A Home Fit to Live in: Housing in Canning Town in the 1950s-70s online exhibition

Eastside Community Heritage is excited to launch their new exhibition website for their project, A Home Fit To Live In, which gives new insight into life in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and celebrates Canning Town as a historic centre of housing standards innovation.

Made possible by The National Lottery Heritage Fund with a grant of £10,000, Eastside has interviewed Canning Town residents about what life was like living in Canning Town at that time, using these oral histories to create a website.  

The website shares sound clips, photographs, copies of the printed exhibition, and paintings and digital art by artist Terence Claydon.

The website shares the history of home with a focus on social housing in Canning Town from the 1950s to the 1970s. Pat shares her memories of moving into new accommodation in the 1950s, “We moved to Tarling Road, where my dad then got a shop (…) you could feel the excitement, you know, like with the newness after the war, things being built up. As kids we used to sit at the end of Tarling Road because there was peggy leggy steps there and they took you over to the gates of the Royal Victoria Dock.”

The website also shines a light on a historic housing testbed that took place in Canning Town. On Kildare Road, 39 homes were built in 1964 as a testbed for the Parker Morris standards, an innovative new housing policy centred around improving space and living standards. This experiment was successful in influencing changes in housing policy and design – the standards became mandatory for all new town builds in 1967 and all council houses in 1969. You can access the exhibition website here: https://eastsidecommunity.wixsite.com/ahomefittolivein 

Eastside Community Heritage has been working for over twenty-five years to uncover and share the hidden histories of East London. Our Hidden-History Archive holds over 4000 oral histories and around 40,000 photographs, dating from the 19th century all the way to the present day, all preserved and archived for public benefit.  

They are currently radically transforming the Hidden-History Archive as part of the ‘Secrets Shared: Unlocking Hidden History’ National Lottery Heritage Funded project. A new digital archive will allow access to the wealth of materials collected through ‘A Home Fit To Live In’ and many other past, present and future projects. Through the digital archive, local residents, researchers and other members of public interested in the history of East London will be able to explore pictures, videos, memorabilia and oral histories of people living and working in the area. They will also be able to interpret these materials using the lightbox facility to create their own displays, books, collages and activity/teaching resources. The digital archive is due to be launched in 2025. You can find out more about the Hidden-History Archive here: 

http://www.hidden-histories.org/