THE BEST laid schemes, as Robert Burns once said, often go askew and in her exhibition Britannia 2013-1981, Dalston artist Laura Oldfield Ford, looks at how even the highly structured environment of a new town changes, adapts and bends to the will of human nature over time.

“This project was generated by walks around London, creating emotional maps of the areas I have engagement with. This is central to my practice as an artist. I began by chronicling a disappearing London, a lot of which has been completely erased for the 2012 Olympics.”

After studying for a BA at Slade Art School, Laura went on to do her masters at The Royal College of Art, graduating in 2007.

Originally from Halifax, she has spent the past 15 years living in the area around the lower Lea Valley.

Through the course of her work, Laura has extended outward from the East End to the new towns of Harlow, Hatfield and Stevenage, all designed spaces from the post-war era, to re-house people displaced by the Blitz or through the slum clearance programme – a process which Laura calls “slightly suspect social cleansing”.

Laura creates a social map of each area by walking around and observing, taking pictures and then drawing what she sees to provide a mental as well as a physical impression of a community.

“I’m interested in new towns on so many levels. Social, political and architectural, especially nomadic architecture, traveller sites and other ad hoc additions that get tacked on to the highly planned grid of a town.”

Arranged in panels like window panes, Laura’s exquisitely detailed pen and ink drawings and pencil sketches trace the forgotten areas of these concrete conurbations. A caravan on a piece of wasteland, a boarded up prefab pub, ironically called called The Sun In Splendour, a deserted drive-thru fast-food forecourt, Laura picks out these desolate images and daubs them with DayGlo graffiti, slogans such as ‘No War But Class War’, or she illuminates them against the acrid glow of street lights – these are the only colourful elements in her vision of the post-industrial landscape.

It’s a grim prophecy, but Laura feels these neglected aspects of the British townscape must be catalogued before they are bulldozed into extinction. She also wants to make a statement against the rampant march of redevelopment.

“Capitalism has been this way for the past ten years and it can’t go on indefinitely. It’s a way to consider what the future of a city might be away from the endless neo-liberal luxury apartments and shopping malls for the rich. There’s no mass council housing being built and it should be happening now.“ Britannia 2013-1981, runs from Friday to end Jan 2010 at the Art and Design Gallery, Hatfield. www.herts.ac.uk/ Laura’s work is also on show at the Royal College of Art, www.rca.ac.uk