This recreation of a Brixton front room nearly fifty years ago is well worth a peek at the BFI. It’s a collaboration with Wimbledon College Of Art as part of the London on Film season.
Students were invited to design film sets in which stories about Londoners could be told. They used a typical Victorian terrace as their canvas, but the designs they created ultimately questioned what a “typical London home” looks like. The designs were based on research (including trips to the excellent Geffrye Museum in Bethnal Green) as well as watching good old-fashioned footage and movies from the era.
The Brixton set is by Freya Newmarch and imagines what a front room belonging to a British Jamaican family in 1969 would look like. It was a space charged with huge amounts of meaning for many Caribbean people who moved to settled and work in London in the 1950s.
After facing racism, poverty and the battle to get the accommodation in the first place, this part of the house became a “hallowed space that provided a sense of sanctuary and projected an image of respectability”. It was the realm of the “proud, aspirational mother”, reflecting conservative values at odds with those of her teenage children, who, of course, were beginning to express a very different identity as second generation Londoners.
Do remember rooms like this? Share any memories below.
With thanks to Kate Burt
