the Market Estate Project – an artistic burial

If I look out of my kitchen window in the winter, I can see a funny little tower way off at the edge of the horizon (I can't see it in the summer because of that tree in front the window). It's the only remaining piece of what was once a significant market space, opened by Prince Albert in 1855.

Next to this piece of Victorian masonry are — or were — a few blocks of 1960s council housing called the Market Estate. Scheduled for demolition this week, it spent its last Saturday filled with art installations and people sharing their memories. I only found out about it on the day and there were long queues to see inside, but met a friend in the evening to have a look around and there were only queues for a couple of the installations. It was fascinating; a cross between Psycho Buildings and Simply Botiful.

I almost missed this guy hanging off the roof, and only noticed him because someone else saw him first. I thought it was just a mannequin until I saw him move his head. It was really cold that night, and quite windy, so he must have been some kind of insane masochist to do that.

One popular art method was to cover all available surfaces in one thing. There was one flat painted all over in the same shade of grey, with shrouded lightbulbs, giving it a liminality that was a little disconcerting. People wore grey sheets which added to the visual weirdness, as their heads and feet became disembodied, as Paul demonstrates here.

Another flat was swathed entirely in blue plastic, which felt a little bit like being inside one of those old Dreamspace inflatables, but with 3D objects to circumnavigate as well.

One room was painted all in yellow, which did very odd things to the white balance on my camera, as well as to my eyes. There were people discussing whether everything was really yellow, or just looked that way because of the yellow lampshade, but if you look closely you can see one of the sugarcubes doesn't have any paint on it.

One flat was covered in tin foil and dedicated to growing cabbages.

Elsewhere, there were graffiti and murals, people making tea and giving out biscuits, and scribbled messages that felt like the walls were talking in code.

There were also some flats that had been left in their original state of decor, which gave an opportunity to have a nose around and get nostalgic about the interior design of our pasts. Some seemed so over the top as to feel like an art installation itself, and maybe that was the point of showing those flats to us.

There didn't seem to be any obvious information about what would happen to the former residents of the estates, though, and I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to them, as hundreds of strangers wandered through their former homes. In some ways it felt like a burial of all their history, with only our photos of the art to remember them by, which isn't quite right, since the art was only on show for one day, and some of the people had lived there for more than 40 years. But I'm not going to get started on the state of social housing in this country at the moment. Instead, I'll just point you in the direction of more photos here and here.