If you have ever visited London, you may have noticed how busy it gets – millions and millions of travellers, tourists, businessmen, workers and Londoners. They all walk over and underneath them, not noticing the beauty of their industrial design. What are we talking about? Street covers.

About those that protect vast cavernous tubes and clasp London’s electricity, water and gas. London streets are filled with them; and Marina Willer’s artfulness celebrates their unique patterns with her first Pentagram paper, called symptomatically Overlooked. The paper focuses on the gatekeepers to this world below our feet – overlooked street covers – with colourful imprints to represent these metal lids as flawless segments of industrial design, beautifully described as being “threaded throughout the functional fabric of a city”.

Marina Willer hopes that her work will serve as a reminder that a city’s beauty isn’t confined just to art galleries or represented only by grand architecture and it will show intricate design is everywhere. The paper consists of imprints taken from 22 street covers, reaching from Islington to Kensington.

The images are folded to an A1 booklet which is beautifully crafted in neon tones that reveal hidden decorative patterns and overall produce an unusual perspective to these covers. They are all unique, produced in such a size, colour and mismatched imprints in order to highlight every detail and individuality of each cover’s outlines. See for yourselves.

For a curious reader, there are texts that retell London’s history through these covers, describing the importance of each piece of street furniture that serve the millions and millions visitors and people of London.

Credits:

Title: Pentagram Papers 45: Overlooked
Art director: Marina Willer
Designers: Ian Osborne and Hiromi Suzuki
Writer: Zuleika Sedgley
Project Manager: Jessica Samuel