Documented between 2009-2015, I Love It When You Sing explores the lives of the artists and creative practitioners, who through a social enterprise scheme were offered live-in studio spaces within housing estates of London’s East End.
These photos are of the Leopold Estate in Mile End, which was my home for four years. Within the context of a rapidly changing area, the project is a personal take on arts-led regeneration.
Essay by Chris Fite-Wassilak
It’s just a blink, really. A short moment, mundane and lightly sweet, that we appear within a certain place, at a certain time. These photographs are an elegy, from a song we all know: the wrenching metal and crumpled concrete of the changing city.
I lived on the Leopold Estate for only a year, its final year; meeting Harrop and other passers-though in the squared, fading labyrinth. It had a breath-held quality to its casualness, a glee that we knew wouldn’t last undermining the daily run of things. It was an uneven outcropping of musicians, artists, freelancers improvising on what constituted life. Most of the previous tenants had left, we were the buildings’ ‘guardians’ – the post squat-era agreement with the veneer of legality, middlemen companies enabling property owners to get on with dealings. We were, in short, liable for everything, and could be kicked out with a week’s notice, the only benefit being it was in writing. These middlemen pitched themselves as charities; which, like most charities, are trying to patch over a hole where the fabric of social democracy used to be.
The oblong flats, lined with asbestos tiles and curling bits of 1970s wallpaper, became studios, rehearsal rooms, overspacious bedrooms, party chambers, in whatever space could be reimagined to be for a time. Sitting rooms became temporary side-steps from normality, all in view of Canary Wharf. This is as close our generation might get to the ideal of the commune, hunching at the burning edge of the corporatizing city, as the old city – the city we were told held infinite meeting places and possibilities and textures – goes up in smoke around us, leaving it is white-light wake a city of shining glass, of privately policed squares, and identikit new-build brick buildings that all claim to be both ‘luxury’ and ‘affordable’. The fireworks from the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony lit up our balcony, while we were inside our gold-themed party oblivious, watching the live-streaming of the event with a one-minute delay. Somewhere in that gap of time is the signal of the inevitable.
And let’s not fool ourselves: one person’s utopia is just another graveyard of the last person’s home. The Leopold, perched between the edge of Tower Hamlets cemetery and the area that had been turned into a park after being bombed in World War II, is just another part of Bow’s long history of refurbishment and remodelling. Every 25 years, give or take a bit, large swathes of the area have been razed to the ground, as part of East London’s ongoing role as test bed of capitalism. We just thought we could suspend time, not partake in that cycle. The neighbour downstairs on the ground floor outlasted us all, staying long after our agencies had kicked us out, as the council still hadn’t given her new housing with a garden as an equal exchange on where she had been living the past three decades.
What Harrop captures is the moments of life in the crevices of that history: temporary growths as it transitions from one state to the next. The question might not be what happened to lead to the building’s destruction, or even what happened next, but more:What lasts? What has continued from those spaces and those times, and who picks up the song when the echo dies out?
© Chris Fite-Wassilak
