With her latest exhibition, British artist Laura Oldfield Ford is more likely to change your understanding of London's working-class landscape than any architect or designer, says Owen Hatherley in this Opinion column.

At the far end of Laura Oldfield Ford's exhibition Alpha/Isis/Eden ? on at the Showroom Gallery in Lisson Grove, just northwest of central London ? is an image taken from a property brochure for a recent building in the area.
It's a view of an interior, of a very familiar kind. The room is small, but expensive furnishings and a view manage to obscure that fact. Vaguely modernist lightweight chairs, a plush sofa, a coffee table with design books and objets d'art frame what you can see through the floor-to-ceiling windows ? which you'll notice, if you've just wandered around the area, is an aerial view of where you are, with the spire of John Soane's Holy Trinity Marylebone as a marker ("occupied", we'll learn, "by an American evangelist sect"). Multicoloured writing is scrawled between the angles of this clean-lined space, and the colour has been tinted, making it look queasy, radioactive. What is happening here is a conjuring act ? an attempt to call back all that this image of a perfect high-rise room for sale erases. All the forgotten moments, fervent hopes and lost connections that these ubiquitous photos and renders of mediocre super-modernity suggest have definitively disappeared are brought back, albeit fleetingly.
For the ...