What's the most important part of any urban landscape? The people who inhabit it

Having grown up in East London in a working-class family, I was already familiar with Ilford and its history, so I was very interested to be part of Alan Abraham’s Transitions project. Alan had no such familiarity and came to the area with fresh eyes and no preconceived impressions. He saw a very different place to the one I thought I knew.  

With his films and music, he drew out of each participating poet subtle and sometimes profound impressions of what at first glance appears to be just another gritty Greater London environment.

Although primarily focused on the built environment, the films served to direct our attention back to what is always the most important part of any urban landscape: the people who inhabit it. Their private thoughts, hopes, struggles, fears and identities and cultures.

Like many other parts of Greater London, Ilford and the surrounding area has seen rapid change and development in recent years, not all of it good. I express this thought in my poem Tetra Paks, named after the brand who create shelving unit shaped food and drink cartons and the idea that homeless shelter accommodation as well as contemporary housing – or ‘pods’ as I refer to them in my film – are created as Tetra Pak-style cartons, to be shelved efficiently instead of to create long-lasting and affordable homes.

Towers of soulless (and expensive) apartment buildings have sprouted around the town centre and are at odds with the more human scale of the early 20th century terraced streets.

Up until Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced the Right to Buy scheme in 1979, Ilford had been rich in good quality, affordable social housing, like the homes I was brought up in. Within seven years, a million council homes passed into private ownership. The resulting property boom of the 80s and 90s opened the door to grabby landlords and profiteering private property developers, depriving working people of assured housing and forcing councils to rent back their own properties to house the resultant homeless or those facing financial hardship.

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This trend has only intensified, putting cheap, liveable accommodation beyond the reach of many working people and placing enormous strain on council budgets.

I find it hard to watch the existing housing stock fall into disrepair at the hands of absentee landlords and this decline is in sharp contrast to the pristine glass and steel monoliths that rise everywhere.

I’ve spoken to many people struggling to raise families in tiny ‘apartments’ – the ‘pods’ mentioned in my poem. The children of these families are denied access to gardens, green spaces, light and air.

Unfortunately, being raised in a working-class neighbourhood can equate (as I know from my own lived experience) with limited aspirations and opportunity.

Historically there has been a thin but rich seam of artistic and creative enrichment of working-class areas from both private and public sources, which opened avenues of experience that would ordinarily have been denied to many people who made their home in those places. I benefited from this myself in the 60s and 70s and it wasn’t wasted, as I went on to have a successful career as a designer.

But public investment in the arts and creative industries has declined in the years since the 1980s – another legacy of Thatcher’s drive toward privatisation and the reduction of arts funding dependency on the public purse. The austerity measures of recent years have further cemented the lack of available public resources. Plus, governmental focus on academic subjects in schools and the marginalisation of creative arts has led to less creative teaching time and fewer arts teachers. 

We lose the importance of giving children (and adults) access to creative play and education at our peril. Even those with little interest in the arts need time spent in purely creative pursuits. There doesn’t have to be an exam pass, a certificate or a trophy at the end… creative play is an end in itself, supporting relaxation and good mental health. Creativity emerges from a blend of logic, memory, problem-solving and emotion. It makes us ‘big picture’ conceptual thinkers, something the world is badly in need of.

As the late, great Sir Ken Robinson said, “You can be creative at anything. You can be a creative mathematician, a creative chemist, a creative cook. Anything that involves human intelligence is a scene of possible creative achievement.”

With this latest show, SPACE continues that valuable work of creative inspiration and enrichment. Transitions holds a mirror up to Ilford and its environs and gives residents who may not, just by sheer dint of being working people, get access to creative spaces and concepts.

It gives them the chance to step out of their ordinary experience and to view themselves and the place they live in from a different perspective.  

And maybe, just maybe, some 10-year-old kid like me will sit in the dark and watch the films and be inspired to go away and produce their own work and live a fuller, more rewarding cultural life.

I hope so.

For anyone interested in taking part in SPACE Ilford’s next community arts project and events at SPACE Ilford – find out more info here.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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