The City of London’s alleyways form a network of twilight passages layered with stories from a medieval past. Myth, Ritual, Performance in the City explores an alternative approach to inhabiting such historic sites, proposing a set of new guilds to celebrate enablers of street activity. Street therapy, busking, and borrowing restore the communal nature of these spaces which once served all social classes living in and around the city.

The Lord Mayor’s Show and procession takes place annually on the second Saturday of November. Pageant wagons advertising the new guilds’ services unfold from the alleyways, traverse the streets, and transform into stages upon arrival outside Guildhall. These portals and bridges connecting the square mile saturate movement through alleyways, creating tensions between the established regularity of the city’s built environment and the new guilds’ unregulated presence.

The project recognises the transformative power of storytelling; using vocational language, it expands the realms of truth and educates through the profound experience of catharsis.