Prefab South
Palaces for the People - a photography exhibition by Elizabeth Blanchet at Photofusion looking at the history of prefab houses - resonates well around Brixton right now. Prefabs were the State response to a post-war housing crisis. The 2013 obsession with property before community can be brutally observed around the corner along Rushcroft Road.
Prefabs fostered community through quirky structures. The forceful eviction of the Rushcroft Road short-life tenants shows how we seem to have regressed back to an age where housing ownership rules strong over the very concept of society.
Comparing and contrasting some of the stunning images shot by Blanchet with the shocking scenes captured along Rushcroft Road, shows just how housing priorities have changed.
Winston Churchill pledged 500,000 prefabs to help house the returning heroes following the Second World War. 150,000 were eventually built in the age of austerity - last Century, not post-capitalism meltdown.
Michael Caine and Neil Kinnock were both brought up in prefabs. With indoor toilets and the white revolution in the kitchen, prefabs were viewed as a luxury style of living. They had a projected lifespan of only a decade. Some sixty years later and a few thousand are still standing.
This is where Elizabeth Blanchet enters the story. Her grandparents lived in prefabs on the other side of the Channel. The photographer explains in the Photofusion exhibition how happy childhood memories led her spending eleven years searching and photographing the remaining prefabs in the UK.
Peckham, Nunhead and Dulwich all feature. This is a dying generation, both in terms of house and occupants. Palaces for the People lovingly offers an insight into the homes and the people that live in prefabs. It is part portrait, part Ideal Homes.
It is so easy to mock prefabs. The exhibition addresses the attachment that the residents have to their homes over half a Century since they first took occupancy. Blanchet found that a sense of community emerges through the close-knit layout of the prefab sites.
Many of the original prefabs are now Grade II listed. You get the impression that various local authorities rather wish that they weren’t.
But as Rushcroft Road has witnessed in the past week, housing per se will always come before people.
Palaces for the People exhibits at Photofusion, Brixton until 2nd August.
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