Estates

In 2018, I collaborated with artists Tony McCorry and Paul McCormack—both former residents of the Chelmsley Wood estate in Birmingham—on a project titled Estates. Through a series of dialogues with current and past residents, the project explored the lived experience of post-war housing estates across the UK. What emerged was a shared vocabulary of memory, displacement, and spatial negotiation.

Recurring themes included the presence of unofficial boundaries and so-called “no-go” zones—territories shaped not by formal planning but by social dynamics, perception, and myth. Estates sought to examine how these marginal spaces, often overlooked in broader narratives of urban development, hold complex and contested identities that resonate far beyond their geographic limits.