Final Major Project

Said to be myths - from a Heygate resident, but I can’t help but wonder, if this person is just trying to defend where their life was. I find it hard to believe that an estate designed as a playground for gangs in my opinion was far from safe.

Harry Brown was shot on the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, south London, not far from where Caine grew up…A few months before the film came out, in the summer of last year, a real-life gang – led by Callum Hall and Deniz Ozdil – was terrorising the nearby Aylesbury estate’.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-10943044

‘Heygate was only built in 1968-69 and quickly became a sort of human dustbin. It exemplified the notion that if you give people sties to live in, they will live like pigs’.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/8010830/Brilliant-architecture-can-rescue-even-Basingstoke.html

‘The Heygate Estate, which housed 700 people in what looks like a medieval blockhouse, and the Aylesbury Estate, with its 2,700 homes stretching south for more than a mile parallel to the Walworth Road, became sink estates plagued by crime, drugs and prostitution’.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/13f27f88-111e-11df-a6d6-00144feab49a.html

‘The Heygate’s generously sized flats were initially popular with council tenants, but the estate gradually struggled with a reputation for violence and deprivation.’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/03/heygate-estate-south-london-hollywood

‘…dilapidated and crime-ridden Heygate Estate’.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23854015-michael-caines-rotten-estate-to-be-transformed.do

‘Sir Michael Caine has spoken of his horror at returning to the ‘sink estates’ in the area he once called home. ‘

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1161469/Weve-left-children-rot-animals-Michael-Caine-speaks-returning-roots-make-new-movie.html

‘The infamous Heygate estate in Elephant & Castle, south London…‘

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/living-in-ghostland-the-last-heygate-residents-1930054.html

‘…that vision has largely ended in crime and deprivation, as the fate of the Heygate estate shows’.

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/new_homes/article7067417.ece

‘The area is characterised by its council estates and high- rise blocks … negotiating the subways frequented by meths-drinking weirdos can be scary…’

Mark Power

As a child Mark Power discovered his father’s home-made enlarger in the family attic, a contraption consisting of an upturned flowerpot, a domestic light bulb and a simple camera lens. His interest in photography probably began at this moment, although he later chose illustration - specialising in life drawing and painting - instead. He (accidentally) ‘became a photographer’ in 1983, and worked in the editorial and charity markets for nearly ten years, before he began teaching in 1992. This coincided with a shift towards long-term, self initiated projects which now sit comfortably alongside a number of large-scale commissions in the industrial sector.    

To date Power has published five monographs: The Shipping Forecast (1996), a poetic response to the esoteric language of daily maritime weather reports; Superstructure (2000), a documentation of the construction of London’s Millennium Dome; The Treasury Project (2002), about the restoration of a nineteenth-century historical monument: 26 Different Endings (2007), which documents those landscapes unlucky enough to fall just off the edge of the London A-Z, a map which could be said to define the boundaries of the British capital; and The Sound of Two Songs (2010), the culmination of his five year project set in contemporary Poland.

In 2007 he tried his hand at curating. Theatres of War featured the work of five artists whose work is concerned with contemporary conflict and surveillance. It opened at the Oskar Schindler factory in Krakow, Poland in May.

Mark Power joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2002, became an Associate in 2005, and a full Member in 2007. Meanwhile, in his other life, he is Professor of photography at the University of Brighton, a city on England’s south coast where he lives with his partner Jo and their children Chilli (b.1998) and Milligan (b.2002), although currently they are based in Krakow, Poland.

Guardian article = click.

crying shame.

“It’s worth mentioning that the Heygate has over 300 mature trees (mainly planes) and many species of bird and beast (including bats). The tree density and number make it the biggest ‘forest ‘in the capital that is not an actual park. Nobody knows if southwark/Lend Lease will take this into consideration, when knocking down the estate….