Our Sites

1 July - 30 October 2005

Photograph taken by Naomi aged 8. (click image for larger version)

Developed by On Site Arts, Our Sites was a new photographic exhibition offering insight into Traveller and Gypsy children’s responses to momentous regeneration plans for the sites where they live in East London and where they and their families have lived for many years. Using basic cameras, these children have taken portraits of themselves and families as well as pictures of their home environments and the land around their sites.

Artists and photographers, Bobby Lloyd and Caroline Christie, from On Site Arts, working with the London Gypsy and Traveller Unit ran photography workshops over the past year on two official council-run caravan sites in Hackney and Newham and an unauthorised site in Tower Hamlets, as well as with housed Travellers living in the immediate vicinity.

The site in Newham has been on the same plot for over 34 years, lies next to the Stratford Channel Tunnel Rail Linkbuilding works and is home to four generations of English Gypsies. The site in Hackney was built 12 years ago, for Irish Travellers who had been living on the roadside in the Borough for many years.

Traveller and Gypsy communities are ethnic groups amongst many in the UK, with the same rights and desires to be part of the wider community yet often marked out due to their particular accommodation needs. In the words of a member of the community, 'many sites have been built in unsuitable and unhealthy locations such as under pylons, flyovers or next to rubbish tips'. At the Newham site an enormous electricity pylon towers, and past the Hackney site runs a busy road.

The show provided an opportunity for this under-represented community to be re-presented through the eyes of its children and young people, with photographic images proving a particularly potent tool. The setting for this outdoor exhibition, on a ramp that led to the Museum entrance, itself temporary and dismantled in November 2005, was chosen as a fitting context for this work.