The Uses and Abuses of ‘Community Art’ on an Inner-City Estate

Abstract

This article traces the history of ‘community art’ on the Aylesbury Estate, a mass municipal housing development in inner-city London. Established by local artists soon after the Aylesbury’s opening in 1974, the Walworth and Aylesbury Community Arts Trust (WACAT) ran a multifaceted arts project on the estate until the early 1990s. Through an examination of WACAT’s changing aims, outputs and engagements with tenants, this article presents new ways of thinking about life on an inner urban estate. For many participants, the project was not only a focus of sociability and creative expression, but a way of making sense of rapidly changing material and social circumstances. The article further shows how art-making was used to both facilitate and oppose the estate’s ongoing demolition, and of contesting stereotypical representations of the estate that went hand in hand with the process of state-led ‘regeneration’.