Catch Us if You Can

A Walk Round the Tabard Estate, London SE1
by Christopher Jones & Martin Dixon
A5 pamphlet. 20 pages

There is a photograph taken in 1913 of the down-at-heel 'slums' that were later demolished to make way for the social idyll of the Tabard Estate. The inhabitants stand in their doorways, moody and suspicious at this act of municipal surveying which records the slums in
decay first and the inhabitants second.

Catch Us If You Can, almost one hundred years later, is the reverse of this act. It covers the same local territory but our surveying aims to reimagine living histories from the bricks, passageways, stairwells and bannisters of Tabard.

Pressure and forces exist all around that want to snatch this all away, to take it back and banish us. Present from the material details and the joy we found in the landscape is the determination that what we already have here is what we want to keep. That means all of us. Catch Us If You Can!