Conditions of Living

Home and Homelessness in London’s East End

Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End takes a visual journey from workhouses to slum clearances, tower blocks and homeless shelters, to explore how photographs have represented these conditions for over a century. The journey ends with new work by artist Anthony Luvera, which addresses the rise of economic segregation in housing developments in Tower Hamlets, with the phenomenon known as ‘poor doors’.

The built environment plays a powerful role in determining the ways people live together and is at the core of the experience of housing. Architecture and planning can be used to enforce social inequalities through the privileging of market forces, resulting in discrimination and segregation. Conditions of Living brings together research and the experiences of those living in the buildings to construct an image of this much-discussed, yet often invisible phenomenon. Conditions of Living invited viewers to reflect on these convoluted systems and contemplate alternative possibilities for housing conditions, communal living, and collective action.