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Painting the Crisis: Community Arts and the Search for the ‘Ordinary’ in 1970s and ’80s London

In 1970 the East London borough of Tower Hamlets had just one major art magazine: Elam. Usually comprising a few drab poems or perhaps some sketches by a semi-professional artist, Elam had a modest readership and was funded by a diminishing number of private donors. An editorial in its winter 1965 edition glumly noted that, ‘Only about 35 people turned up to the meeting we held at Toynbee Hall in November . . . We were sorry that so few local authorities sent representatives. . . .’ Elam largely concerned itself with reviews of classical music concerts and ruminations on Chaucer, with highbrow political commentary and sometimes cantankerous editorials (‘I have a very agreeable pianist as a next door neighbour who doesn’t play enough for me!’), and a few contributions solicited from local residents. It went out of business in 1972 after failing to secure funding from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Six years later, however, if you were to venture down into the basement of St George’s Town Hall in East London on a weekday evening you might stumble upon something rather extraordinary. Beneath the fading Victorian grandeur of this municipal building there existed, for much of the 1970s and ’80s, an inky, clattering world of print workshops, film studios and drama rehearsals. Depending on the evening, you might interrupt an oral-history recording or come across a landscape architect distributing technical-drawing pencils to gathered schoolchildren. You might also have found the pensioner Gladys McGee composing her first poem with the help of the Basement Writers group. By 1980 art was everywhere in East London. It was inscribed on walls in the form of huge