Riverside Court, Nine Elms Lane, Wandsworth, London, SW8

This postmodern block was built in 1989. Its red engineering brick is covered by vegetation smothering the rectangular outlines of Riverside Court and rendering the walls underneath invisible. A little further along, green is crowding from rooftop to rooftop, expanding over your head as you stumble along Nine Elms Lane and the little neat row houses of Wandsworth.

Continuing eastwards, vegetation is overhanging the steel and cast iron piers of Vauxhall Bridge, stretching over the concrete and steel office blocks in the City’s financial district, and at the horizon, over the pinnacles of corporate highrises, out to the commercial warehouses of the East. One can’t see the details. Just the shapes. In some parts the creepers part to reveal the brick, steel or glass work below. Most of the architecture is sealed beneath a green coat of foliage that changes colour from borough to borough, district to district, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge patchwork blanket.

Like fields seen from the sky, this dense coloured quilt stretching along the rooftops of the city is part of a mapping programme put in place by the City’s Health Department. Gradations of changing colours, swelling and inflating leaves are monitored as a method of pandemic prevention and helps officials to adapt their services to the likely impacts of airborne diseases. Roads are monitored and controlled to enable new situations to be integrated with daily activity. Policemen on horseback, traffic wardens at intervals, medical teams stationed at designated areas. An announcement in the entry hall of the Victoria Line reads “Severe infections around Vauxhall. Please change at Green Park for all destinations.”

Excerpt from Plant Fiction by Troika. Now showing at the Science Museum, London.