"The first time I saw the 1954 demolition plan of Soho drawn by Geoffrey Jellico, Ove Arup and Edward Mills, happened to be during lockdown in 2020.

This futuristic plan seems so cold, detached from actual people’s life and their culture and somehow coincided with the current unprecedented events of the “Pandemic”. Those designers were apparently examining ways of dealing with depopulation of the city centres after the Second World War,

if this plan had gone ahead, it would have been an artificial depopulation.

Uncannily, the pandemic has now managed to depopulate the city centre as natural phenomena.

It feels this depopulation plan was almost like an ominous premonition. "

– Mieko Shimizu

I started living in Soho since 2000, people often surprise to find out that there is a small but very tight local community in Soho.

When lockdown happened all the people, I met during my life in there suddenly disappeared from streets and Soho turned into a ghost town overnight. Nobody knew when we see each other again, it was utterly shocking.

When I saw the 1954 plan, I felt some form of desperation and disappointment. It really shows how top-down society can be indifferent to real human life.

Five tall towers, glass-bottomed canals that followed the path of famous Soho streets like Dean Street and Berwick Street.

Although the 1954 plan didn’t go ahead, in reality developers working with the local council have actually enabled the destruction of Soho over the years.

I picked up the five tall towers from the architectural plan and tried to create a series of five note melodies. I hope that this prayer from deep inside myself channelled this destructive power into something productive, a creative energy.

– Mieko Shimizu