Murdered with Straight Lines

The Architecture Centre is pleased to present the first ever exhibition of Garth England’s drawings, kindly on loan from Bristol Archives.

Garth England was born in 1935 and lived most of his life in South Bristol, working as a paperboy, milkman and on the railways. His remarkable collection of drawings – made with pencil, crayon and with a ruler – were mainly drawn from memory during his later years in a residential home and were created on whatever paper was to hand – often the backs of envelopes, bank notes and letters. The drawings present a remarkable record of not only Garth’s life but of the buildings and places that surrounded him throughout his life in Bristol and beyond.

In 2013, during the research phase of Future Perfect (a public art programme in Hengrove, South Bristol, curated by Jes Fernie and Theresa Bergne), the engagement manager for the project, Jo Plimmer, met Garth and was introduced to his remarkable drawings of Bristol.  As part of the Future Perfect programme, a selection of Garth’s drawings were published in a fully illustrated book, Murdered with Straight Lines: Drawings of Bristol by Garth England (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2016).