Outreach work can lead museums to some interesting places. This is certainly true in Glasgow, where curators have been working on the 23rd floor of a tower block.
The venue is a community flat at Red Road, a council estate featuring eight high rises that were built between 1964 and 1969. They once housed more than 4,500 people and were heralded as the solution to the city’s housing crisis.
But, like many tower blocks built after the second world war, the utopian dream of a new way of living turned sour, and the first Red Road blocks are being demolished later this year. All will be gone by 2014.
Glasgow Life, the trust that runs museums for the city council, is working with the Glasgow Housing Association and several other partners to develop a range of projects in the run-up to the demolition. Documenting this community was particularly important, as Glasgow embraced high-rise living more than any other city in the UK.
According to Crawford McGugan, one of the curators involved in the Red Road Project as part of Glasgow museums’ outreach team, in 1962 there were 65 blocks in the UK that were at least 20 storeys high – 39 of these were in Glasgow.
The Red Road Project was among the initiatives discussed at a conference in Glasgow last year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Open Museum, Glasgow Museums’ outreach service.
Many of the issues that museum staff are tackling at Red Road were addressed at the Out There conference, such as maintaining relationships with transient communities, contemporary collecting and how museums deal with controversial issues.
Red Road is a challenging and complex environment. The indigenous Glaswegians who used to live there have moved out, to be replaced almost entirely by asylum seekers. Three members of a Russian family plunged to their deaths at Red Road in an apparent suicide last year.
Glasgow Life’s Mark O’Neill, director of policy, research and development, and former head of the museum service, lived at Red Road for a year in the mid-1980s.
“While high rises can work very well in prosperous areas, when combined with poverty, they compound the social problems which arise,” O’Neill says.
“Their demolition will be a major change to the city’s landscape, though – buildings as big as the pyramids of Egypt will disappear. This is why we have got involved; to create a record and help people who lived there to manage the transition.”
Glasgow’s Open Museum team feels it is vital that the various communities who were housed at Red Road are directly involved in documenting its history.
“We have to remember that the focus has to be the community experience of living here and going through that process of change, which has been huge in only 40 years,” says McGugan. “How do we reflect that and how do we build that into some kind of coherent story?”
The Open Museum has started collecting objects and is creating a handling box. Reminiscence work starts this month. And two residents have been found to feature in a film about moving out of Red Road.
But an important part of Glasgow Museums’ work will be integrating what others have been doing at Red Road, particularly community arts organisations such as Street Level Photoworks, which has been involved since 2003 and manages the Red Road Community Studio. Street Level’s work, led by photographer Iseult Timmermans, includes creating a collection of portraits of the estate’s residents.
Other artistic activity at the blocks includes a 2006 feature film, Red Road, by Andrea Arnold. And this year, writer Alison Irvine will publish a novel about the flats, based on interviews with residents.
It is often artists rather than museums that have carried out the most ambitious and interesting work with communities living on council estates, particularly tower blocks.
Liverpool, like Glasgow, has largely abandoned its experiment with high-rise living. The Liverpool Housing Action Trust (LHAT) was responsible for nearly 5,400 properties in 67 tower blocks but, following consultation with tenants in the mid-1990s, it was decided that all but 13 of the blocks would be demolished.
An ambitious programme of artists’ residencies took place at two tower blocks, Kenley Close and Linosa Close in Sheil Park, before their demolition. The first was Up In The Air (1999-2000), which involved 10 artists using empty flats at Kenley Close for accommodation and studios, before the block was demolished the following year.
Further Up In The Air (2001-2003) featured 18 national and international artists and writers in three phases of residencies. They were based at Linosa Close, which was torn down in 2005.
“The project grew over the five years it was running, so we felt our way into it,” says Leo Fitzmaurice, who coordinated both initiatives with fellow artist Neville Gabie. “The longer we stayed, the more we got to thinking about the possibilities for the site, and the more we got to know the people living there.”
As with similar projects that have involved working with communities living in social housing, this close contact with residents was vital.
“I hope that people planning projects of this nature in the future will look at this as an example, in terms of its timescale and open-endedness,” says Fitzmaurice. “It brought into play all that was special about the place and the people, and the changes they were going through.”
National Museum’s Liverpool’s (NML) Walker Art Gallery bought a work that came out of Further Up In The Air: Marcus Coates’ Journey to the Lower World. The film involves Coates, dressed in a deerskin, performing a shamanic ritual as he attempts to answer the residents’ questions “do we have a protector for this site?” and “what is it?”.
“It is a fantastic piece – it is quite dark and quite weird, but also quite funny,” says the NML’s head of fine art, Ann Bukantas. “The residents are disturbed by it, but also amused. It is deeply rooted in the relationship between this artist and the particular community.”
Coates gave a recent talk about the work at the gallery, which was attended by former Linosa Close residents. “The residents talked about their spectacular views and how they were literally being brought down to earth,” says Bukantas. “The overriding concern for them was that they weren’t going to lose their sense of community.”
The experience of living in tower blocks will also be part of the displays at the Museum of Liverpool, which will open in the summer. The People’s Republic gallery will have a section on homes and homelessness that will include oral histories from people in refurbished high rises, and those who had lived in high rises but had voted for demolition.
“Tower blocks are a key feature within the story of housing provision and the city’s housing policy,” says Kay Jones, NML curator of community history and coordinator of the People’s Republic gallery. “A key theme throughout the housing story is consultation, choice and campaigning.”
Challenging perceptions about tower blocks and other high-density social housing is a motivation for many of those who have worked with such communities.
Photographer Tom Hunter has been documenting the lives of the residents of Hackney, in east London, for nearly 20 years and has focused on tower blocks for several projects. He is interested in how high rises and the people who live in them are misunderstood and unfairly demonised.
“It is not the buildings that are the problem, it is that they are not maintained or looked after,” says Hunter. “Flats in tower blocks are often big, quiet and secure, and people often love to live in them.”
Hunter has recently completed a film commission about the Woodberry Down estate in north Hackney, which does not contain high rises, but was one of the largest housing estates in Europe when it was built between 1946 and 1962. The estate, which features more than 2,500 homes across 57 blocks, is being demolished.
A Palace for Us (until 20 January) is part of the Serpentine Gallery’s Skills Exchange Project, in which artists, designers and architects work with older people, care workers, young people and activists to exchange skills and develop ideas for social change.
The film, a collaboration with Age Concern Hackney, documents life on Woodberry Down through the testimony of residents who have lived there since it was built as an “estate of the future”.
“The people I have talked to are proud and happy to have lived there,” says Hunter. “If you say all council housing is bad, you devalue all the lives that it has helped shape. My work is a celebration of that great community spirit and that socialist ideal, and what it has achieved.”
The original ideals of affordable housing for all and the community spirit this creates is the theme of another project in Hackney. I Am Here was a response to Hackney council putting up bright-orange boards over the windows of vacated and empty flats on the Haggerston & Kingsland estate in 2007.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lasse Johansson, two artists who are also long-term residents, developed a project to replace these orange boards with large photographic portraits of the people living on the estate.
“One of the reasons that we did I Am Here was that we felt the orange boards turned the estate into a projection screen of all the fears people are carrying against estate environments, as it just looked grim,” says Johansson.
Zimmerman says the “I Am Here” name was chosen to show that there were real individuals with real lives on the estate. “You can see the variety of people who live here from the pictures,” she says. “This is actually a nice community. The façade is not indicative at all of what’s inside.”
The project has snowballed to include film work, a website and a book featuring 56 photographs of the spaces left behind. The publication, called Estate, is also a contribution to the debate about the future of public housing.
I Am Here is also documenting a community in transition, as five months after the orange boards went up, residents voted for the demolition and reconstruction of the estate. All of them will be rehoused in the new buildings, but they will be joined by private and shared-ownership residents, altering the community forever.
Zimmerman and Johansson are living in the partially occupied Samuel House, the only block left on the Haggerston West side of the estate. They say it is undergoing a kind of revival during this period of transition.
Residents have been customising their properties and introducing communal facilities such as picnic tables, a barbecue and a table-tennis table. Children are playing outside again.
“What we have learned is that it is about communication – that is what matters,” says Johansson. “If you get people talking, it makes a huge difference.”
Documenting the history of council housing seems particularly relevant as the postwar consensus about social housing breaks down. And with the recent proposed changes to housing benefit, it’s becoming a contentious political issue that affects millions of people.
Red Road Flats: www.redroadflats.org.uk
Tom Hunter: www.tomhunter.org
I Am Here: www.iamhere.org.uk
“I do not see them as prisons. I cannot escape the irony of what they represent, but to me they can be curiously beautiful. Powerful and menacing, like the north face of the Eiger by day; transformed, a mass of coloured lights against a velvet sky by night.”
These are the words of David Hepher, who worked on a series of paintings of high-rise council blocks from 1974 onwards. Two of his works can be seen in the Galleries of Modern London at the Museum of London.
Last year’s opening of the galleries also included a display called Copper and Silk, featuring a new acquisition of prints by British artist Keith Coventry. These featured his Estate etchings, which look abstract and resemble early modernist paintings, but are, in fact based on the directional maps found in high-rise estates in London.
Francis Marshall, senior curator of paintings, prints and drawings in the Museum of London’s department of history collections, was responsible for the Coventry acquisition. He says the works appealed because of the artist’s ironic and ambiguous approach to documenting urban life.
The largest artist involvement in tower blocks were Up In The Air and Further Up In The Air, which took place at two soon-to-be demolished Liverpool high rises from 1999 to 2003. Artists used empty flats for accommodation and studios.
Photographers have also regularly used tower blocks as locations for their work. Tom Hunter’s documentation of communities in Hackney includes the Empty Towerblock Series, which looked at abandoned high-rise flats, and the Holly Street Residents Series, portraits taken on a high-rise estate before it was demolished.
Turner Prize-winner Rachel Whiteread has also featured tower blocks in her work. Demolished captures the destruction of tower blocks in three Hackney housing estates between 1993 and 1995. Whiteread said the work was “something that is going to be completely forgotten… the detritus of our culture”. The images are in Tate’s collection.
A 2009 exhibition at London’s Geffrye Museum featured Mark Cowper’s photos of his own home and those of fellow residents of the Ethelburga Tower in Battersea, south London. Subtitled At Home In A High-Rise, it focused on a block not under threat of demolition.
The Cuming Museum in south-east London has also displayed high-rise housing images. An exhibition it held from December 2008 to April 2009 featured photographs taken by London College of Communication (LCC) photojournalism students that included images of the soon-to-be demolished Heygate Estate.
They are part of an ongoing LCC project to record the regeneration of the area that has produced two photography books: Community and Home.
In November 2010, Australian artist Simon Terrill took large-scale photographs of the Balfron Tower in Poplar, east London. Residents were invited to be in the photos and the results can be seen at Bow Art Trust’s Nunnery gallery from 7-23 January. The aim of the project is to trace the connections between individuals, communities and the architecture they inhabit.
