Built throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the Aylesbury Estate is an enormous public housing complex in South East London that at its peak, boasted 11,000 residents. Like other social projects of this kind, Aylesbury has struggled with violence and vandalism throughout its run, and in 2005, local officials decided to demolish the estate and rebuild in phases rather than rehabilitate the existing structures.
Living and working in South East London for nearly four decades, Harriet Mena Hill was familiar with the area, but it wasn’t until 2018 when she was commissioned to teach a summer program for young residents that she really engaged with the project. She made large portraits from wool, blending dyed roving to delineate windows, shape bowed electrical wires, and even mimic graffiti spray-painted on outdoor walls.
Forming the series Soft Concrete, the textile pieces cast a largely gray environment of stone and steel in soft fiber. The body of work, Hill says, was a “repositioning of how the estate is perceived. Historically, it has been widely portrayed in the media as violent and intimidating, as a place without hope.”
In contrast, Soft Concrete “presents the estate as a place of living and community. From a distance, the portraits look like photographs or realistic paintings, but on closer inspection, the material reveals itself to be wool, hand blended for subtle colour mixing used to depict small active details of domestic life,” the artist adds.
Hill is broadly interested in the ways that communities and the objects they interact with can become vessels for shared memories, so when the estate began to be razed in 2020, she started to collect fragments of concrete from the construction site. “It was a direct response to the situation of residents who were required to stay at home as the demolition of adjoining blocks, the homes of their former neighbours, continued throughout lockdown, in spite of wider restrictions,” she tells Colossal.
Before its destruction, several tenants had advocated for renovations rather than demolition, hoping to preserve the community and homes they’d built. In an interview with the BBC in 2023, long-time resident Aysen Dennis lamented being forced to leave the estate after 30 years. Local administrators found her new housing in central London, but it wasn’t the same. “The council gave me everything I asked for. It’s on a high floor. There’s lots of light. I can see the park,” Dennis said. “But it’s not my home.”
Intimate in scale, Hill’s paintings glimpse hallways and pockets of windows that are similarly sliced from their larger contexts, the ragged edges of concrete framing the largely domestic spaces. Part of the ongoing series titled The Aylesbury Fragments, the scenes capture the run-down infrastructure of buildings left standing during the phased reconstruction process.
Although regeneration began in 2013, it’s less than half complete, and Hill has completed more than 150 paintings to date. As demolition continues, she adds to her ever-changing collection of concrete remnants. “I live with the unpainted pieces for months, sometimes years, getting to know their shape before I begin working on them,” the artist says, noting that as long as there are buildings still under construction, she’ll continue painting these small tributes to the community once housed within their walls.
Hill has exhibitions slated for London and across the U.K. throughout 2027. Follow along on Instagram.
Discussion about this post