Charlie Warde’s prints, paintings, installations and videos interrogate utopian texts and ideologies through the post-war British town planning and social housing they have inspired. Typically an iconic modernist structure is represented in an idiom and materials that recall simultaneously the ideals underlying its foundation and the vicissitudes of its subsequent life. The HELP print/multiple was originally made to raise funds for his Concrete Island project. This was a week-long residency during which the artist lived in a portakabin under the Westway Flyover while he built a site-specific installation from rubbish, scrap metal and wood, and builders' rubble. Warde's project was inspired by J. G. Ballard's 1974 novel of the same title, a modern-day version of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in which a wealthy architect struggles to survive in an inaccessible urban wasteland where he is stranded when his Jaguar careers off the Westway in an accident. On the sixth night of Warde's residency the nearby Grenfell Tower caught fire with appalling loss of life, the site was closed and the project had to be abandoned.

The image, consisting of just the word HELP hand-stencilled in black acrylic paint onto cream handmade paper, had orginally been a reference to the novel's protagonist spelling the word out in large letters to attract the attention of motorists passing overhead on the Westway, at the same time punningly appealing for financial help from the artist's supporters. But as he has written on social media:
"The prints have subsequently taken on another significance - the screams for HELP from residents trapped in burning apartments, the LACK OF HELP from the council in the aftermath of the disaster compared from the overwhelming amount of HELP from volunteers and the community."
In a chilling echo of the novel, some of the victims of the fire had even desperately spelled out the word HELP on their windows. Half of the proceeds from the sale of the edition were donated to the survivors of the disaster.