DOCUMENTING the rapidly changing look and feel of an increasingly privatised and enclosed contemporary London, Savage Messiah was a pre-digital cut-and-paste fanzine of monochrome photographs, text and illustration.

Part-graphic novel, part-artwork, it described life through the eyes of a young woman in the capital during the early 1990s.

Living in insecure accommodation, well away from the city’s manicured gardens and perfectly ordered homes, Laura Grace Ford picked through the relics of a London landscape that was being deliberately abandoned and then auctioned off.

While the city was being made safe for the super-rich, with the commercialised economic juggernaut of the Olympic Games and its redevelopment sideshow rolling into town, Savage Messiah was searching for empty yards, derelict factories and other wild but genuinely public spaces.

A rallying cry to resist gentrification, council house sell-offs, the “right-to-buy” scandal, social cleansing, working-class marginalisation and road building, Savage Messiah recognised urban regeneration as a crude attempt to design out dissent.

It lamented that a class war was being waged with only one side really fighting but didn’t exclude the love stories, casual sex and relationships, squats, month-long drug-fuelled benders, come-downs and violence that were also part of the author’s life.

At times poetic and rarely short of meaningful analysis, Savage Messiah yearns for a boundless and “nicely uncivilised” life among the towers, bridges, arches and narrow lanes of an unsanitised city.

While the poor continue to struggle with housing costs and alternative cultures are starved of space, its call for a collective resistance to neoliberal capitalism, “the endless proliferation of banalities and homogenising effects of globalisation” makes it a relevant counterblast to top-down regeneration projects and their idealised redevelopment brochures.

Published by Verso, £16.99.