Opening at Four Corners Gallery this month, Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End takes a visual journey from workhouses to slums, damp tower blocks to homeless shelters, exploring how photographers have represented these conditions for over a century. It sheds light on little-known histories: the tenants’ rent strikes of the 1930s, post-war squatting, and ‘bonfire corner’, a meeting place for homeless people at Spitalfields Market for more than twenty years.
This timely exhibition draws shocking comparisons with today’s housing precarity, high rents and homelessness. From Victorian slums and the first model estates, to the mass post-war council house construction and the subsequent demolition of many tower blocks, it ends with post-Thatcherist gentrification and its impact on affordable housing.
The exhibition features new work by the artist Anthony Luvera, which addresses the rise of economic segregation in recent housing developments across Tower Hamlets, a phenomenon commonly known as ‘poor doors’. Also titled Conditions of Living, this socially engaged artwork by Luvera is built upon extensive research into the social, political, and economic contexts behind the rise of market-driven ‘affordable’ housing provision and the state of social housing today, and is created in collaboration with a community forum of local residents who live in the buildings themselves. This new work builds upon Luvera’s twenty-year career dedicated to working collaboratively with people who have experienced homelessness, and addressing issues of housing precarity and housing justice.
Anthony Luvera says: ‘London is one of the world’s last major cities still to ban the practice of allowing property developers to build ‘poor doors’, despite proclamations by successive governments and mayors about stopping the appalling practice. My work with people experiencing homelessness began twenty years ago in Spitalfields. To be back in Tower Hamlets creating this new work about economic segregation in housing developments and the broken social housing system feels urgent, especially at a time when the cost of living crisis has sunk its claws into the lives of ordinary working people.’
Carla Mitchell, Artistic Director at Four Corners says: ‘this is a highly relevant exhibition, given the extortionate London rents which create forms of social cleansing for long-established local communities. We were inspired by Four Corners’ own building, which was a Salvation Army working men’s hostel for over fifty years.’
Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End
30 June – 2 September 2023
Free admission. Opening hours 11am-6pm Tues - Sat, until 8pm Thurs.
Four Corners, 121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN
Nearest tube: Bethnal Green, Central Line
W: www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk
Photo: New Houses. A slum clearance operation in Poplar, East London, 19th April 1951. © Topical Press Agency/Getty Images/Hulton Archive.
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