Art and Community: The Docklands Community Poster Project

You! There’s something rotten! The Walls are crumbling!

Is it not possible to do something about it?

You! The rot is growing so fast!

If anyone sees us, it’s no good! (No good at all!)

- ‘The Whitewash Song’, The Bruise - A Threepenny Play (Bertold Brecht, 1930)

Reg Ward, first Chief Executive of the LDDC, speaking at a local meeting in 1982 described the Docklands as “a blank canvas upon which we can paint the future”. However, when the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) moved into its Isle of Dogs offices, there were still local working docks, many small industries and a population of 56,000 people, mainly living in high-rise council tower blocks with poor amenities.

The LDDC was the Thatcher government’s favourite quango, it trampled all over the working class and created the ultimate sore thumb in Britain’s privatized metropolis - Canary Wharf. Headed by Ward, a former Chief Executive of Hereford and Worcester County Council and Hammersmith and Fulham London Borough Council the LDDC began planning internationally funded office buildings in the early 1980s.

Left in the dark, the local Docklands community soon saw scaffolding superstructures protruding out of their neighborhood. The gross negligence of the suited cronies with their gravy-dripping fingers provoked an intense backlash from the formerly silent majority. This backlash culminated most poignantly in poster campaigns and bizarre protests by artists, local representatives and Labour politicians.

What is going on behind our backs?

The first photo-mural sequence confronted the most pressing issue

The Docklands Community Poster Project was founded in 1981 by Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn in response to the concerns of East London communities over an extensive proposed re-development programme. The artists, who had previously been working closely with local trades unions around health issues, were approached to produce a poster alerting local people to what was to come.

An arts project that began as a request for a poster eventually became the cultural arm of an extraordinary campaigning community over a period of ten years. Here are some of the fascinating images it produced…

The big money theme from the first sequence

The statement of an activist at a local meeting inspired the slogan

Final image in the sequence.

Housing sequence:

Campaign Pictures:

Mutiny in Wapping!

Staged funeral procession purposefully designed as a optical tableau

Protester from Mudchute farm releases sheep and bees during Bank of England director Eddie George's speech at an LDDC champagne reception.

Further information at Cspace.

W. L. H.