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.