front of us.” My work studying these urban spaces has taken on more of a role of the Flanuer, drifting though the city without any pre determined route. Without the need to be anywhere for any certain time gives the opportunity to observe my surroundings in a different way. Without the normally crowded streets you feel as an observer you have more time to really look at the city fabric. In the film Robinson in Space by Patrick Keiller a study of liminal spaces and architecture in the UK that has Pyschogeography at its core. There is a line by the fictional flaneur Robinson that says “If he looked at the landscape hard enough it would reveal to him the moleculer basis of historical events.” What relevance does Psychogeography have in todays modern city where information is at our finger tips with google maps. It could be suggested we have become less connected, with the digital world more prominent and the real world less distinguishable. Will Self suggests that the common city dweller, “is unable to experience being alone in place itself, not knowing where and unable to travel across appreciable portions of the city by their own motive power, they are condemned to a socialised spatial existence.” In a time of city lockdowns and a social pandemic, i think more than ever Psychogeography has become relevant again. Looking at the fabric of a city can reveal wider truths about society and reveal layers of history and evoke memory. As Thomas Struth suggests whilst talking about his project Unconscious Places, each building gives off an atmosphere, it reveals the human unconscious energy that is hidden in them. The architecture and urban spaces i have looked at in these photographs are not city landmarks but the everyday spaces that most inhabitants encounter in their daily lives. The walks and photographs that i have taken not only reveal and ask questions of society as a whole and the effect that modern architecture has on the individual, but also the reveal my own existential fears and unconscious thoughts at an uncertain social and political time. Richard Chivers