Nye Bevan estate Clapton London E5 2012
Nye Bevan is widely regarded as the builder of Britain’s welfare system, its free universal healthcare, schooling, public sector housing and so on. A vision of a post-war social order that was systematically degraded over the 80s and 90s.
Into a new century Nye Bevan Commons is an amalgam of ideas that revolve around the Commons from within the built inheritance of 70s socialist planning that still structures our cities. The concept addresses the void in public thinking with the unregulated extension of the market into every aspect of life alongside the erosion of welfare state institutions. This has led to a broadening appeal of the commons tradition in an attempt to retain any meaningful sense of a shared collectivity in contemporary life.
Nye Bevan Commons was an attempt to see this in terms of an imaginary with its practice. At the local level the project developed social exchanges through processes of everyday life to explore a Commons imaginary that connected housing estates, neighbourhood centres, community kitchens, waterways communities into a common geography of space. A common geography that is invisible but underlays the driving narratives of contemporary life with the material nature of its exchanges.
satellite map : Nye Bevan 2012, West of river Lea: Clapton Park estate, East of river Lea: Hackney Marshes
