Considering Art Podcast – Harriet Mena Hill, Concrete Art and London’s Aylesbury Estate

Introduction to Harriet

0:00Hello, Bob Chawndy here, with another Considering Art podcast, in which I talk to an artist about their work and something of their life. For the past eight years, my guest today, Harriet Menor-Hill, has been engaged in an in-depth

0:30exploration of the Aylesbury, a vast council estate in south-east London, which when it was built between 1963 and 1977, was home to some 10,000 people. At the time, it was regarded as a flagship example of post-war clearance and modernist urban planning. Gradually, though, it has fallen into disrepair, and in 2015, Southwark Council launched a regeneration programme, and several of the blocks, which are also named after Buckinghamshire towns,

1:01have already been demolished.

Harriet's Artistic Background

1:04In 1997, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair chose the Aylesbury estate to make his inaugural speech, in which he said there should be no more no-hope areas like it. Harriet has made it her mission to capture the community feelings of the people of the estate through an educational outreach programme, and by painting in oil images of homes on the Aylesbury. And her canvas, if you like, are blocks of concrete, which she salvaged from one of the demolished blocks called the Chilton.

1:34Her Aylesbury Fragments series has been shown nationally and internationally, and featured on many a prize shortlist. It depicts in detail individual flats in their brutalist style, with no people, but rather human presence, which shows itself with things like light shining from within the windows at night, or washing on the line, or graffiti on the walls. One piece was recently acquired by the Museum of London for its permanent collection. A previous series, called Soft Concrete, was made in felt.

2:07Before this, Harriet became known for her depictions of imagined architectural spaces, most notably for a series entitled Mapping the Grid. I talked with Harriet in her studio on the edge of the Aylesbury estate. Harriet, welcome to the podcast. Hello. Tell us a bit about yourself, Harriet. You're a Londoner, are you? I'm a Londoner, born in London, but very much of Scottish heritage. I don't have any English blood at all, so I don't want to misrepresent myself, but I was born in North London.

2:38And what's your connection to the Aylesbury estate? I moved to South London when I was 18, and I've lived there ever since. And the Aylesbury is in the neighbourhood where I've been for the past 30-something years. And it lies, the Aylesbury estate lies between my home and my studio. And for the past eight years, I've been working on a project which is observing the demolition and the regeneration of the Aylesbury estate.

3:10Okay, well, we'll come back to that.

Early Artistic Influences

3:13You went to Camberwell College of Art. While you were there, did you study the Surrealists? I was aware of the Surrealists. I didn't study them, but I didn't have a great experience at Camberwell because I don't think I was really following the kind of orthodoxy of perhaps the department, where it had come from or where it was going. So it was quite surreal, the experience. The reason I asked that about the Surrealists was because some of your early paintings and

3:44drawings had a certain surreal quality. For example, there's one called Chapel with stairs that looked like teeth. Yeah, all of the work that I did prior to the Aylesbury project was all conjectured architecture, which was very much the realm in which I dwelt really for sort of 30-odd years, working from my imagination. I was very influenced by people like, well, certainly the Surrealists, but more so I loved

4:17the backgrounds of the Bellini paintings. Piero della Francesca, I went on as, I think, a 19, 20-year-old around Italy and was absolutely intrigued by the buildings in the back of the paintings, some of those hill towns that still exist. And they seemed to me very reminiscent of when you think of a sort of inner dream or an archetypal town. That's sort of what was conjured in my head. And I was really interested in walking around those towns in paintings and making those journeys.

4:52Yeah, another one called Found Branch is after Grunewald, which is, he's a Renaissance painter, wasn't he? It's got a domed cathedral with what looked like twizzle sticks at the top of it and a big smoking chimney. That was a found, I've always collected, I've always collected found objects and that branch featured in paintings across about a three-year period where I drew the branch obsessively. I've actually got it in the studio. It was a small branch.

5:22Yeah, I forgot the branch.

5:25And so it was based on something that was real. The branch really reminded me of Christ's hands in the Grunewald painting, the sort of twisty, I don't know if you know the painting, it's an extraordinary, very, very powerful painting. There's a sort of agony in the hands and this branch, it was quite spiky and it reminded me of that. And then that building, I loved the idea of catching the smoke within that globe. Subsequent series involved architecture and grid-like structures. Has architecture always

6:01been an interest? It's always been there. It's always been there. I don't come from a fine art, but my dad was an industrial designer. And I think growing up with watching things being built and constructed had far more influence actually than painting and sculpture. It was more about how things are made. Yeah, another one around that time, it's called Waiting, and you drew it at the Department of Neurology at a hospital. What were the circumstances?

6:33A very close friend of mine had had a brain aneurysm and she was in intensive care and I used to go and visit her. And somehow the situation was so extreme and she was given not very good odds of surviving. And I used to take small pieces of paper with me that I had in my pocket and I would draw while I was sitting with her. And somehow the drawings represented little passages

7:05of time that were manageable. And that was how that journey went when she was very ill. And then after she was moved into rehab and she spent several months in rehab. And months later, I got the drawings out and it was in a sort of unintentional diary. They were made in a similar way to the drawings based on the Grunewald where I didn't know what was happening next. And it was very much about the experience of when somebody's very, very ill and you don't know what is going

7:41to happen next. And I quite liked the way the drawing led left, right, up and down. It looks like you've got a fantastical system of plumbing and electrics. And I thought, well, you're a department of neurology. It does look like a nervous system. Well, it was partly observing. It's very slow. It's very quiet. And then suddenly something will

Mapping the Grid Series

8:04happen. And it was trying to capture the kind of almost watching the medics trying to find a route through this. I mean, they were utterly brilliant. And it was partly, I mean, the drawing has got sort of what could be body fluids or, you know, and wires and trying. And it was sort of about trying to find a way through it medically, but also the experience itself. And miraculously, it had a good outcome.

8:37And that drawing, I'm very glad I've got the record of it, but I found it very difficult to look at. I've never shown that drawing. But because of the memories of your friend? Well, I've spoken to her about it subsequently and said, how would you feel about me showing it? And she just thought I was absolutely mad not to kind of, you know, she didn't have a problem with it at all. But she obviously had no idea of its existence because she wasn't conscious when it was being made. Well, you're interested in architecture developed with a series called Mapping the Gris. Now, these are

9:11images of, well, high rise buildings, I suppose, but you've made them curved and they have a certain calming effect. Was that intentional? They're quite big drawings. They're about three foot by four foot. Some of them are bigger than that. And I made them over a period of about seven years. And I'm very frightened about the notion of, or I've always found thinking about infinity, the notion of infinity, absolutely terrifying.

9:46And in a way, the drawings were about trying to look at what I found so frightening about infinite space. And I was trying to describe, I was trying to contain that fear in a way, that made it manageable to look at something that was really very frightening, but making it tolerable, if that makes sense. And what frightens you about infinity? I find the idea of not being able to quantify what is beyond or the limits of something very,

10:22very difficult. I mean, this goes back to found objects and why I work in found objects. I really like the finite shape that I have before I start rather than it being arbitrary and it could go anywhere. I've always instinctively, not consciously, I've come to understand that even back to my degree show where I was working on found panels and looking back across 35 years of painting. I've always needed to have the edges in place before I start.

10:54And Mapping the Grid was a really, really important series in terms of working with something really, really drawing out as much of it as I could. Obviously, it wasn't commercial because it was just a series of great big drawings that took months and months and months. And there was an enormous freedom in working on something that wasn't commercial. There was no idea of, you know, that as a commercial project.

11:28Mapping the Grid was shown in many European spaces, but also in Worcester Cathedral. Was there any particular reason why you showed them in a cathedral? I had been working on a series of paintings that came out of the drawings which were about secular altars. I was interested in the idea of the sort of worship of art in place of religion. And I saw by chance a traveling altar that it's believed that Anne Boleyn prayed in front of the night before

12:03she was executed. It's very small and understated. It's at Hever Castle. And it was an incredible experience of being in the presence of something that had occupied that space. And I then started to work with structures that could be opened and closed and that viewers could sort of interface with in a way that isn't usual with paintings, that they could be closed, they could be opened, they could be changed around. And then into those spaces, I started to paint grids, which had a light source that took you

12:41inside it very much. I mean, follows through of, you know, the, the enunciation, the light kind of blasting through. Um, and so it was a very, seemed a very fitting setting to be able to show those in a religious, to, to ask those questions about where art sits in relation to religion now, when you think about how important religious institutions have been to the development of Western art. Um, and, and it was,

13:11it was an amazing experience to have the paintings in that space, in the chapter house. Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, you do luminosity really well, I have to say. But as I mentioned, I find it quite calming to look at, especially with the, with the curvature as well. Um, but it's sort of ironic because you're depicting things that happen in cities, yet cities are not normally very calming, are they?

13:40I think they create space though, those paintings, which are about the viewer's relationship to looking. And I think that is a calming, you have to look at them to try and work out what you're looking at. But the idea is that they, that, that your eye is drawn into, and that they are, the colors are quite calming. And also there is a light source in them, which is a focal point. And I think they're quite safe spaces to just wander mentally, if that, if that makes sense.

14:14Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned that you walk through Aylesbury Estate on your way to the studio.

Aylesbury Estate Project

14:22How did you first become involved in, in making art here? Um, in 2018, um, I, I'm not going to go into too much. I worked for 10 years, 11 years at the National Gallery in their education department. And when I left the National Gallery, I went back into community education. And then one of the jobs I was offered was on the Aylesbury to deliver a sculpture project for the summer school for young residents. And although I'd been in the area and

14:56I've taught in mainly in primary and many of the local primary schools, I'd never actually worked. So I'd worked with some of the young people on Aylesbury, but I hadn't ever worked in situ on the Aylesbury. And when I got there, it was a real eye opener because I knew the, the estate by its reputation, which wasn't good. It was, um, very demonized by the portrayal in the media of the estate. It was a sort of go-to estate for all that was wrong with inner city living, um, with council

15:29housing with, you know, from every angle. Sink estate. Sink estate where Tony Blair went and gave his inaugural speech. And in that one speech seemingly sort of buried the estate and any real chance it had of a future. I don't, it obviously wasn't his intention, but I don't believe he knew the estate because what he said did not represent the community that lived there. And so when I, when I had the opportunity to, to, to meet with the young people,

15:59to spend time, they were there for three weeks, my reaction as an artist was to, to want to talk about what I, what I'd found and to try and reposition my experience with what I, with what I had known previously, thought I knew. You told me an interesting statistic while we were walking through it just now, and that is that 14% of Premier League footballers come from this area within a 10 mile radius of the Aylesbury. Football is really, really important on the estate that there have

16:35been some amazing offshoots. Terrell Williams wrote an amazing play called Red Pitch, which is about friendship and particularly male friendship, young male friendship against the backdrop of the regeneration. And that, Terrell is a youth worker on the estate, but he's also now an award-winning playwright who lived, he still lives on the estate. And the play was on at the bush and then it moved to the West End. And it's the most fabulous celebration of friendship and football in the

17:06context of the estate. It's a wonderful piece of, piece of drama. Out to the window where, where we're doing this interview that you can see where Ria Ferdinand grew up. That's right. That's right. And that was another real, because I saw Ria Ferdinand talking about the importance of football and how he could spot players who trained, who grew up playing in what are called the cages on the estates. There are cages all over the Aylesbury still, where you see young kids playing football now. It's a way out and it's also a place of growing up and of meeting. And again,

17:45it sort of goes against the portrayal of the estate. Football's been huge for so many of the young people that I work with. It's being demolished in stages, isn't it? A part of this regeneration programme. And how contentious is that programme? I think there's a pragmatism amongst residents, some residents, particularly the older residents who grew up in the streets surrounding the estate before it was built. So it's not just a, this shouldn't happen and we just want it to stay

18:20as it was amongst some people. There are activists who don't want anything to change.

18:27I think amongst some of the people who I've spoken a lot with, there is an understanding. It's very easy to be against something, but coming up with viable solutions is much more difficult than being either just for or against something. So there's a sadness that the community itself is being dismantled. I think there has been quite a lot of work to keep aspects of the community together. I'm involved with a programme with the older residents who've been rehomed and we're running

19:04doing art classes with them, but also talking with them a lot because what they asked of us was that they wanted their history recorded. So we're endeavouring to see how we can make that happen. We've started doing sample recordings, long form recordings, oral histories, because what they really want is a record of their having been there as a community. Well, let's hear from one of them now, Jean. This is the question people often say, oh, how could you live there? Well, when this was built,

19:39rightly or wrongly, whatever way you look at it, people come from derelict homes and this was pure, pure heaven. We've got buff and this is how people felt when they came on onto the Owlsbury. Tell us about Jean. Oh, Jean's absolutely a mate. She's a legend on the estate. So Jean grew up in the streets around the estate before it was built. She lived on the estate for 52 years. She's an extraordinary fount of knowledge and wisdom about what has worked, what hasn't worked, where the problems lay.

20:15But more than that, she became very active. She has always been active on the residence committees and taken part and encouraged other people to find their voices. And she's brought people along and encouraged them to come to meetings and speak for themselves and take action. But she set up a project that she talks about in her recording, Little Tykes, which was a children's centre that she founded. And as she said, you know, she left school at 15 with no qualifications. And at 50,

20:51she got her MBQ. She learned how to fundraise and set up this children's centre, which I've spoken to people who use the children's centre, who I've met through other avenues, who say how critical it was for them, meeting other young mothers, breaking through the loneliness, having somewhere to go. It is a vast estate. And Jean founded something that was about absolutely integral to the community.

21:21And she was awarded an MBE for doing so. So she's an amazing person, yeah. Was it then to look at memory and get a sense of community that you decided to commit the Aylesby estate to your art? Originally, the first project I did was called Soft Concrete, and that was working with felt. I was making monumental felt portraits of brutalist buildings. I've always been interested in

21:52what material can say about the subject. And felt, although I'd never worked in felt before, seemed like a good way to go. Why didn't you use canvas? Or paper? I found it quite funny. I saw this range of wool at a friend's who was developing a project for, she was working with adults with learning difficulties. And I looked at this, all this wool strewn across her table and thought, oh my God, it's got the most amazing range of colours and textures. And when I was thinking about how to describe concrete, how to

22:29talk about the community aspect, the domesticity on Aylesbury, and the functionality of the community that I found, it was just a natural segue. I just thought, oh God, you know, that wool, particularly of the outdoor sheep, there were wonderful concrete colours and flecks and texture in amongst the dyed merino bright colours of the merino walls, not the natural colours. And it lent itself. So it was purely just responding to what the material looked like and exploring what

23:06the potentiality of that was. And you also, you can get, weirdly, you can get extreme luminosity with the felt, which was a real surprise. Then you went to concrete. What made you decide that? That was another, I wish I could say, I have all these kind of really clever plans that I know what I'm doing, but that's not what happened. I was going past the estate. As I mentioned earlier, I've always collected things. I beachcombe. I'm a nightmare to be on a beach with because I only

23:41walk for about three feet and everybody else goes off and has a lovely walk for several hours and I'm still in the same place at the end of the afternoon. Fossils originally, and then just stuff. I pick up bits of wood that are sort of from ships, boats. I want to know where it came from. In my head, I go to what the sailors... So you found a load of concrete fragments from one of the estates called Chilton, part of the

24:11Aylesbury estate. And that set you off, did it? At the beginning of lockdown, everything had closed down. All the shops locally were shut, schools were closed, and I came past Chilton and found a piece of concrete that had come over the hoarding, where it had been boarded off, and I picked it up. And I knew quite a lot of the young people who'd lived in that building. And on the other side of the road where we've just walked past, where the buildings are still occupied, I thought of the kids who lived in that building opposite,

24:44they were subjected to this, watching the building where their friends live being demolished. And it seemed incredibly brutal, incredibly harsh. They had nowhere to go, they couldn't go out. And yet the diggers were just, that's one of the diggers, the diggers were just eating away at this building. The process of demolition is incredibly violent and brutal. The diggers look like great big dinosaurs and with these great big jaws that chew bits off and rip the cables out. And I hadn't really

25:17taken on board what a violent process demolition is, and relentless and noisy and dusty. And the young people were just sort of subjected to having to watch that happen. So I picked up a couple of bits of concrete, cycled to the studio. And while I was in the studio, I had photographs of Chilton before it was demolished for the felt work. And I just, in the course of a break, I sketched Chilton onto a piece of concrete. And that was the beginning of the Fragment Project.

25:49There are no people in your works, but there is evidence of people. You've got lights shining on, you've got washing hanging out, you've got graffiti. That's enough for you? Yes. I think there needs to be a kind of anonymity and a preservation of privacy. And I think that once I'm worried that it would become about characters, if I started to put people in, that it would be about those people. And it's about the community. It's not about one person or

26:24one family. It's about the history of all of the people who have been there. How easy is it to paint on concrete? How do you prepare it? I mean, you've got to smooth it first, haven't you? A lot of the surfaces are flat like that. Not all of them. And sometimes in the process, sometimes I leave the scars as I find them. But sometimes I put a skim of cement on the top,

26:56and then that has to be sealed to preserve the paint surface on top. How have your artworks gone down with the people who live on the estate?

27:09There are a couple of people who I've got to know who really like them as pieces of artwork, but also completely get the celebration of them, that they are about that place. And because they look, they're very recognisably where they're from. And if I've painted a curtain and that's your flat, you know that that's your curtain in your flat. So they recognise, they can locate where I am on the estate. But on the whole, if I'm honest, they're just not that interested. The majority of

27:43residents aren't that interested in it. I mean, what's the atmosphere on the estate now? I mean, I know that there are parts of it you won't walk into, will you?

27:54Jean, she said it's in the worst condition that she's ever known. And she's always been very, very positive about the estate. And she said it's really bad. Well, it's just been left to rot, basically, or parts of it. The demolition of Wendover has been very, very, very slow. It's been delayed. There's been a high court action, which has delayed things further. And it's left residents in a very difficult position because a lot of antisocial behaviour that was nothing to do with residents moved on to the estate.

28:27So again, it's like the problems weren't generated by residents who were in situ. But there's been an influx of very, very problematic behaviour onto the estate, again, which was totally out of the residents' control. Is there a political aspect, politics with a small p to your work, do you think? Yes. There is. But it's also about finding that line about, and I think it is something that all

28:58people who make work about places have to take, they have to look at that, about who has the right to speak about certain things. And I go to other places in London where I don't have any connection. Aesthetically, I'd love to make work about it, but I have no connection with the place. And for that reason, I won't make work about it because I just, I don't really feel like I'd be a tourist. I don't have any kind of knowledge about what is going on. I don't know people from the estate. And I'm not

29:29saying you shouldn't make work. It's just not how I make work. My work is about the place that I am uncovering and getting to know. I do think a lot about that question about who has the right to speak about places. And on occasion, I've had to justify why I'm making work about the estate. To whom?

29:52I've been challenged on a couple of occasions about people asking what, literally, what right do I have to make work about that subject. What, are these people in authority or residents? No, no exhibitions when the work's on show. It's only happened a couple of times, but I think it's a valid, I think it's a valid challenge. And I think... So what do you say to them? Well, I talk about what my connection to the estate is and why I'm making the work and that what you've

30:27asked about, is it political? It is political because I think when you're actually witnessing something happening in real time, when you are present, I'm on the estate most days. I'm in contact with older residents and younger residents continually. And I'm interested in how the whole thing is playing out. And I'm making a record of that. I hope, as honestly, as I catch a sort of unvarnished record, it's not all good. It's not all bad. But I mean, there are aspects of it like

31:00the luminosity of the light. I mean, the intention of the build of Aylesbury was very good. It was to make really decent housing. On a good day, you can see glimpses of what the intention was. Had it been maintained better? Had it been managed better? Had residents had more control of what was going on. It would perhaps have had the future that was intended for it. And I think the community's been sold. It's also that thing about, for them, it raises questions beyond the estate about when

31:34you don't have autonomy, when your destiny is in somebody else's control. A lot of people have more agency over the decisions they make. If you own your own home, do you want to move? Do you want to stay there? And that's been removed from a vast community. They were asked what they wanted to happen, and then they were ignored. In fact, they were asked three times. There were three ballots on the Aylesbury about the future of the community there, and three times they were disregarded.

32:09Aylesbury Fragments has been exhibited in Wells Cathedral, another cathedral. Why is that? Um, that was the opportunity to show an installation of, the idea behind it was a sort of, again, a secular Stations of the Cross, a journey. Um, and, and the project has been a journey with the community. Tracking change, again, as a painter, I'm interested in observing the world around me, and

32:39I'm interested in the changes that happen. I'm getting, I'm the same age as the estate, so I don't know how much that featured subconsciously, but the awareness of aging and redundancy, and at what point you become sort of obsolete. Um, that's very interesting, yeah. You've done a series called Aylesbury Drawings, which go inside, they're internal, yeah. There was one in that series called, called In the Mind's Eye, which has the Chilton estate, the original one that was demolished,

33:17sort of ascended into the clouds, isn't it? Is there a psychological aspect to that? Um, I was really interested in that series, there was, it was such a massive building, and, and when it was demolished, I watched it being gutted, because again, as I came back from work every day, I could see it being sort of skeletonized against the sky, and then when it was demolished, it was just gone. It was, it was such a weird sensation of just that massive structure

33:52was just gone, and there was just flat earth, and I made a series of drawings where, on a very big sheet of paper, these tiny little buildings, but it was a build, it was a tiny drawing of a very, very big thing, again, about somehow containing a difficult idea in something quite small. And I just, I was working on very thin tissue paper to try and, again, describe how it had just sort of

34:23floated away. It needed to be very fine paper, but those drawings were on very fine paper. It was as if the building had just ascended. So you're, you're doing this community project. Where do you go from here, Harriet?

Future Work and Conclusion

34:37Um, I am making occasional bits of work on concrete, but I've been making a lot of paper, experimenting with paper. I've been making paper out of earth and of organic matter that I've retrieved from the estate. I've made quite a large series of drawings of, as flats are sealed up, they brand the door with the door number. So the original door number is obscured. So they just sort of brand the number very crudely into the metalwork. And I went and made a series of

35:08rubbings of the flats that had been sealed up. And I've drawn the buildings around these numbers. So it's, again, it's, it's still there. It's still describing aspects of the Aylesbury, but in very different forms. I've moved much more over to drawing about memory, about memory and drawing. I talked to you before about my mother's dementia. I've been making drawings of fragments of memory and how we draw fragments of memory. Um, so it's kind of coming from partly Aylesbury and

35:45partly what the space that I was sort of occupied in for the past three or four years. Well, we'll look forward to seeing that. Harriet, thanks so much for talking about your work. An absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for coming and having a look. Harriet Menehill there, giving a voice to the Aylesbury estate community. Thank you for listening. Join me, Bob Chaundee, again next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

36:16Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.