I recently attended a documentary photography workshop. One question I had was how could I be braver about asking and taking photographs of people in their houses and then being able to use them for positive purposes? The tutor gave me a lengthy answer and the gist was about building relationships, building trust. There was [...]
There are two novels written about the estates we are thinking about in this post, as different in many ways as the estates themselves. The estates are very interrelated and mutually used but they are completely divided by a railway line. Locals tend to refer to each of the estates respectively as ‘over the other side’ [...]
Estates like Park Hill were built as a brave and positive contribution to housing as part of a wider vision of how we might live in the urban environment. The council architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith (who died very recently) had drawn inspiration from Le Corbusier’s post war Unité d’Habitation and this was to be [...]
In last month’s blog we went to Margate and that’s where we start again this month. Margate’s seaside heritage is exemplified by the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital built practically on the seafront in the 1790s, back in the days when sea air and sea bathing were considered to cure all manner of diseases. This hospital [...]
Just about every time I’ve been to Margate there’s been a dazzling blue sky and I asked if the golden sand was artificial – it isn’t. However my interest in this place didn’t stem from childhood memories of day trips to the seaside (but I do recall English and Welsh seaside holidays sitting behind a [...]
Prefabs were supposed to be a short-term fix to the housing crisis after the second world war, a life of around 10 years until housing could be more permanently sorted. They needed to be constructed rapidly, and although hard to heat and cold in the winter, some with asbestos and other health and safety concerns, [...]
Denton Road still appears on my old edition of the London A-Z but apart from that, practically all traces of it have vanished. I’ve never been able to find a photo in an archive, or a snippet of written information from decision makers on what happened to all those people who lived there, and why [...]
