The streets of London carry histories of empire, capital, and control. Every brick is inscribed with an order of belonging—who is welcome to linger, who is hurried along, and who is seen as out of place.

The city, like many metropolises of empire, is layered with unspoken codes. Streets and buildings carry the afterlife of colonial orders, where Black presence has historically been either erased from the archive or cast into hypervisibility under surveillance.

Urban planning is a choreography of power, determining how bodies move, where they gather, and whether they are recognised as legitimate presences in public space. For Black bodies, this choreography has always been fraught, caught between invisibility and exposure.

Architecture too speaks a language, and in London, that language often whispers exclusion, through tower blocks that isolate rather than connect, and estates that fragment rather than unify.

The careful placement of CCTV cameras and the narrowing of public spaces disclose an anticipatory logic: the city imagines Blackness as disruption, and thus builds pre-emptive forms of control into its very structures.

Belonging is rewritten through architecture. The built environment becomes an archive of unspoken reminders—that one’s presence must be justified, and that the right to inhabit the city remains precarious.