• Visit at your leisure

    The exhibition ‘Blackfriars SE1 in the 1970s’ has started a tour of selected Southwark leisure centres, with The Castle Centre first up. On display here for all of October, and to the end of the year provisionally. Exact moving-on arrangements are being finalised.

    At 2 St Gabriel Walk, London SE1 6FG.

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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.

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