Studio Gallery

CHILDREN’S GAMES, HEYGATE ESTATE BY MARK LEWIS

Preview: Friday 18 July, 6-8pm

Open Saturday 19 & Sunday 20 July, 12 – 5pm
22 Iliffe Yard, SE17 3QA

Our debut exhibition at the studio in Iliffe Yard is bought to you by Southwark based arts organisation The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Children’s Games, Heygate Estate by Mark Lewis highlights the gap between utopian visions and everyday realities. The work takes the form of an uninterrupted travelling shot, 7 minutes and 21 seconds in length, in which the camera moves along the elevated walkways of South London’s now-demolished Heygate Estate.

Children’s Games, Heygate Estate highlights the gap between utopian visions and everyday realities. The work takes the form of an uninterrupted travelling shot, 7 minutes and 21 seconds in length, in which the camera moves along the elevated walkways of South London’s now-demolished Heygate Estate. The camera glides around a complex network of these ‘streets in the sky’, weaving between stairwells and tight corners, swooping with the seamless movement of a computer game.

Co-commissioned in 2002 by Film and Video Umbrella and Cornerhouse Gallery who write: the modernist architectural features of the tower blocks and ‘rationally planned’ spaces dominate the frame but, at the periphery of vision, small human actions take place. Children of many nationalities, reflecting the diverse cultural make-up of the Estate, play a variety of games. Whether cycling or flying kites, tumbling or playing football, the children fill the marginal spaces of the brutalist architecture with lively activity. Inspired in part by Brueghel’s painting Children’s Games (1560), Children’s Games, Heygate Estate might also be seen as an exploration of the modernist architect Aldo van Eyck’s famous dictum that “‘space’ in the image of man is ‘place’”.

Commissioned almost a decade before the demolition of the estate, the work allows us to reflect not only upon the historical layers of urban architectural design, but also the underlying social principles and subsequent state-led gentrification to have informed it. The rapid progress in the redevelopment of Elephant & Castle has dramatically altered the physical environment as well as the local social fabric. Buried deep underneath new concrete plazas, shimmering facades and manicured pocket gardens, the memories of the Heygate Estate linger. The past may be out of sight, but through an act of remembering we can see beyond these contemporary superstructures to a space where alternate visions and realities might still be possible.

Iliffe Yard is part of the Pullens Estate, constructed by James Pullen between 1886 and 1901, built with artisans and small traders in mind, so families could live and work on the premises. The estate is now some of the last Victorian tenement buildings surviving in London, located a stone’s throw from where the old Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle used to stand.

Children’s Games, Heygate Estate by Mark Lewis was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Cornerhouse in 2002, and later acquired by the Arts Council Collection. The work is on loan from Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.