Interesting Black and White pictures ripped from the net

[KEVIN2008]

Between 1969 and 1972, the housing and homelessness charity Shelter commissioned photographer Nick Hedges to document the truly appalling living conditions that some UK families were having to endure.

In Glasgow, Hedges, shooting mainly in the Gorbals and Maryhill, found some families living in truly Dickensian conditions.

At the time, the photos were used to lobby government and local councils, to try to get them to speed up new social housing projects.

Hedges, ever the gentleman, and hoping to protect the privacy and dignity of his subjects, has, since then, always refused to allow the images to be exhibited.

Now, with many of the adult subjects dead, and the children in the pictures all now, probably, parents or grandparents, he has agreed for them to go on show; partly to highlight the UK’s ongoing housing problems and partly in the hope that he can possibly track down some of his former subjects, to find out how life has treated them.

The exhibition, Make Life Worth Living, organised by Shelter Scotland, will run at St Andrew Square, Edinburgh until October 31.

Brilliant as the photographs are, they still have the power to shock and shame. This isn’t ancient history, it’s how and where some of us were raised.

Here’s hoping the show also finds a suitable exhibition space in Glasgow.

Once on the link, click on the first picture, to make it full size, and then you can flick through the gallery, and read Hedges’ comments on the images.

Nick Hedges's Make life worth living photographs


The thing about people living in slum housing is that there is no drama…it’s about the absolute wearing down of people’s morale in a quiet and undemonstrative way.
Nick Hedges


Mr and Mrs C lived with their large family in what was virtually a derelict flat in one of the last Gorbals Tenements. "There’s nothing now that you can get angry about. You’ve said it all before". Two of the elder girls in the family. One was unemployed, the other about to leave school with no prospect of a job


To the north-west of Glasgow city centre I discovered Maryhill. The tenement blocks here were thickly populated, and the courtyards ankle deep in rotting garbage.


They are the grimmest environment that I’ve encountered. This has something to do with the size of the stone used in their construction, the entry to them through the cave like entrances, the deep and dark stairwells and the relentless pattern of streets. The tenements are built around a courtyard which becomes a battlefield and refuse dump.


Mr and Mrs P came back from England to look after her father, a retired miner.

Composite photograph showing six Red Road multi-storey flats being demolished in a controlled explosion in Glasgow, Scotland, as part of Glasgow Housing Association's plan to regenerate communities across the city. Danny Lawson/PA Wire

A solution that became a humanitarian disaster..

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-g...k-estates-sunk