Seven years ago, the artist Grayson Perry worked alongside architects FAT to create A House for Essex. As if made from glazed gingerbread, it is a unique holiday let with a playful exuberance which belies its relatively small plot, with colour and decoration starkly and unashamedly pronounced against the east Essex countryside.

He has now completed his second house. This one is in Barking, which was once in the county of Essex but now firmly part of greater London’s 20th century eastwards suburban expansion. This one is also a lot, lot smaller, only a fraction of the size of Perry’s FAT collaboration – perhaps you may even call it a doll’s house for Essex.


Sitting outside A House for Artists – the unique APPARATA designed monolith to creative co-living as featured in recessed.space previously (see 0009), Perry’s sculpture Inspiration Lives Here sits atop a post and is almost unnoticeable to somebody not seeking it out. But those who do will see a playful architectural model of typical Becontree estate short terrace of four homes, a single scaled component of what was a project of 27,000 new London County Council homes completed between 1921 and 1935.

Using an architectural typology informed from the garden city movement, the estate was predominantly laid out in short terraces of two-storey cottages, set around both shared and private greenspaces. As a project of social housing, the properties were designed to home families of soldiers returning from the Great War and others displaced through East End slum clearances.



As model housing which has just celebrated the centenary of its first residents, the fact it was council-led housing was important to Grayson Perry who said when growing up both he and his extended family lived in homes not dissimilar to it. The artist reaches back into his memory to recall his childhood experiences in such a home: “the man next door had a model aeroplane made of wood that he'd made in the shed, it sat on his washing line pole and had little propellers that flew around in the wind – I used to love it as a child, that sort of handmadeness.”

That handmadeness was key to the work, the artist goes on to explain: “Thank you to Lauren, the fabricator, and I don't normally work with a fabricator … I sort of designed the sculpture and then she made it out of cardboard. It had come in the back of the car, and it was a bit battered, and I said I liked the way it looked.” Perry then painted fabricated metal house, carefully shaped to reflect the dog-eared, knocked-about, and celebratory handmade feel.


Up on a pole, the work doesn’t shout its presence, and it takes a closer look to notice those handmade qualities. But, in doing so other human details become apparent in the dramas and decoration which take place around the four houses. Neighbours lean over fences in conversation, a garden has a chair and table, the end-of-terrace has a satellite dish, another property has a garden fence, while a privet hedge sits in front of the adjoining property with 80’s stone cladding. There are also two cars which poetically recall the Dagenham Ford factory: “there's a small transit, and at the other end a Ford Anglia, which was my father's first car – it’s literally a copy – which he bought brand new in 1964.”




The model house is one which references a specific row on the estate which the artist felt typified the architecture and feel of the place, but then those details folded into it are drawn from broader observations of both Becontree and the occupation of social housing observed by Perry.

One of the four homes has an extension, which touches on the right-to-buy selloff of council homes initiated under Margaret Thatcher and continuing through to today: “You could always tell which houses had been bought, because they got a new little porch and one of those PVC front doors with a stained-glass window, and a little conservatory on the back. So, I wanted to represent this in the house as well, that transition away from uniformity.”


That personal, non-artist creativity feeds into the title Inspiration Lives Here, and its aesthetic and demand for closer inspection also fights against another kind of uniformity, that of the trend for public art to eschew subtlety and delicate nuance in favour of big, brash, and overtly noticeable one-liners.

Perry describes an “aversion” to much public sculpture – “these sort of bland stainless-steel baubles that get dumped outside neo-modernist building blocks that symbolise something very bland” – and instead is pleased that the final work is, in his words, is “a humble little sort of council dovecote.”

That this work reflects the handmade and human-scale, it is perhaps a fitting commission for the courtyard of A House For Artists, a building within which artists both live but also diligently work on their creative tasks with flats that provide versatile live-work space specifically shaped around a cultural resident – a design for which Perry was on the panel of advisors. But, as the title of the work suggests, culture and creativity are not the sole domain of self-declared artists, but of the everyperson, whether that’s somebody painting or working ceramics, or simply making a wooden model aeroplane with spinning propellor.


Sometimes, that creative practice is public, presented, and ART in capital letters. Sometimes it’s something more personal, carried out at home for the process of making alone, perhaps never seen by anybody else. At night, Inspiration Lives Here gently glows through internal lights. Perry has painted the internal walls in pale, domestic colours, and when they light up there is a sense of an internal activity withheld from public show.

At a time when, while on the increase, the construction of social housing is pretty much non-existent in comparison to a century ago, Perry says that his small lamp-sculpture “is a kind of anti monument, nostalgic for the golden age of social housing.” It acts as a subtle marker to both housing and creativity for all, and personal creative activity, both worthy causes to illuminate.