Council House Art

Towards the end of March 2019, after visiting an exhibition of painting in Bath, a musical in Sheffield and a film in Birmingham, I realized that, quite inadvertently, I had been to see three major pieces of council house art in that grimly comic month when British political life was dominated by the run-up to the original Brexit deadline. Away from the febrile atmosphere of the news, I had enjoyed some really serious, accomplished art which offered nuanced personal reflection on what the musician Richard Hawley called ‘that tiny little subject, postwarBritain’.1 The Sheffield musical that Hawley worked on with the Crucible Theatre, the George Shaw retrospective in Bath and Richard Billingham’s Black Country memoir, Ray and Liz, are all works that come from and document British twentieth-century council housing, testifying to these origins, and in the process evoking ambivalence, anger, nostalgia, sadness – and beauty. Just as the 1980s Conservative Government’s Enterprise Allowance has been acknowledged by many musicians as having provided unintended material support for start-up bands, and the 1944 Education Act gave us the Scholarship Boy – and Girl, so too do the council house and the council estate require recognition as generative, in their own way, of art which tells stories of twentieth-century Britain, of the dream of a welfare state, and of the obligation to house its citizens.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Beauty · Exhibition · Musical · Political science · Politics · Visual arts · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Urbanization and City Planning

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  David Morley•Inter-Asia Cultural Studies•2020

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