The Carpenters Estate
The Carpenters Estate was built as a council house community in Stratford in the late 1960′s and is alongside the eastern fringe of the London 2012 Olympic Park. In part due to Olympic regeneration, London’s increasing land values and changes in council housing since the Right to Buy era, the future of the Carpenters Estate has switched between displacement and re-development for over ten years. Walking around the Estate, the evidence for this is visible in many boarded-up and empty houses, yet, on the inside where a house remains a home there is a very different view. Carpenters is a formal portraiture and short film project that has involved many residents, some of whom have been living on the Estate for forty or more years and are now in their eighties. Their personal perspectives convey both an appreciation for the Carpenters Estate as a much valued place of home and reflect on the changed times of London’s housing landscape.
Carpenters has been created in collaboration with the photographer Anthony Palmer.