Whitechapel Immigration

3 Key excerpts on "Whitechapel Immigration"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Production of Heritage

  The Politicisation of Architectural Conservation

  • Alan Chandler, Michela Pace(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The philanthropic mission of its founders, offering opportunities to local people to become artists as part of growing a culturally richer community, established a model of engagement that started to lose sharpness with time, shifting from social intent into artistic signature. While the building changed and expanded, its popular character also transformed towards a more elitist conception of art. The fact that this coincided with the involvement of international artists does not necessarily mean the loss of engagement intentions and of interest in the context. Rather, it was the shift towards import and branding that characterised the change in character of the gallery. The necessity for the gallery to grow on the international stage by importing rather than producing and exporting art is also linked to the liveability of the area and the changes that inform its social and built fabric. Originally an underprivileged area of London, Whitechapel cyclically hosted immigrant communities and workers over centuries. It is characterised by mixed cultures and blended traditions and, as in other marginal areas, it hosted artist communities because of the affordability of the rent. The processes of gentrification that started in the last century impact local and artists’ communities alike, fundamentally altering both existing buildings through hikes in the cost of inhabiting them, and with new buildings that cluster into ‘areas of regeneration’ providing unaffordable investment potential to ‘elsewhere’ investors. The change in the conception of the ‘artist’ as an ‘imported professional’ grew parallel to these urban ‘regenerations’ to the point where poverty and art practice were decoupled and ‘creative districts’ are now being created from scratch as part of wider regeneration programmes. However, none of the artists who settled in fringe areas in the past would be able to afford to live in a ‘creative district’ as such. That leaves us two options: either the artists who can settle there are a new kind of wealthier ‘creative’, or they are sponsored by someone. Surely art does not need to be poor to be valuable, and it is well known that many of the great works of art are born from patronage and commissions, but it is difficult to imagine the same freedom of action that produced, differentiated and radical creation within these ‘artistic’, pre-packaged enclaves with elite opportunities.

  Lessons learned

  The St. Pancras and Whitechapel case studies highlighted the necessity to reflect on the concepts of authenticity, craftsmanship, authorship and sense of place. The ways these concepts link one to another is not obvious and depend on our ability to read the transformation of the social and economic context in the layered history of buildings, which become – as Morris would put it – real documents of time.

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  Artists and Patrons in Post-war Britain

  • Courtauld Institute of Art, Margaret Garlake(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  18 and for large-scale work.

  The site of the Gallery19 on Whitechapel High Street adjoining the Public Library underlines its social significance, since it was considered that both buildings provided ‘the means for the social advancement of the working classes, and gave them a respectable and sober form of recreation’.20 In the early 1950s, Whitechapel was a deprived working class area, containing a long-established Jewish community and an emerging immigrant population from the Commonwealth. In the 1960s a community of artists was attracted to the area by its supply of affordable studio space. Throughout the period however, the Whitechapel public was significantly different from that of other London art galleries. This difference could be advantageous for, as Robertson wrote to Barbara Hepworth, ‘The Gallery attracts an extremely large public. All the West End people come here, large numbers of East Londoners and people from the City who do not normally visit the galleries … the exhibition would be seen by the largest number of people.’21

  There were two distinct Whitechapel publics: one reflected the local population in all its diversity and the other embraced a West End audience, City business people and art world professionals. The Whitechapel could be said to function as ‘other’ for the West End and art professional public, some of whom regarded their visits to the East End as forays into a sub-culture which confirmed the superiority of their home ground and the values which lay behind the idea of an art establishment. The Whitechapel’s potential also to function as ‘other’ for the East End public and the danger that it might confer an outsider status on the local visitor by presenting an elitist programme, was a constant subject for debate by the Trustees. Serving the needs of the local public was fundamental to the Whitechapel ethos, and the Trustees’ minutes record many hours of discussion on this topic, particularly in the 1960s when what was perceived as neglect of those needs seemed to threaten the financial position of the Gallery. However, when he first joined the Gallery, Robertson observed resistance to what had generally been perceived as art with local appeal. The social realism of John Berger’s ‘Looking Forward’ (1952) was not well received by the local public, who found it colourless and despondent, despite the supposed accessibility of its realist subject matter.22

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  Haunted Landscapes

  Super-Nature and the Environment

  • Ruth Heholt, Niamh Downing, Ruth Heholt, Niamh Downing(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Considering the social relationship of gender (Moore 1988, 13) in the Whitechapel space, working-class life could be described as typified by its ‘matriloci’—something that conflicted with the social geographic hegemony in late Victorian culture and the idea of nuclear exclusivity. What constituted ‘the family’ in Whitechapel were echoes of older rural kinship systems that, ideologically and emotionally, posed a threat to current social hegemony. Industrialization, notes E. P. Thompson (1974), affected the emotional life of first the male and then the female worker, because it excised sociability from the male work environment and consigned it to the home. This caused a much more horizontal kinship space to emerge around the streets and private spaces of Whitechapel—the public house, the street and the lodging house stairwell became the reclamation yard of friendships and family alliances (Stansell 1982). Further, it can be understood that the forced displacement of the people of the Whitechapel Ward through persistent slum clearances (1846–1886) caused great sociological damage and conflict but threatened the delicate and complex matriloci that had resuscitated necessary kinship networks. There have since been praiseworthy studies conducted that map the socio-political disenfranchisement that accumulated in these areas as a result (Clarke 1986). ‘[W]omen whose families moved too often for them to participate in neighbourhood networks and/or who were far from kin, could be especially vulnerable’ (Rapp, Ross & Bridenthal 1983, 244) and all of the murdered women fell into this category. Unstable urban communities like this were places where relatively few people—the atypical minority—were able to settle. Relatives were not within easy reach and there was little privacy to be had due to the crowded living conditions. The house could easily become a veritable prison—a negated zone

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