Piece by Kate Lyddon on display at Standpoint gallery
Showcasing the work of emerging and mid-career artists, Standpoint gallery is a place where, as a practising artist or gallery goer, your tastes and complacency are regularly challenged.
The Mark Tanner Sculpture Award is one of the most significant awards in the UK for emerging artists, offering £8,000 towards new work and a solo show. The prize is focused on work that demonstrates a commitment to process, or sensitivity to material. Last year’s winner Kate Lyddon, whose solo show is now on display at the gallery, is better known for her narrative and characterisation work in drawing and painting but has emerged into a sculptor.
According to the gallery’s Curatorial Director Fiona MacDonald the judges, including the departing Director of Tate Britain Penelope Curtis, were “impressed by [Lyddon’s] intuitive sense and use of materials, and the immediacy of her characterisation.”
MacDonald sees in Lyddon’s work “a kind of polarisation between the possibility of innocence and loveliness/sweetness, and the dark, odd, disturbed and disgusting aspects of human behaviour.”
Personally for me the most interesting aspect of Lyddon’s work is how she works with ‘a loose subject’, using aesthetic seduction and repulsion, chaos and order.
Her characters exist at the extremes of possibility, or the “surreality of our existence, how that experience manifests in human behaviour and social interaction… the madness and crudeness of the world,” according to MacDonald.
Lyddon doesn’t seek out ‘characters’, but allows many varied overlapping impressions and experiences of people, all of which surprise her as she works.
Glamorous outerwear is fused with grotesque features, and these sculptures are clothed in the ritualistic fashions of tribal belonging: sports team costumes, military uniforms or carnival fancy dress, worn wrong.
She is further informed by responding to materials’ limitations and the problems they throw up, disrupting clear narratives, and leading her away from initial subjects to unexpected solutions.
Kate Lyddon is the sort of challenge I look forward to, and the kind of artist always likely to to do well at a forward-thinking gallery like Standpoint, particularly with MacDonald at the helm.
Halloumi man: Joe Taylor with ‘intergalactic’ stall front. Photograph: Ella Jessel
Asked who this year’s Field Day headliners are, would you say Caribou, Ride and Patti Smith – or Street Feast? For at next’s month festival, held as ever in Victoria Park, food and drink will be as big a draw as the music.
Or if not, it will certainly be as eclectic. Faced with a sudden craving for cold biltong, churros and chocolate or just a plain old soft shell crab burger, you won’t be found wanting. Street food, needless to say, is experiencing something of a boom in East London.
Joe Taylor is a 28-year-old from Stourbridge in the West Midlands, who came down to London to seek his fortune as a street food vendor. “I don’t have another job or career as such that I want to do specifically,” he says. “So setting up my own business gives me the freedom to tie all my interests together: having fun, going to festivals and events and working outside.”
The parameters set, Joe needed an original idea – not easy in an already crowded market. As a vegetarian one food he found himself drawn to at festivals was halloumi cheese.
“A lot of other stalls might use halloumi as vegetarian option but I thought if I was just doing a vegetarian stall there I could do something a little bit different with it.”
As well as halloumi wraps, Joe was soon thinking up new cheesy products – all guaranteed to make you dream at night. Deep fried bread-crumbed halloumi, pieces of halloumi in a cone and salad boxes are all on the menu. But after premiering the idea at Winterville in December, he realised something was missing – a snappy (or even cheesy) name, an identity. Soon Moony’s Halloumi was born.
“I wanted to find a bit of an angle that would help me engage with people, so there’s a little mascot which is Mr Moony, and he’s basically made out of cheese,” Joe explains.
“The stall front is a bit of an intergalactic space theme comprised of recycled 12 inch records. In front of the records we’ve got space mountains which have got a volcano plume where the menu boards can be written on that. And there’s a few halloumi people and bits of artwork.”
The strength of the street food competition means some kind of hook is a sensible idea. Kate Greening is this year overseeing all the food at Field Day and has been bringing vendors to Field Day for five years under the Venn Street banner.
“When I started we only brought in 10 metres of food then, and now we’re filling the whole site,” she says. Kate explains that as well as including well-known street food traders such as Street Feast, they are trying to bring less established traders with new and exciting ideas into the site.
“It’s very niche, very specialist, rather than have people who can do everything, we want traders who do one specific thing and really specialise.”
Kate reels off some of the highlights on ‘food stage’ as though they were her favourite bands. Crabbie Shack, of crab burger fame, apparently put a whole crab in a burger bun. “It looks like a croissant but it’s not, it’s a crab,” she assures me.
Churros Bros will be frying up dough – Spanish-style – with specialist chocolate, a new Filipino trader Kusina Nova looks set to impress, then there’s hog roast, sushi wraps and, I’m told, “killer” mac and cheese from Anna Mae’s. There’s enough, I’m assured, to take a trip around the world in different street foods.
“We know what the food culture is in London, and this is a great way of celebrating that by bringing as many of the high quality traders together as we can,” Greening adds.
Victoria Park Model Boat Club. Photograph: Travis Elborough
“There’s often a lot of condescension about the past. We need to understand that it’s different but also see the similarities,” historian Travis Elborough explains to me over a cup of tea.
The 44-year-old, who lives in Stoke Newington, has a knack for seeing into the soul of the London landscape. His books include a history of the Routemaster bus and the peculiar story of how London Bridge was transported to Arizona after being bought by an American oil tycoon in the 1960s.
These days Elborough’s attentions have turned to parks –Victoria Park specifically – after he was named Chisenhale Gallery Victoria Park Residency artist for 2014–15.
“I’m interested in the civic and the municipal and that 19th century transformation of our urban spaces that you have in places like Victoria Park,” Elborough says.
Victoria Park is the oldest purpose built park in London and the only royal park not located in the western part of the city. It opened in 1845, as a response to the outbreaks of cholera and typhoid in the densely populated East End that were fast spreading to the affluent West End.
How Victoria Park came about, to keep the “poor and bedraggled” of East London away from the wide streets and squares of the West End, is well documented. What Elborough intends to highlight is more how people interact with urban spaces, and how the parks’ functions change alongside society.
“It sits opposite the Olympic Park, and the Games were an attempt to improve an area through sport and regenerate it. There are parallels between that and the development of Victoria Park as well, not via sport but via housing,” he says.
Elborough tells me about James Pennethorne, who designed Victoria Park. Pennethorne had worked with John Nash on Regent’s Park, a notable feature of which is the surrounding luxury housing.
“There is an attempt to repeat that at first in Victoria Park. The original plan was to have quite grand park-side mansions and crescents, but there just wasn’t the interest because the East End still had quite a negative vibe to it, and the canal that passes on one side was a working canal.”
Before this, part of the land that formed the park was called Bonner’s Fields, named after a Bishop of London who was an ‘enthusiastic burner of heretics’ during Queen Mary I’s reign. Another bit of it was nicknamed Botany Bay, as it was where convicted criminals hid to avoid being transported to Australia.
The book Elborough is currently writing features parks in Paris, New York and Germany. Its main focus, however, is Britain.
“In Britain, parks take on a particular characteristic which is different from other civic spaces. It’s partly because of Britain becoming the first fully industrialised nation so they become almost the fallowed field of the former agrarian society,” he says.
In the 18th century, the space on which Victoria Park is built was used for grazing animals and rough and ready sports, gambling and prize-fighting. When the park opened, however, it became a genteel space with a lake and railings around the paths, in keeping with the Victoria idea of the promenade.
Members of Victoria Park Model Boat club. Photograph: Travis Elborough
“Parks are both tamed wildness and are used to tame wildness,” says Elborough, whose research looks at how the evolution of team games such as crochet and tennis subverted the tamed nature of Pennethorne’s initial design.
Then there’s the political meetings and demonstrations that have occurred in Victoria Park: a major rally by the Chartists, a political speech by William Morris and one of the great Suffragette rallies on May Day in 1913.
“It’s a public space but it’s one which is controlled because there are rules about how you can behave. But then we subvert those rules, so there’s always that tension.”
As part of the Victoria Park residency, Elborough is hosting Games for May, a series of public events in which Elborough invites specialists and park users to consider how the physical landscape of the park has been formed through social ritual and technological invention.
This will include a workshop with Norman Lara from the Victoria Park Model Boating Club on 24 May, followed by a model boat regatta. Chisenhale Gallery has also commissioned Elborough to write a series of short texts to be published on the gallery’s website.
Studio, 2015. AA Bronson. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London
Bethnal Green’s Maureen Paley is the setting for AA Bronson: Hexenmeister, an exhibition by Canadian artist AA Bronson. The work is on display across three rooms, with each room corresponding to the three strands that characterise the artist’s long and varied career: as a radical collaborator with the group General Idea and others; as an artist invested in spirituality, shamanism and the occult; and as a curator, archivist and writer engaged with the many iterations of gay life and subculture.
Though small, the exhibition offers an illuminating insight into the work of an artist who has consistently highlighted new ways for art to be made and distributed, and who continues to challenge orthodox notions of sexuality, ageing and authorship.
As a young man in the 1960s Bronson embraced the hippie ideal and dropped out of his university architecture course in order to create alternative structures for living and creating. Alongside friends and fellow art-school dropouts he formed a commune, free school and underground newspaper in Vancouver, open to all and working on the basis of collective decision making.
This early experience of working within the framework of an open door, consensus-based system led on to his now famous work with Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz in General Idea.
A type of collaborative artistic identity, General Idea allowed Bronson, Zontal and Partz to share their lives and art, becoming, as Bronson remembers, “one person” over their 25-year collaboration. The three artists, living together and working as one, produced countless paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as public art in the forms of billboards, posters and prints.
Red (2011) by AA Bronson and Ryan Brewer. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London
From 1987 this public work in particular began to react to the AIDS crisis that was then decimating the gay communities of their New York base, raising awareness of the disease and highlighting the ignorance and negligence of contemporary societal institutions.
In the ground floor white cube that displays Bronson’s collaborative work here in Bethnal Green, the black canvas Black AIDS (prototype) from 1991 reflects this period of General Idea’s work. In the solid black painting an AIDS logo is hidden and unseen within the block of negative colour, its message as obscured and unreadable as information then was.
When in 1994 both Zontal and Partz died of an AIDS related illness, Bronson emerged as a solo artist, at first engaging with his own sense of loss and directly with the horror of the crisis. His work of this time has lost none of its potency, nor has Bronson mellowed in his commitment to artistic expression.
In 2010, the censorship of a film by David Wojnarowicz caused Bronson to request that his deathbed portrait of Partz be withdrawn from the Smithsonian exhibition ‘Hide/Seek’, in solidarity against censorship and the prejudice around work that fearlessly engages with AIDS and its legacy.
In later solo work Bronson also explores spirituality, manifested in his interest in the magical and occult. The large format photograph Red (2011) demonstrates this performative interaction with his own history and historical gay identity as he wanders the cruising woods of Fire Island as a red-painted apparition, documented by his collaborator, Ryan Brewer.
Placed alongside Red and at the centre of the exhibition is Treehouse (2015), a tent with a frame carved from a single ash tree and walled in hand-woven linen. This new work rises up out of dirt in the gallery floor as an inviting private space of reflection or a place for potential performance.
The third room reflects Bronson’s parallel and interwoven career as a curator, editor and archivist, best exemplified by his founding of the NY Art Book Fair in 1995. The room displays the Bronson curated mini-exhibition Queer Zines, a spread of self-produced and independent magazines that deal with gay life, sex and communities across Europe and America.
Alongside often-explicit images and descriptions of their sexuality, these zine writers document scenes, party spaces and artists to reveal the links between gay and queer lifestyles and punk, lo-fi and other DIY subcultures.
As Bronson himself writes: “They reveal a community in constant communication.” In much the same way, this exhibition showcases an artist in constant communication with the radical, the challenging and the subversive.
AA Bronson: Hexenmeister Until 31 May Maureen Paley 21 Herald Street, E2 6JT maureenpaley.com
Tackling discrimination: cast members of Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman
Following a tip off, I arrive to meet the playwright Robin Soans, holding a packet of Jaffa Cakes. In Soans’ new play Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage, opening at the Arcola this month, the main character’s mother says she always knows her son’s mood based on his eating habits – when things got bad, she says, he stopped eating Jaffa Cakes: “He can usually eat them by the packet.”
The son in question is Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas, who in 2009 came out, bringing a lifetime of denial to an end and beginning the long journey towards acceptance among his fellow professionals.
Accepting a Jaffa Cake and dunking it into a cup of lemon tea, Soans tells me it is domestic detail like this that is so essential in a documentary play: “If you want people to believe the big stuff and go on the big journeys, you’ve got to woo them with the detail,” he says.
The play is about a pioneer. “It’s about someone who did something that had never been done before,” says Soans. During research for the play Thomas admitted that whilst it was a groundbreaking act, it also came with the knowledge that “you have to be prepared to take the shit for it”.
And Thomas did, being ritually insulted on rugby fields around the country in his late career. Six years on, it is his resilience and self-awareness through those dark times that have made him a hero to more than just sport fans, Soans says.
Thomas is very keen for his story to be told – hence persistent rumours of a forthcoming Mickey Rourke film portrayal – but when Soans initially approached him, he was sceptical.
“I think he distrusted the theatre as being exploitative and pretentious, but the first time he saw a run-through in the theatre he was gasping, he was sitting up, it was this absolute recognition.”
On stage Thomas’ personal story is interwoven with that of his hometown of Bridgend, which, around the same time, saw 25 teenage suicides in just two years.
“The two things I never, never try to be are either worthy or grim,” says Soans, “even if it’s a very serious subject.” Instead, with humour and humanity his express intention is, he says, to “reveal a piece of human nature that hasn’t been revealed in that way before.”
Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 20 May – 20 June arcolatheatre.com
An artist is exhibiting her own alter-egos this month at an exhibition mapping the impact of online profiling at Stour Space gallery.
Save Changes sees artists Bettina John, Sheila Rennick and Paula Varjack address how social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest can affect people’s sense of identity.
Bettina John, a 34-year-old artist and costume designer, experimented by using only the internet to make new friends when living in New York as an artist in residence in 2012.
She then chose the five friends she felt were the most interesting and built alter-egos based on their characters.
These include a dogmatic fashionista called Belinda Evangelica, who will be launching a ‘music manifesto’ and single during the exhibition.
“I like her because she just says what she wants,” says John. “She’s really bitchy, and she’s the kind of girl that just has two categories: black and white. She has a Pinterest page with three boards: hate it, love it and irrelevant – because that’s how she sees the world. And she dresses only in black and white.”
Guitar heroine: Belinda Evangelista
John calls her characters “mega stereotypes”, each one with a distinctive look to go with their exaggerated character traits. There’s a cabaret performer, an author and a ‘meta-character’ who tweets about all the other characters. ‘Cyber hippie’ Colbee Hawkins_89 has her own blog and is an activist.
“She needs a lot of in depth fieldwork, so I need to be her for quite some time,” says John. “I went with her to Istanbul and was her for four solid days.”
Being a made-up person for four days straight sounds intense to say the least, but John finds it fascinating how different people react to her characters.
“Colbee really gets attention. People always want to take her photograph and know where she’s from.”
Cyber hippie: Colbee Hawkins_89
At the exhibition opening on 8 May, three of John’s characters were in attendance and made introductory speeches. For the rest of the month there will be two installations – one for the work of the characters, and the other being the characters’ worlds.
Two more artists will be taking part in Save Changes. Sheila Rennick will be exhibiting ‘Tinder men’, paintings of the profiles of men from dating site Tinder, and video artist Paula Varjack will be also displaying work following her recent show about finding freedom in reinvention.
Bettina John as performer Miss Dixie de Rose
Save Changes Stour Space 7 Roach Road, Hackney Wick, E3 2PA Until 1 June stourspace.co.uk
In a small screen at the back of the Whitechapel Gallery, a group of keen cinephiles awaits the address of Jem Cohen, a veteran New York-based filmmaker who has made more than 70 idiosyncratic works over three fruitful decades on the job. It’s an early part of a two-month retrospective entitled Compass and Magnet, with events also taking place at the Barbican and Hackney Picturehouse.
Cohen has produced diary films, city portraits, essay films and collaborated with an extraordinary list of musicians – crossing and blending disciplines with pioneering spirit. On this occasion he’s introducing Museum Hours, perhaps his most accessible and well-known work to date.
“You can walk into a museum and in its way it can miss,” he tells us. “Something has to come together, things have to meet…”
And they do. The film is a subtle and moving expression of enormous ambition. Ideas about time, image, memory, art, artefact, displacement, friendship, experience, history and much more, are hung on a sweet narrative thread that runs through the corridors of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and out into the streets of Vienna.
The following evening, Cohen takes leave of an East End pub to chat for an hour. He tells me more about the film: “It refuses to follow certain rules about what a narrative is and how a narrative is supposed to function, and it insists that the environment, the locations, the ideas and the characters are all equally important.”
This kind of approach is indicative of Cohen’s dedication to making films that don’t lock into one specific form; Museum Hours is particularly interesting in this regard.
Arriving in an unfamiliar city to tend the bedside of a dying cousin, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) is comforted by a chance meeting with a kind museum attendant (Bobby Sommer). One would be forgiven for expecting a romance, but as the lure of familiar storytelling takes hold, Cohen quickly pulls it away and the piece shatters into something far more interesting: a strange hybrid of documentary and fiction that’s both affecting and real.
Those familiar with Cohen’s wider body of work will recognise the importance of music, which is heavily hinted at in the casting of musician O’Hara, whose character sings quietly but crucially.
Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours in Vienna. Photograph: Mark
“Music has always been absolutely vital to me since I was a little kid, but I’m not a musician so I had to find other ways to get at musical experience,” he says. “I’m often inspired as much by music, painting or poetry as I am by other cinema, but I also think it’s something that film can aspire to – it can be a kind of music.”
He goes on: “It’s something that’s woven into our lives – it doesn’t have to be something that only celebrities get to do. There are a lot of people who sing in their kitchens and might sing very beautifully, but we’ll never get to hear them. It’s the act of doing it that might help them to be in the world, and I think that’s very much what’s happening with Mary’s character in the film.”
This elevation of the finer details permeates much of Cohen’s work and is a particularly key element of his observations of the city – whichever city that may be.
“I just feel strongly that there is always a city that is entirely separate from the one tourists are led to, and that goes for any city,” he says. “In terms of Vienna, I was just reflecting my experience, going on random walks and tube rides, or opening the door of an unknown bar and stumbling onto one of the film’s most important locations.”
Raised first in Kabul and then Washington DC, Cohen moved to New York in the mid-80s, “when it was just at the tail end of a very rough period”, he explains. “It’s problematic to romanticise a city that is in rough shape in terms of crime and infrastructure falling apart. But there was a sense of mystery and possibility that had to do with people of all kinds going to New York to be able to have some freedom.”
He continues: “It’s kind of a great dark magnet throughout history where people could get away from parochial, predictable circumstances and enter into this sort of wild place.”
He then draws a comparison between the rise of real estate in New York and the current property crisis in London. But he is quick to stress the resilience of cities like these – both of which he is very fond.
Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours. Photograph: Paolo
“New York, when I ride the subway, is still an incredible mix of people and that’s what makes it an interesting place above all. And I feel the same way about London. I don’t see that they are really going to able to scrub New York and London entirely clean, but god damn they will try.”
There is passion and sensitivity in almost everything Cohen says, and he delivers his thoughts with care and precision. With this in mind, it seemed strange that the Guardian should describe him as somebody who categorically “hates indie films”.
“I don’t hate indie films,” he says. “‘Indie’ is just one of those words that has become sort of meaningless – it’s not about something that one needs to hate, it’s more about it not meaning anything. It’s like using the word ‘alternative’ in regard to music – it just doesn’t have any particular concrete value anymore to say that.”
And what if people want to call his films indie? “My filmmaking is done as far from commercial Hollywood as possible, but I haven’t been part of the Sundance world either. So by some standards I’m kind of invisible. But if you keep at it for 25, 30 years and make 70 films, sooner or later people realise you’re there. I don’t really care that much what people call it – if they need to call it indie then that’s not a big deal.”
And finally, I ask, why call the season Compass and Magnet?
“The main reason is that it amused me because I’m lost all the time,” he says. “For someone who travels a lot and films all the time, it’s just kind of funny and absurd that I am so poor with directions. And magnet of course is just because the basic premise of doing one’s work is to find out what things in the world call out and what things one is attracted to – what things stick.”
Janet Etuk as Grace and Sean O’Callaghan as Phil in Beyond Caring. Photograph: Mark Douet
During the pre-election ‘air battle’, zero-hour contracts were a hot topic. It is timely then that Beyond Caring, a play that peels back political rhetoric to reveal the realities of cleaners working in a meat factory with no fixed hours, has transferred from The Yard in Hackney Wick for a brief run at the National Theatre.
Designed to encourage a flexible labour market, zero-hour contracts force workers to bend over backwards to meet the whims of an employer. If you are young and lucky enough not to fall ill or on hard times – you might survive. But those in Alexander Zeldin’s play are the vulnerable, the poor and the sick.
The action follows three women taken on for a two-week job at a meat factory. They are bolshy Liverpudlian Becky (Victoria Moseley), timid Susan (Kristin Hutchinson) and Grace (Janet Etuk) who has had her disability benefit cut and has been passed fit for work despite having rheumatoid arthritis.
They join Phil (Sean O’Callaghan) a gentle giant type who buries his head in detective fiction and is on a treasured permanent contract, and manager Ian (Luke Clarke).
All the acting is strong but Clarke gives an especially good performance as Ian, the type of manager who thinks an extra 27p an hour and a university degree gives him the right to laud it over his subordinates with fascistic zeal.
He calls team meetings after punishingly long shifts (“I’m not happy guys”), prevents Grace from taking medication and watches porn on his phone all the while spouting an infuriating jumble of self-help clichés and managerial jargon.
Nothing happens, the days pass in a pattern of work and biscuit breaks. This lack of plot is consonant with the sense that there can be little progress for those forced to live in the immediate.
We learn little of the characters’ backstories beyond hints at private tragedy but again this is a reflection on the nature of their work, for how can human connections be forged on such inconstant foundations?
Tension builds as physical exhaustion and pent-up rage pushes the cleaners towards the edge. Grace’s muscles, pushed beyond their capability finally give in and she collapses over the huge concertina-shaped machine. Paste-grey water is sloshed frantically over stainless steel machines, but the stubborn smears of congealed sausage meat will not budge.
The cleaners are presented as ‘invisibles’ (Ian says the staff party will give them a chance to mix with the ‘normal staff’) but 2.3 per cent of the UK’s workforce are on zero-hour contracts. The barman at your local gastropub is probably on one, as is the Sports Direct cashier who sells you a bundle of socks.
What really shocks in this brutal piece of theatre is that legislation that values a business owner’s profit-motive over basic human rights has become so commonplace in modern Britain. Beyond Caring leaves the audience smarting – not just from the pungent smell of sanitiser but from the injustice of it all.
Beyond Caring is at the National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 23 May nationaltheatre.org.uk
David Byrne’s Meltdown festival programme has just been announced and features Sunn O))), Young Marble Giants, Benjamin Clementine, Atomic Bomb! The Music of William Onyeabor, David Longstreth, Matthew Herbert, Bianca Casady and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (and more). More will be added to the line up over the coming months.
“I am beyond excited at how much of this has fallen into place. It’s quite eclectic and I hope there are some new discoveries for everyone – including me – in this edition of the festival’ – David Byrne.
Lonely at the top: The now empty Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
Dozens of previously unseen documents which shed light on the recent controversial private sale of listed former social housing block the Balfron Tower have been posted online by a UCL researcher.
As well as forming a comprehensive archive of the architecture, history and living community of the brutalist Docklands building, the cache also raises new questions for Poplar HARCA, the housing association behind the sale deal.
The online collection – www.balfrontower.org – has been assembled by David Roberts, a doctoral student in Architectural Design at UCL and member of the art collective Fugitive Images, who has been studying the Balfron Tower for several years. He has made his research public in order to “contribute to an informed public debate on key issues” about the Tower, including its complicated sale.
Balfron’s social housing tenants, who previously occupied 99 of its 146 flats, voted to transfer to Poplar HARCA in 2006 on the understanding that their flats would be upgraded to the Decent Homes Standard and they would continue to live in them. They were progressively “decanted” from the block between 2010 and 2015 to allow refurbishment to take place. Following a series of setbacks to the project, it was announcement in February that Balfron would be sold as private flats through a joint-venture with developer LondonNewcastle.
The documents on balfrontower.org cover everything from Hungarian-British architect Ernő Goldfinger’s original designs to German-language reviews of the block and the coverage its sale received in the East End Review.
Also included is a financial viability document from 2012 which states Poplar HARCA’s intention that the Tower become a “leaseholder only block”, made up exclusively of privately-owned flats.
From 2010 Poplar HARCA has maintained it would need to sell some of the block’s flats to pay for refurbishment works, but claimed in public until this year that it did not know exactly how many, insisting, when asked, that there was a possibility – however small – that social tenants might be able to return.
Asked about the financial document which suggests this possibility had been ruled out as early as 2012, a Poplar HARCA spokesperson said: “There are significant costs associated with restoring a Grade-II listed building, particularly one in as poor a state of repair as Balfron and the final decision on residents returning could not be taken until the JV [joint venture] was formed in December 2014.
“As has always been the case – and as tenants have always been advised – had funding become available prior to that to allow Poplar HARCA any other option it would have taken it.”
David Roberts hopes the site will allow people to explore the subject for themselves. “As a researcher I have the time and access to information that many others don’t,” he says. “The documents I’ve encountered can be intimidating, difficult to access, or difficult to grasp because of bureaucratic, academic or legal language.
“The website aims to open these documents and processes to the public and help contribute to a more informed public debate.”
Roberts’ research focuses on social housing in East London and emphasises first-hand testimony. He began his research project because a Balfron resident got in touch with him. “She was interested in doing an oral history project with her neighbours before they all leave,” Roberts explains. “It is their voices, from inside, that are rarely heard.
“As we worked together we met more and more residents that spoke frankly about living in the tower – frustration with unreliable lifts and the lack of sufficient funds for repair, joy at the light and space it offers and an unanticipated spirit of neighbourliness, and anger that these cherished things may soon be lost to them.
“One former resident said, ‘On the 23rd floor we felt magnificent. I think for social housing tenants to lose the view is such a terrible theft of experience. You live in the space in a different way.
It affects your being. And that’s critical to your entire existence. And for poorer folk like myself it’s a great loss.’”
