This inclusive interdisciplinary project explores the relationship between evil, spaces and places. From the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge and the massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda, from crumbling sanatoria to gothic haunted houses and basements of imprisonment and sexual oppression, evil has many geographies and inhabits a wide array of accidental or designed architectures. Places become defined as evil; spaces are made evil by the actions of people or acquire the atmosphere and presence of evil. Whether real or imagined, these spaces and places speak to us of unease, fear, menace, dread, horror, the supernatural and something beyond what is human. Evil. This project seeks to map and explore the relationship between persons, evils, spaces and places.

For 2016 the project will focus specifically on London as a locus of evil spaces and places. Described in The Guardian newspaper as “the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable”, London is the home of Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, and Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors. The city has cringed before the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt; it has seen kings and queens crowned and beheaded; it has gawked at Shakespeare’s Wyrd Sisters, the Great Fire, cholera, and the Great Stink that led to the creation of one of the first modern sewer systems. It is full of hauntings and ghosts and things that go bump in the night.