IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A
Abstract
The Aylesbury Estate is a vast brutalist housing scheme in South London, sitting next to Burgess Park, created after clearing a densely populated industrial quarter. They were created in complementarity in the context of the Welfare State and are now subject to a major urban regeneration process. Burgess Park palimpsest-like array of incomplete erasures and unfinished projects is flattened out into a more “coherent and legible” urban space, whilst the Aylesbury is undergoing demolition and replacement, implying dispossession and displacement of vulnerable people (Lees 2013, 2014), and environmental damage due to the embedded carbon footprint of demolishing and building anew. A market-driven process of large-scale urban transformation results in a loss of diversity and richness in both the spatial and sociocultural fabric of the city. But there is a response. This paper focuses on one particular flat in Wendover, one of the Aylesbury’s high-rise slabs, where former tenant and activist AE* lived since 1993. Artists and activists collaborated in adapting their flat into a free exhibition space accounting for AE’s life leading community efforts to challenge the estate’s regeneration since 1999. Different artworks featured throughout the flat whilst AE kept on making their daily life until shortly before being relocated in 2023. Visitors learned about the struggle of vulnerable people against gentrification, socially unjust and unsustainable urban regeneration of the Aylesbury. The flat and exhibition’s 3D laser scanning record is the basis of a virtual exhibition that will extend the memory and message of an architecture currently concealed to its people and currently at risk of disappearance. Digitally intersecting art and urban heritage, this digital vessel reflects both the fragility of the building and of the life it supported, amplifying the voices against the city-making model and social and cultural stigma (Campkin 2013) pushing for its replacement.
Felipe Lanuza is an Architect qualified in Chile and holds a PhD in Architectural Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL). He has wide international teaching experience and works across the architectural humanities, research through art and design, cultural heritage and advanced recording technologies to address urban memory; focusing particularly on discourses and experiences of absence in cities and landscapes. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow in Architecture at the University of Nottingham and teaches at the School of Architecture and Landscape, University of Sheffield.
Alessia Gammarota is a photographer with a Fine Art degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and a Photography degree from the European Institute of Design in Rome. After documenting major fashion weeks in New York, London, Paris and Milan for the leading production agencies, she made the move to documentary photography. She focuses on long-term projects which explore the concept of identity through the connection between places, bodies and dress: from the colourful hijabs in Indonesia expression of cosmopolitan young generations to the identity loss due to the ongoing gentrification and social cleansing of London. She believes in plurality of voices and conceives her stories through a multidisciplinary approach, which involved collaborations with artists, architects, anthropologists and other professionals from different fields. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the Guardian, Marie Claire, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vogue.
9:00 am - 10:30 am
Friday 27th June, 2025