Ms Rosamund Lily West

Research project: The ‘concrete citizens' of the London County Council's housing schemes, 1943 to 1965.

Abstract

In the 1943 ‘County of London Plan', both its authors and the London County Council (LCC) set out the re-planning of London. It aimed to solve the defects of modern London through planning, paying close attention to existing neighbourhoods and communities. The LCC used human-figurative sculptures, ‘concrete citizens' as communication tool for the post-war re-planning of London and its communities. These sculptures were part of the LCC's wider visual communication strategy that included publications, exhibitions and films, designed to persuade and inform Londoners of the replanning of London and the rehousing of Londoners.

Informed by Frank Mort's analysis of the visual imagery, ‘cultural visions', used in the planning of London to project a fantasy of London's future that represented both policy and an imagined urban landscape, my research positions these artworks in the context of wartime and post-war planning for London, concentrating on the LCC's housing of communities, and how these sculptures were designed to speak to the communities they were designed to represent. I investigate the artworks in their physical and intellectual context, to reveal the LCC's wider intent for the post-war housing of Londoners, and how the LCC made moral and ethical decisions on the future of London, made flesh by human-figurative sculptures.

My research builds on scholarship on the LCC's ‘patronage of the arts' scheme and wider post-war state patronage of the arts, as well as scholarship on the LCC's architecture and replanning of London, to place these artworks in the context of the housing schemes they sit within by analysing their placement on housing estates to denote meaning both in the works and their placement. The thesis contains six case studies consisting of eight artworks, three Peter Laszlo Peri reliefs, ‘Following the Leader (Memorial to the Children Killed in the Blitz)', ‘Boys Playing Football' and ‘Mother and Children Playing', (installed between 1949 and 1952 on the South Lambeth estate and Vauxhall Gardens estate); Franta Belsky's, ‘The Lesson', installed on the Avebury estate in 1959; Siegfreid Charoux's, ‘The Neighbours', installed on the Highbury Quadrant estate in 1959; Elisabeth Frink's, ‘Blind Beggar and his Dog', installed on the Cranbrook estate in 1959; Sydney Harpley's, ‘The Dockers', installed on the Lansbury estate in 1962 and Uli Nimptsch's, ‘Neighbourly Encounter', installed on the Silwood estate in 1964.