Who Will Love Us Now
Diptych, 130 x 100cm, 2024
unique
The antique photograph of the Hornchurch Cottage Homes was stuck behind the radiator of my studio in Cremer Street in Hackney. This studio building has now been demolished and houses luxury flats, I have no idea how the photograph came to be there. It shows an unpaved street in Essex where large detached houses were built to house East London orphans. From the crowded slums of Shoreditch children were moved to the leafy suburbs. Each house was operated by a set of ‘parents’. The houses were laid out on a private street, with eleven detached two-storey cottages, each one housing 30 children. On site, there were three schools - for boys and girls and infants, a swimming pool, a band room, stores, workshops (in which children used practical skills such as carpentry and shoe-mending) and an infirmary. When the home closed in 1984 it had offered residental childcare for 95 years. Built in 1889 by the Shoreditch Guardians of the Poor, Mr Robert George Alabaster Esq was possibly the Medical Officer for Shoreditch and a supporter of the Cottage Homes.
After the closure in 1984 the houses became derelict and were at times squatted. When I visited to take the photograph of the baby in the basket in 2016, they had been transformed into expensive private properties, complete with drive and privet hedge. The work suddenly felt abtly timed, when the news were filled with tales of children’s residential care in 2024 being in the hands of private equity firms making vast profits, while children are housed in poor conditions, with little pastoral care and a total lack of oversight. The Victorians aimed to create a stable family environment for children. Today we have a care system for profit, where children are used as units of financial gain. This is a good moment for British society to look again at its values and change the way things are done.
This work was made for Essex Neck, an exhibition curated by Matthew Stock and The Modern Language Experiment.
