Ruhullah Aramesh was a 24 year old refugee from Afghanistan. He was attacked in Thornton Heath on 31st July, 1992, by a gang of twenty yelling racist epithets. They beat him with iron bars and wood planks until his skull was crushed.
Sampler from Spectacle’s Archive
He died on August 2, 1992. Barry Hannon (17), his brother, Paul Hannon(18), and Joseph Curtin (17), were sentenced to life for murder. Richard Turner, (19), and Jamie Ware (19), were acquitted of manslaughter and murder. Another boy, seventeen years old, whose name was not released, was acquitted for attacking Mr. Aramesh but convicted for assault for having previously attacked a friend of Mr. Aramesh. Barry Hannon and Joseph Curtin had also attacked an Asian family only an hour before killing Mr. Aramesh, hitting a man, sixty-five years old, on the head with a bottle.
It was recorded as racially motivated. Barry Hannon, Paul Hannon, Joseph Curtin were given life for murder. One other was convicted of manslaughter through diminished responsibility, and three were acquitted. Curtin was freed on appeal after 3 years, due to the judges’ failure to summarise the police interview.
His death was just one of multiple killings that happened near to the BNP headquarters, as well as Stephen Lawrence and Rohit Duggal.
We have footage of the march and speakers representing:
The speakers are announced but it is difficult to work out exactly their names or how to spell them, so if you have any idea of who they are please let us know at archive@spectacle.co.uk or comment below.
Sign up to our Newsletter for more information about our ongoing projects.
This week is Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. Founded in 1998, Refugee week is held every year around World Refugee Day, which is on the 20th of June.
Across the country hundreds of organisations host programmes of arts, cultural, sports and educational events. At Spectacle we have been working with refugees in a variety of countries for many years, and this week we invite you to watch our films about refugees.
Micronomics Refugee Youth Interviews
The Micronomics Project investigated an understanding of small scale self-organised (micro-)initiatives and whether the economy has room for them. The film considers their potential to challenge the dominant definition of ‘the economy’ and implication, when the value created and exchanged is of social nature
Interviews and footage from Spectacle’s Micronomics Project is now available through our Archive.
Make yourself comfortable. Give yourself a few minutes to listen to what these people would like to tell us. This film is a succession of portraits of ‘Paperless’ people.
Filmed in Brussels and released in 2007.
The ‘Paperless’, the ex-‘Paperless’ and also their Belgian loved-ones answer the main question- “When the papers arrive, what would change in your lives? ” All of them reveal their hopes, wishes and plans. What would change in relation to the world or their relationships with others? What impact would that have on the image that these people have made for themselves and our society? Some of them original, some moving, their answers call out to us.
In August 1992 Lichtenhagen estate, Rostock, in the former East Germany Police withdrew as fascists petrol bombed a refugee centre and the home of Vietnamese guest workers while 3000 spectators stood by and clapped. Using material filmed from inside the attacked houses and interviews with anti-fascists, the Vietnamese guest workers, police, bureaucrats, neo-nazis and residents, a story of political collusion and fear unfolds.
Refugee Week’s vision is for refugees and asylum seekers to be able to live safely within inclusive and resilient communities, where they can continue to make a valuable contribution.
Sign up to our Newsletter for more information about our ongoing projects.
June 2021 marks the 30 years since the founding of INURA, the International Network for Urban Research and Action. In that time, INURA has developed into a resilient network for people involved in action and research in localities and cities. The Network consists of activists and researchers from community and environmental groups, universities, and local administrations, who wish to share experiences and to participate in common research.
INURA advocates for social justice. Most recently INURA spoke out against the arrest and imprisonment of Eugene Kalinouski, 22, urban geographer, who was arrested in Belarus for during a political protest. Belarus has a history of arresting those who dissent with the government, and are facing international sanctions after the recent extraordinary lengths they went to in order to arrest a blogger. Other examples of the issues that Network members are involved in include actions such as standing in solidarity with workers, criticising environmentally unsound development processes and research on major urban renewal projects, the urban periphery, community-led environmental schemes, urban traffic and transport, inner city labour markets, do-it-yourself culture, and social housing provision. In each case, the research is closely tied to, and is a product of, local action and initiative.
This year, INURA member Tomislav Tomasevic, activist, researcher, and organiser of the 2019 INURA conference in Zagreb, was elected as the new mayor of the city of Zagreb (population 805,000) winning more than 68% of the vote.
INURA was founded in 1991 in Salecina, Switzerland as a network with a self-organising, non-hierarchical, decentralised structure. INURA is also a member of the Habitat International Coalition, a global network for the right to housing and social justice.
Since 1991, INURA has held yearly conferences in cities around the world, although the 30th conference, which will take place in Luxembourg, has been postponed until 2022 due to the global pandemic.
Spectacle’s founder Mark Saunders is a founding member of INURA and Spectacle’s archive contains valuable video footage or urban environments throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s from Montreal to Brussels to Berlin which is available for the researchers in the INURA network.
Spectacle has long focused on inequality in urban environments and precarious housing arrangements including squats, cooperatives, evictions, and estates. All this material and more can be explored through our archive.
Sign up to our Newsletter for more information about our ongoing projects.
Are you an NGO or Community Centre or organisation looking to include your participants in the making of compelling videos addressing their interests and concerns? Why not engage them in a participatory video project? Spectacle has successfully adopted collaborative documentary making models for over 40 years, including award-winning participatory documentaries that have been broadcast on national and international television. We can design hybrid training-production programmes which will give you the best aspects of a collaboratively-directed film combined with professional quality production.
We offer:
1) Training in shooting and editing film for you and/or your participants
2) Our professional shooting and editing services
3) A final short film and a fast turn around participatory project
Because every community is different, there is no single participatory process model. The goal is to create a space which is open to equal participation, sharing, and creating for a community. By giving artistic and editorial control to non-professionals, the final results are vibrant and multifaceted. The participatory video process centres the lived experiences of many people.
The benefits this can offer from a research standpoint are obvious. Whether you want to understand people’s experiences or just build community, a participatory project can be a joyful experience of co-creation and co-authorship of knowledge and art.
Spectacle has a long history of participatory work. From Germany to Colombia and across the UK we have led, co-led, and facilitated participatory film groups and workshops both in person and online for groups of all shapes and sizes.
Spectacle is an award winning independent television production company specialising in documentary, community-led, investigative journalism and participatory media. Spectacle’s documentary work has been broadcast and exhibited internationally. We have produced work on commission for clients including Amnesty International, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Howard League for Penal Reform, Council of Europe, Groundwork, the London Health Commission, the NHS, Big Local and the Wellcome Trust.
As well as undertaking productions, Spectacle runs short, sharp, affordable training courses and community based media workshops. We believe our courses are the best around, largely based on the exceptional feedback we have received from the hundreds of people we have trained over the years.
We are a small, socially-minded company, our training and commissioned work income supports our unfunded community based work.
How do I begin a participatory video project?
We are offering a bundle of services that will guide your staff through a specifically designed programme of training and production based on your video project. There are many options for how we could design your programme together. We can accommodate any time zone where your participants might be located.
We can offer practical workshops on video making. These bespoke training workshops can be tailored to the needs of the client including: a variety of cameras including smartphones, DSLRs, camcorders, etc; visual storytelling including storyboarding or idea generation; filming techniques guaranteed to generate quality footage.
We can teach you how to teach your participants to film, and how to run your own participatory project.
Travel permitting, Spectacle can assist you in your real shoot. You will have complementary equipment (second camera, audio recording, lights) and extra crew if needed.
We can train you on how to effectively use video editing software, sitting together in front of your project to get the editing process started.
If you want professional editing, we can finalise your video with the possibile option of drop-in editing sessions.
Finally, we can guide you through uploading and promoting it on your social networks and media platforms.
We can facilitate this entire process from beginning to end, give you the skills to run it yourself, or any hybrid in between.
Read more about our participatory model and past projects.
Contact Us
For more information or to chat about your project and ideas email us at training@spectacle.co.uk
Sign up to our Newsletter for more information about our ongoing projects.
For the first time Spectacle is making the entire Despite TV magazine series available. This release is the first of several Video Libraries we will be putting out on Vimeo On Demand over the coming months. These libraries will use the Vimeo’s series format to curate selections from Spectacle’s back catalogue, grouping together finished films with previously unreleased archive material. We will be releasing Video Libraries on Murray Bookchin, the Exodus collective and Battersea to name a few.
Despite TV
Despite TV was an video group founded in 1982. The group operated out of the Tower Hamlets Arts Project on Whitechapel Road East London and produced video magazines that explored local issues, showcased local talent and promoted community organisations. Despite TV covered issues that have shaped the political, social and topographical landscape of London in profound ways. Despite TV documented and commented upon events such as: the dissolution of the Greater London Authority (GLC), the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) taking over the old docks to turn them into an annex of the City, and the transformation of Brick Lane from a National Front stronghold to the Bengali street we know today.
The films are not all slick productions but they make up for this with creativity and anarchic energy. Despite TV’s magazine shows were made at a time when video was far from ubiquitous and there is a feeling of excitement, a sense of discovery and possibility that underpins all the films. A typical episode moves from a report on a nurses strike to a situationist dissection of a Big Mac to a local band performing and then on to a short film about a toucan reminiscent of Chris Markers work.
The episodes in this series give insight into political events large and small, from enormous development projects to campaigns for more cycle paths to protests against Page 3. The breadth of events covered gives the series the feeling of a time capsule, giving insight into the political and cultural mood of England in the 1980’s and early ’90s.
In honour of the anniversary of the 1990 anti-poll demonstration on March 31st, Spectacle hosted a free screening of Despite TV’s film Battle of Trafalgar. This was followed by an online Q&A with filmmaker Mark Saunders.
The discussion brought out the many ways that the public order policing tactics captured by the film are still in use and can readily be seen in the policing of the #KilltheBill protests against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Bill, and recent public order policing at Clapham Common of the Sarah Everard Vigil.
The Protest and the Making of the Film
Despite TV was a filmmaking collective based in Tower Hamlets that operated through the 80s and 90s. Working as a co-operative, sharing resources, and making all editorial decisions through consensus, the collective published magazine videos.
The main aim of Despite TV was to revert hierarchies commonly reproduced in the media industry, promoting video production as inclusive, non-hierarchical group activity, and shared authorship and editorial control. Everyone in the group, in fact, had access to equipment and initial training, could propose what to film, contributed to the technical realization of the initial ideas, and was co-director of the final films. In order to enhance participation and avoid the exclusion of marginal voices in the group, all decisions were taken by consensus and all tasks and roles -such as chairing meetings, but also interviewing, operating cameras, sound recording, or carrying out runner’s tasks- were shared in turns.
In 1990, Despite TV was working on a special issue on the poll tax called Despite the Poll tax. The proposed poll tax was despised throughout the country. It was a blatantly extortionate tax which required all individuals, regardless of wealth, to pay the same amount, and anti-poll tax chapters sprang up across the country. Despite the Poll Tax was not so much focused on the inequities of tax, but how the law would necessitate ID cards, which were the origin of infamous SA pass laws during aparthied. The tax would offer a great deal of social control and create a data blackmarket. The tax itself was therefore a colonial instrument. It was actually the second time that the British government had tried to institute such a tax. The first time was in the 14th century and led to a famous peasants revolt.
The magazine was nearly finished. Three camera crews went to the protest to get some shots for the end credits. They stationed one camera near the front, one in the middle, and one at the back. Their expectations for filming a peaceful joyous mass demonstration quickly went out the window.
Violence against protestors by the police left many bruised and bleeding. Hundreds were arrested. Police horses and vans repeatedly drove through the crowd, trampling people underfoot – all in the name of public order. However, none of this violence was reflected in the narrative on the evening news which depicted the demonstrators as violent and the police as responding to life or death violence.
Despite TV managed to persuade Channel 4 to commission a film based on the footage to create a film showing the events in the order they really happened. The documentary was broadcast on Channel 4 in Sept 1990 and resulted in the upending of the accepted narrative of that day.
The film was also used in court as a part of a common defence of protestors who had been arrest that day, showing many were acting in legal self defence.
Connections to the Current Moment
In policing of public events in the last year including at the George Floyd BLM protests in 2020, Sarah Everard vigil at Clapham common, and Kill the Bill protests happening currently in Bristol.
In the Battle of Trafalgar we see police vans driving through crowds, and the same tactics were used in Brooklyn 2020. Police vans were driven into crowds of BLM protesters who were protesting the murder of George Floyd. The Battle of Trafalgar demonstrates that the police were not “out of control” but following a dangerous and near secret tactic which was very likely to cause a crowd to react violently. During the anti-poll tax demonstration, the film argues, the protesters gained no benefit from violence, but the state did benefit because it allowed them to paint all protestors as criminals.
This narrative is easily created when media sources uncritically present police statements as their only coverage of such protests. Again there is an uncanny similarity between the commentary of a mounted police woman in 1990 and one in 2021, both who claim to have never seen such violence directed at police in their entire lives.
Jump to 1:30 for the report on Bristol protests
The use of provocation by police including the use of vans, attacking women, collective punishment, kettling, creates a large dragnet of offenders and erases the divide between peaceful and violent protests. The criminalising of protesting creates an excuse for the use of violence which paints the entire cause (whether it be BLM or anti-tax demonstrations) to be viewed as criminal in the court of public opinion.
April 3rd – National Day of Action
The 3rd of April has been designated as a national day of action against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Bill. Over 40 cities and counting across the UK will see #killthebill demonstrations, and they will be joined by those supporting the #ReclaimTheseStreets movement which grew from the murder of Sarah Everand and the policing of the vigils in her honour.
In the demonstrations the week before violence from the police in Bristol created headlines of “violence against police” and “rioting,” but, as in 1990s, from the point of view of those on the ground the papers seemed to have switched around the subjects and objects of their sentences.
It will be interesting to see what policing tactics will be employed and what narrative the media will offer after April 3rd.
Sign up to our Newsletter for more information about our ongoing projects.
Responding to demand ranging from Idaho to New Delhi, Spectacle has designed a video training course at times that work in almost any time zone, and so available to pretty much anyone around the globe – live!
This course offers half-day training on Tuesdays and Fridays for 4 weeks – that’s 8 half-days total. The initial courses will run from 15:00-18:30 London Time, which means you can enjoy it as an early morning class in Los Angeles, or an evening class in Bangalore. Subsequent courses will shift in time for availability including Australia and Japan.
Learn storyboarding
Designed for PhDs, Academics and Researchers
When it comes to making videos, the just ‘point and shoot’ method only works if you are extremely lucky. From inaudible audio, to interviewees that clam up as soon as they see a camera, to takes ruined by continuous autofocusing – the pitfalls are innumerable.
This course is specifically designed for academics interested in incorporating video into their research. Whether you want to integrate visual methods into your research or produce videos to disseminate your outcomes, you will learn all you need to know to turn your research into a short film.
If you don’t have the budget for expensive filming equipment, won’t have a film crew, and need a surefire way to make a final project where the mistakes don’t distract from the message – you need our training course. Spectacle has been working with and training academics in filmmaking for decades so we know the unique needs of research filmmaking. From video techniques to editing and visual storytelling, this course will provide all the skills you’ll need.
Camera techniques and settings
Skills You’ll Learn
The first 4 sessions are on videography, and the last 4 focus on visual storytelling and editing. You can do all 8, or just choose to do the first or second half.
How to operate a camera
How to get best results from smartphones
Storyboarding and visual storytelling
Talking heads and interviewing
Strategies from filming to editing
The basics of editing using Adobe Premiere Pro
Learn about editing as a data analysis method
How to produce engaging videos based on your findings
Learn professional standard editing in Adobe Premier Pro
In the Classroom
All courses are taught live on Zoom. The course content is split into manageable 45-90 min modules. Each module builds on the last and will cover key concepts and offer practical exercises to develop your skills and confidence in technical and creative aspects of video making.
The first 4 sessions will cover all aspects of filming, including sound recording and camera techniques. The last 4 sessions will focus on visual storytelling and editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.
FLEXIBILITY
If you have to miss a session, you can access the recordings for 30 days through private links. You can choose to attend only the filming half or the editing half of the course, or buy the whole package and take a gap between the two halves.
PRICE
£480 for 8 sessions
£280 for 4 sessions
Previous Clients
Spectacle has delivered successful training workshops for numerous educational organisations, NGOs, and private companies including: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Anthropology Department, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Edinburgh University, Birkbeck College, UCL, LSE, Oxford COMPAS, University of Zurich, as well as hundreds of social researchers, journalists, scholars, and video marketers who have found our methods engaging and inspiring.
Spectacle has been invited to give a Master Class at the Italian National School of Participatory Video and Documentary Cinema.
This is the second year this School has run. The School consists of five intensive online weekends from February 26 to March 27. The public is welcome to join online film screenings. For those that sign up to the school the films will be followed by live debates on different facets of participatory video making. These courses will walk viewers down a path of shared audiovisual production practices, and seek to find together new ways to show reality.
The school will gather over 70 passionate documentary makers who embrace participatory tools and methods. Tutors will include Angelo Loy, Aline Hervé, Marco Damilano, Andrea Segre, Stefano Collizzolli, Davide Crudetti, Martina Tormena, Lucia Pornaro, Aline Hervé, Sergio Marchesini, Alberto Cagol, Sara Zavarise, Giulia Campagna, Maud Corino, and Chiara Tringali
Following a screening of The Truth Lies in Rostock, Mark Saunders and Michele De Laurentiis will discuss the film and invite participants to think about how participatory video can be a journalistic tool for community led investigative documentaries.
The film will be screened live on Facebook and you can find a link here.
The School is run by ZaLab is an association of filmmakers and social workers based in Padua, Italy. ZaLab promotes advocacy campaigns aimed to spread democracy and minority rights, especially through a grassroots distribution network.They focus on promoting their documentaries through independent and non commercial distribution.
Imagine: you’re running an international research network and suddenly – a pandemic hits! All international travel is on hold for up to two years! It’s your worst nightmare. You’ve got researchers who are supposed to be flying in from all over the globe for a week-long retreat or training workshop! What can you do?
This was the predicament numerous Universities found themselves in, but they found ways to adapt and continue projects – many turned to Spectacle’s Bespoke Training Workshops to help them creatively solve problems.
Through 2020, video conferencing has become the norm and many researchers are now imagining how important and useful video making or remote online participatory video research could be for communicating their research or archive-based workshops going forward. Maybe we can help you too.
The training we will provide is for the researchers focusing on sustainable cities. Researchers will join online from cities around the world including Oxford, Beijing, Bangalore, Cape Town and Medellin.
Spectacle’s training will give these researchers the skills to film with a more professional production quality and edit with an eye for narrative flow. Going forward, this will enable them to make short videos to effectively communicate their research to a larger audience.
Does this sound like the kind of training you or your organisation might benefit from?
Bespoke Training for Academics
When it comes to making videos, the just ‘point and shoot’ method only works if you are extremely lucky. From inaudible audio, to interviewees that clam up as soon as they see a camera, to takes ruined by continuous autofocusing – the pitfalls are innumerable.
Spectacle online video training
When looking to make video, academics have unique needs. They aren’t looking to become documentary filmmakers. They aren’t looking to invest in overly expensive filming equipment. They won’t have a large support crew to help with filming. And the need to make a final project where the medium (and mistakes) don’t distract from the message.
About Spectacle
Spectacle is an award-winning independent media company that specialises in documentary, community-led investigative journalism, and participatory media.
We have been leaders in Participatory Video (PV) practice and community engagement for more than thirty years, and offer training and workshops in every aspect of digital filmmaking.
We offer affordable, accessible, and enjoyable film, media, and video training. No prior knowledge needed! Learn what you really need to know to make quality videos with us.
As England enters a third lockdown where all people are ordered to “stay at home,” at Spectacle we are reminded of a community in Clapham Old Town, Lambeth SW4 that was told to “get out” of their homes.
In Rectory Gardens, there lived a group of creative and industrious people. As young artists and divergent thinkers they turned a derelict bombed out row of uninhabitable houses into a flourishing artistic community. For forty years they lived in a housing backwater largely unaffected by social housing policies, despite sporadic attempts by the council to “formalise” the street. They created a housing cooperative, until Lambeth, the ‘cooperative Council’ began taking their “million pound” houses from under their feet. The community that now included the vulnerable, elderly, and unwell, was broken up and dispersed.
A Tragedy in the Commons
The street circa 1980
Rectory Gardens (RG) is a L shaped Victorian pedestrian street in Clapham Old Town SW4 that was badly damaged by bombing during WW2. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the decimated houses attracted a group of squatters who saw the opportunity to create a utopia. This motley crew of characters with their own ideologies, housing needs, and reasons for living outside of the norm, formed a collective community which lived in relative harmony for four decades.
Rectory Gardens circa 1980
By the 1980s these squatters had revitalized the houses, and formed a housing cooperative. Rectory Gardens offered a home for all kinds of artists, free-thinkers, draft dodgers, and other socially liminal characters. Through the 80 and 90s, it remained a diverse community at the epicentre of a flourishing arts scene.
Squatters clear rubble, circa 1960
The street was host to an industrious community of artists, musicians, poets and unconventional ‘free thinkers’ who found a cheap way of living while developing their creative endeavors. It became a hub of cultural activities initiating art studios and cafes that brought life to the area. Spectacle interviewed both Vivienne Westwood and Maggi Hambling about the value of Rectory Gardens’s cultural contributions.
Bombed out windows, circa 1960
Residents of this dynamic community were the initiators of much that made the area distinct and attractive, the skate park and cafe on clapham common, Cafe des Artistes, Fungus Mungus, Voltaire Studios, bric-a-brac shops, rehearsal studios, artisan crafts and pool of skilled creative labour. The street itself had a public garden that served as a safe play area in the day and a performance and social space in the evening.
As with any tragedy, their success was key to their end as well. The artistic growth contributed to the popularity of the neighborhood and ultimately its subsequent gentrification. The council had its eyes on the properties, and though the residents tried to work with the council to legalize their living arrangement the deal fell through. The residents were recently evicted by Lambeth Council, who sold the houses to a developer on the private market.
Evicting the community was devistating for the mental health and well-being of many of these elderly and vulnerable residents. They lost not only their homes but their community and support networks. Many struggled to live away from their home of forty years, some died or were sectioned. Housing is integral to well-being, a point overlooked by this profit driven housing department.
Spectacle at Rectory Gardens
In the spring of 2014 Spectacle was contacted by the residents of Rectory Gardens. They wanted to record the final months of their squat-turned housing-cooperative. Rectory Gardens had been a lively arts community for over forty years, but growing conflict with the local council left the residents desperately fighting to avoid eviction, something that perhaps some media advocacy and intervention could assist them with, they believed.
Spectacle begins filming at Rectory Gardens in 2014
During our preliminary engagement with Rectory Gardens, Spectacle offered training to any residents who were interested in filming techniques. Spectacle conducted workshops where participants learned camera techniques, collected peers’ stories, and collectively discussed the footage and ways to continue the production process. The production process was dictated by the participants themselves, and they shaped the narrative scope by inviting ex-residents to contribute with their memories. This work developed into an archive of oral histories of the street.
Peers interview eachother and collect an oral history of the street
The production has continued for over six years, far longer than the initial few months originally envisioned. Together, Spectacle and Rectory Gardens residents have collected over 150 hours of footage including: long interviews with residents; key events on the street; residents resisting evictions; historic footage filmed by residents during the 90s; and residents in their new flats, reflecting on living away from their community where they lived for decades.
Post evictions, the street is home to wealthier residents
During Spectacle’s engagement, RG has been dismantled through evictions and relocations, and the residents have been scattered to various and disparate areas of the borough. The street, on the other hand, has been transformed to make way for the arrival of new wealthy tenants.
Framing the Street
Spectacle’s video archive of Rectory Gardens brings out many topical themes and offers inspiration for the post-Covid City through an examination of the past. Rectory Gardens is a portrait of forty years of resistance to the government housing policies.
The houses themselves were initially built as philanthropic poor-quality Victorian housing for low-income workers. After Rectory Gardens was bombed and left derelict post WW2, it provided a solution for postwar homelessness through squatting. It offered fertile ground for experimenting with alternative ways of living, resisted the “slum clearance” in the 1970s, Thatcherism, and the sale of social housing in the ‘80s. Their methods and ideologies represent a range of approaches including anarcho individualism, anarcho-syndicalism, socialism, capitalism of small artisanal businesses looking for cheap space, and the daily necessity of the socially excluded and the legally marginalised.
The beautiful rennovation by one of the co-operative residents, taken just before eviction
By the 2000s, the constant push to turn London’s affordable housing into profit, was nibbling at the edges of Rectory Gardens as well. The insidious forces of “regeneration” and contemporary privatised gentrification have been endemic in London where, even by global standards, the commodification of real estate is extreme. Through eviction and rehousing the community was broken up, and the squatters were replaced with live-in guardians, the modern sanitised, privatised version of squatting.
It’s important to note that not all parts of London have been equally gentrified, and Lambeth Council, where Rectory Gardens is located, was famous for its tolerance of alternative housing organisations and leftist leanings. They referred to themselves as ‘the cooperative council’ and ‘Red Ted’ Knight and his ‘Socialist Republic of Lambeth’ were the bete-noir anti hero of the tabloids. There were many houses like Rectory Gardens which were uninhabitable after the war, and Lambeth had few resources to deal with them. Squatters quickly took advantage of the council’s disinterest and moved into these spaces. Lambeth greatly benefited from the labour of these groups, and many cooperatives were able to legalise their situation, but RG was not.
The Project Now
The filming part of this project has come to a close, and we are looking for partners in the next phase – telling the story of what has disappeared.
We are searching for funding and partners to assist in bringing the dispersed community together again for an online participatory editing process. The process will let the former residents of Rectory Gardens tell their story, by sifting through the 150 hours of footage and drawing out narratives and themes to share with a wider audience.
Searching for Partners for Rectory Gardens Online Participatory Video Project
If you are interested in exploring collaborations or can suggest potential funding streams please get in contact. We welcome academic researchers, activists, social historians, and all others.
This project is relevant to: well-being, health, housing, social housing, urbanism, urban planning, human geography, sociology, participatory methods, co-creatation, co-authorship, knowlege sharing, community filmmaking, and participatory film.
