Sunday, 04 May 2008

Suburban gaze

CcampbellholierthanthouThis image is by Christopher Campbell and comes from an exhibition of paintings about London's infamous A406 North Circular Road. To most people who have to negotiate it, the North Circular is an obstacle or a set of traps, not a road in which people live. Yet the homes were built to the high expectations of suburbia.

If you've read Edward Platt's fascinating study of the homes and inhabitants of the (not dissimilar) A40, Leadville, Campbell's images will be all the more compelling. Like Platt, Campbell takes the mundane, refuses to heat it up, and yet still creates something I'm reluctant to look away from. The exhbition is at StArt Space, Columbia Road, east London until 25 May.

Among the comments Edward Platt made from his interviews with residents, I'm occasionally reminded of this one:

It is not the noise on the road, but the noise of her neighbours that upsets her.

4 May 2008 16:39:56 | Space and place

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Neighbouring and older people My text about older people and neighbouring will be published shortly by Community Development Foundation. There will be a launch, or to put it more technically, an excuse to gather and guzzle, at Shared Intelligence in London on Tuesday 27 May 2008, which happens to be National (wait, make that European) Neighbours Day. (Thanks to Ben Lee from the National Neighbourhood Management Network for providing the venue). Speakers include David Sillito from BBC News, Chris Gittins from Streets Alive, and Ryan Campbell from Age Concern England. If you'd like to come along, please register as places are limited. Further information is here.
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Trust and key-holding David Sillito has some pieces on BBC Breakfast tv this week, beginning today in a couple of localities where I've done interviews myself, Pembroke Street in Devonport, and Bolton Woods in Shipley. And if you want to find out more detail on some of the stories David's picked up - and the detail on the research he commissioned which suggested that 36% of respondents would not trust any of their neighbours with a spare set of house keys - perhaps you'd like to come along and hear him speak at this book launch. The question about key-holding was posed hypothetically. In some research I carried out in Manchester a few years ago, reported here, we asked the direct questions: 'Do you hold a spare key for any of your neighbours? And do any of your neighbours hold your key?' We found that in the 65-74 age band some 49% had keys held by neighbours, and 43% held keys for at least one neighbour, but the other age groups were significantly lower. The size of our sample left some of our stats a bit shakey, whereas the BBC survey had 1000 respondents and shows little variation across regions (England and Wales) or age groups. Are we a nation of strangers? / David Sillito 6 May 2008

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