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Updating the SE1 story
The ‘Blackfriars SE1 in the 1970s‘ exhibition has moved back to the Castle Leisure Centre (2 St Gabriel Walk, SE1 6FG) for a second showing, and will be available to view there into the new year.
In the three years since the public launch of ‘SE1 Stories’, the display has been at 18 different venues – visiting two twice – and includes two neighbourhood centres, two church halls, three colleges, two art galleries (including Tate Modern), five libraries/heritage centres, three leisure centres and Southwark Town Hall.
Over that time the connections to current local campaigns have become ever more obvious and urgent. As a result the SE1 Stories group has put together a further two panels to reflect this, with input from people active now. These can be viewed with the original 12 exhibition panels, SE1 Community Newspaper samples and artefacts either at the current venue or see the pdfs on our web page.
The two pictures here are examples of the campaigns across the decades calling for more low cost housing in north Southwark.
For more, see websites from Latin Elephant, Aylesham Community Action, 35 per cent or others listed on our SE1 Today web page.
Note: the original grant from Southwark Council has been fully spent on the original exhibition production and moving costs between venues (15 out of 20 showings have been in the borough). Further resources have been found for the additional material, while more funding is likely to be needed to complete the cataloguing and digitisation work which is just beginning on the photographic archive, and hopefully making the content more publicly accessible.
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Visit locations featured in the exhibition
The SE1 Stories group has built an online walking tour around the locations highlighted in our exhibition “Blackfriars SE1 in the 1970s”. These include sites which were fought over in the campaigns to give local people a say over redevelopment plans, and those of the organisations who planned and carried out the campaigns.
The tour is hosted on the PocketSights app, which can lead you round from one site to another if you are doing a walking tour, or around the sites virtually if you cannot get to North Southwark. Download the app from App Store (Apple) or Google Play (Android) and search for ‘SE1’ to find the walk, or use this direct link.
To help improve the information on the app we organised a real walk. Thank you to all the SE1 Stories members and to the enthusiastic people who signed up to go round with us in the biting cold. And thank you to Blackfriars Settlement for organising a very welcome lunch for us at the end of the two hour walk. A selection of photographs from this event are on our Instagram feed.
Further thanks for the support provided by Sue Brownill (Oxford Brookes University) and the Spaces of Hope: Peoples’ Plans research project (the Hidden History of Community Led Planning in the UK).
Tags: Blackfriars
SE1 Stories – a record of community struggles
Telling the story of an extraordinary period of community action in the 1970s and 1980s in Blackfriars, Waterloo and North Southwark, along London’s south bank.
For many it was a fight for survival as businesses moved out and developers eyed up land for office development, leaving isolated communities struggling to maintain their way of life, coping with run-down housing and threats to facilities such as chemists and laundrettes. Very much the same pressures are re-emerging now – and there is the same need for community action.
Photography
Intrepid photographers captured a lot of the activity, which was then published in SE1’s own community newspaper. Many of the photographs are now held in private and public collections, particularly council local history archives, perhaps you know of others hidden elsewhere.
The first project based on this material is the exhibition Blackfriars SE1 in the 1970s.
Please see the About Us page for more.