PETRO-FEUDALISM AND THE FIGHT FOR CLEAN AIR - STANLOW

Tallinn Archicture Biennale 2026 - Royal College of Art 2025/26

SYNOPSIS: Beside one of Britain’s largest oil refineries, the town of Ellesmere Port breathes air it cannot see, cannot measure, and cannot prove is harming it. The pollution is real, chronic illness, a cancer rate well above the national average, but the systems meant to hold industry to account instead defer to it, leaving residents inside a problem they have no power to challenge.
Petro-Feudalism and the Fight for Clean Air traces a journey from the abstract idea of the exclusion zone to a single refinery on the Mersey, uncovering a condition in which industrial infrastructure stops behaving like a market actor and starts behaving like a governing power. Its response is both practical and radical: a cheap, open-source sensor network that hacks public infrastructure to make invisible pollution visible, and a speculative future in which a community turns that data into legal, political, and structural change.At its heart is a simple argument, that clean air is not a privilege to be negotiated, and that the line between industry and human life should be drawn by the people who have to breathe across it.

This project is called *Petro-Feudalism and the Fight for Clean Air*, but it did not begin with either petro-feudalism or Stanlow. It began with a line on a map.

EXCLUSION: Before this work turned towards a refinery on the Mersey estuary, it was concerned with a broader and stranger phenomenon: exclusion. The exclusion zone, the boundary we draw around danger, around contamination, around the places deemed unfit for ordinary human life. These zones appear objective, even scientific, but the closer I looked, the less fixed they became. They change shape over time. They are communicated in wildly different ways. They expand and contract depending on which parameters are considered and which are quietly left out. And most troublingly, the thresholds that define them, the precise level of a chemical like benzene at which a place tips from "safe" to "unsafe", are not neutral facts handed down by science. They are negotiated, lobbied over, and shaped by the very industries they are meant to constrain.

The first phase of the project took the concept of exclusion apart: how these boundaries are made, who draws them, how they are enforced and perceived, and whose interests they ultimately serve. What emerged was a single conviction that would go on to shape everything that followed, that the threshold itself is the vulnerability. The moment a system permits *some* harm, it creates a number, and a number can always be moved by whoever holds the most power in the room.