[3] In Leeds and later in London, she became involved in the punk, rave and squatting scenes and produced zines and posters influenced by Raymond Pettibon, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage.
[10] In 2008 Owen Hatherley named Savage Messiah 10: Abandoned London as one of his "books of the year", describing it as "an oneiric vision of a depopulated, post-catastrophe capital, pieced together from snatched conversations and reminiscences, set in a landscape of the labyrinthine ruins of 1960s architecture and today's negative-equity banlieue.
[4] Reviewing the book for The Guardian, Iain Sinclair commented: "Collided into a great block, the catalogue of urban rambles takes on a new identity as a fractured novel of the city" and praised Ford's "authentic gifts as a recorder and mapper of terrain.
"[12] In his review for Eye, Rick Poynor praised her "acutely observant" writing and "assertively linear style of drawing"; concluding, he described the work as "graphic literature of great urgency.
"[13] In 2012 Greil Marcus described Savage Messiah as a continuation of the work of the Situationists Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, and Michèle Bernstein,[14] and as "a delirious, doomstruck celebration of squats, riots, vandalism, isolation, alcohol, and sex with strangers, all on the terrain of a half-historical, half-imaginary city that the people who Ford follows, herself at the center, can in moments believe they built themselves, and can tear don as they choose.
[9] J. D. Taylor has interpreted Savage Messiah as an exploration of themes of surveillance, gentrification and class conflict and the use of architecture as "a cynical strategy of social management and expropriation"[16] and suggested that Ford's work is part of a trend involving the "reclamation of the non-place".
[19] Comparing Savage Messiah to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Davies argues that both works draw on London's past to critique its present.
[3] She created 11 posters based on dérives in the city; though Arnolfini produced a map and Ford led a walk between them, they were primarily left to be casually witnessed by the public.
[27] Later that year a solo exhibition of paintings and collaged drawings entitled Seroxat, Smirnoff, THC ran at the Stanley Picker Gallery in Surbiton.
The exhibition focused on the effects of urban regeneration in the neighbourhood surrounding the gallery near Edgware Road in central London, and included audio recordings of the area.
[32] Skye Sherwin of The Guardian writes that Ford's work "focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed, which regeneration seeks to concrete over: city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise, with their Escher-like walkways and bleak 'recreational' open spaces.
[23] Christopher Collier has argued that Ford's work utilises "semi-fictionalised settings of dilapidated blue-collar and immigrant districts of a post-Thatcherite London increasingly ghettoised, defunded and threatened by the state.
In a 2009 interview Ford reiterated the centrality of a critique of urban regeneration, and expressed an interest in brutalist architecture (referring specifically to Broadwater Farm in Tottenham and Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar.
"[1] She also said, in the same interview: Streets are indelibly marked by moments of socio-political intensity – uprisings, occupations and raves, trauma, anxiety and militancy – as well as the tremors and faultlines of your own past.
[1]While Ford's work has been described as psychogeography, Mark Fisher suggested that it be understood instead in terms of Jacques Derrida's account of hauntology, in order to better understand the ways the urban spaces she depicts represent "ghosts" or political paths not taken.