Richard Galpin's work is concerned with urban growth and transformation.
Recent projects involve engagement and collaboration with urban community food growing projects. The work incorporates structural concerns (walls, support systems, field trials, mapping) and creative (plant collections, renaming cultivars, and breeding new varieties).
The work engages with local history and changing land use, with an interest in urban commons past and present.
Richard Galpin's 2D and 3D works are dynamic visual observations of urban development, with an emphasis on the apparatus of construction sites, urban infrastructure and the surfaces of the city.
The work is underpinned by early conceptual works and writing around the theme of erasure. These themes find echoes in Richard Galpin's later works in relation to the preservation or erasure of traces of history in cities during processes of redevelopment.