The sculptural children of the London County Council’s post-war housing estates

This seminar will look at sculptures of children in post-war London County Council housing estates in the context of post-war society, culture and politics.

After the Second World War, the country and London was faced with a housing crisis caused by bomb damage and the legacy of decades of inadequate ‘slum’ housing. Thus, the LCC’s replanning of areas of London included many new housing estates and the LCC understood the emotional and psychological significance of the home. As the historian Lynda Nead describes, “War had shattered families, physically, emotionally and psychologically, and the home was necessarily the foundation of post-war reconstruction”.

From 1956, the LCC began its ‘patronage of the arts’ programme which enabled it to install artworks – mainly sculptures and murals – within a variety of sites including schools, parks and housing estates. Many of the human-figurative sculptures set within housing estates featured scenes of children such as Franta Belsky’s The Lesson, installed on the Avebury estate is east London and Peter Laszlo Peri’s sculptural reliefs in Lambeth. This seminar focuses on these children and their significance within the wider context of London’s renewal and replanning.

Rosamund Lily West is a Lecturer in Architectural Studies at Manchester School of Architecture at the University of Manchester as well as an Associate Lecturer in Design History and Theory at Chelsea College of Art. Prior to this, she was a Research Fellow at the Survey of London, UCL. Before entering academia, she worked in museums for 15 years, including as Paul Mellon Research Curator at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Her PhD research, at Kingston University, looks at post-war LCC housing estates and public sculpture. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a co-convenor of the Women Architectural Historians' network of the SAHGB and has recently been appointed an ECR member of the advisory board of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community at the IHR.

- this seminars is free to attend but registration is required.