Democratising social housing : health and wellbeing, tenants’ rights, resistance, and collective action.
By Carl Davis
Last week, I found myself wandering round the Hard Graft exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. Hard Graft looks at the impact of work on health. It mainly considers the physical impact on exploited and underrepresented workers, who they are, and where the unrecognised hard graft takes place.
The exhibition has three sections covering the plantation from slavery to the modern day, the street, and the home . It was an exploration of how the physical traces of hard graft in these often dangerous environments manifest on the body, highlighting how the rights of these workers are so often denied, and examining the power of collective action.
Hard Graft at The Wellcome Collection
In addition to the historic and contemporary plantation section, the exhibition includes the hard graft of sanitation workers, sex workers, prison labour, and cleaners. If anyone is interested and is able to get along, Hard Graft at the Wellcome Collection is well worth visiting.
A Resonant Exhbition
The displays offer a mix of photographs, personal artifacts and accounts, many of them harrowing, and thought-provoking installations. As I walked through the exhibition, I couldn’t help but reflect on how some of these themes resonate in the world of social housing.
My own interest is mental health and related discrimination in social housing and the most telling and appalling specific reference to mental health was an exhibit explaining a diagnosis known as drapetomania. This term was coined in 1851 by Samuel A. Cartwright, a pro-slavery physician, and this so-called ‘mental illness’ was described as the “disease that caused slaves to run away”.
Discrimination of all kinds is still rife in social housing, including the continued weaponising of mental health. Social landlords have evolved landlord-led and purely voluntary ‘vulnerabilities policies’ to normalise discrimination against disabled people. These practices subsume the legal obligation to recognise disabled tenants’ and residents’ rights enshrined in the Equality Act 2010.
The result of such practices is that too many social landlords weaponise their self-defined vulnerability label against tenants and residents, especially those with disabilities and mental health issues. Such cultures are laid down by the leadership of the landlord, but end up infecting all areas of the organisation.
Spotlighting Social Housing
The Hard Graft exhibition made me think — what if we at SHAC curated a similar exhibition? There is a need for us as social housing tenants and home owners, grassroots housing activists, and our allies to consider similar methods to spotlight the unhealthy and dangerous conditions in which so many live. Substandard housing and the demands of greedy, bullying, discriminating, and totally unaccountable social landlords take a devastating toll on our physical, mental and financial health and wellbeing.
The fabric of social housing often bears the marks of neglect, with cracks in the plaster, damp patches creeping up walls, and draughts that no amount of DIY will fix. These physical scars mirror the toll on tenants: the health issues exacerbated by mouldy ceilings, the endless battles with landlords or councils to secure basic repairs, and the exhaustion of living in limbo. These are stories written in brick and mortar, but also on and in tenants and residents bodies through ill health and stress, anxiety. Dealing with bullying landlords, rising rents and debt result in too many sleepless nights and even reportedly to suicides.
An exhibition about social housing could turn the spotlight on these overlapping stories. Including the campaigns and organising being done by tenants and residents, they are not just tales of struggle under appalling conditions and against all the odds, but are testament to resilience and, crucially, the strength to push for change. Within SHAC, this is encapsulated in our plan to setup up a national tenants’ and residents’ union.
Hard Graft at The Wellcome Collection
The beauty of the Hard Graft exhibition lay in its ability to balance deeply personal lived experience with the universal: to make visible what we often overlook. People are living and working and trying to get by under terrible conditions imposed by powerful organisations and a political class unwilling to cede any power or acknowledge that we have rights .
A similar approach to an exhibition on social housing could illuminate how housing conditions mark, shape and harm tenants and residents bodies and minds and ruin lives while reminding us and visitors to the exhibition that the fight for decent social homes as a right is a shared one. These stories aren’t just about surviving within four walls. They’re about reclaiming dignity, asserting rights, and challenging the status quo.
The Healing Element
On a previous visit to the Wellcome Collection in 2018 I visited the ‘Living with Buildings : Health and Architecture ‘ show featuring Rab Harling’s installation, a 2014 film titled “‘Inversion/Reflection: What Does Balfron Tower Mean to You?’. Harling explored residents’ experiences living in Balfron Tower, a notable high-rise in East London .The film documented their thoughts on residing in the tower and their reactions to being evicted and relocated due to redevelopment plans.
This work highlighted the human impact of purely profit driven urban regeneration and the displacement of longstanding communities by greedy and reckless corporate landlords. The work echoed aspects of ulterior motives, recklessness, greed, utter contempt for tenants, and unaccountability that led to Grenfell as well.
I felt crushed by the weight of the problems I was experiencing with my landlord at the time. Seeing a focussed critique in a respectable gallery space was validating. It wasn’t just me being ‘unreasonable and difficult’, as my G15 landlord put it. It was part of a whole corporate psychopathic betrayal and shift away from the founding social purpose of the social housing sector.
Housing Rebellion created a landlords’ Rogues Gallery to highlight disrepairs (November 2024)
Hard Graft also included a healing element. As I left the Wellcome Collection that day, my mind buzzed with ideas. The traces of social housing conditions lie on the bodies and spirits of tenants and residents. We deserve a space in the public conversation, and perhaps now it is time to create one.
This project is certainly possible and I am willing to put in the time and effort to support that happening. It would need more than one person to get involved. If you are interested, email shac.action@gmail.com to let me know.
The Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights exhibition is free to enter and runs until 27th April 2025. Visit The Wellcome Collection gallery at 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.
See more about Disability Visibility, SHAC’s campaign opposing disability discrimination in housing.
23 January 2025
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