A programme of art, culture and new infrastructure to reimagine the future of the UK’s biggest council housing estate
Studio Morison
Street Furniture
Windmill Road, Martin’s Corner, Goresbrook Road and Andrew’s Corner
Studio Morison made a range of robust, terrazzo street furniture that activated five shopping parades across the estate, creating small islands of calm to transform places of passing into places of being still, being social and being present. Heather and Ivan Morison are interested in celebrating a diversity of social behaviour through the street furniture, which is designed to encourage and suggest places to socialise in new ways.
The design and material of the street furniture is Becontree-specific, with material qualities and colour combinations borrowed from the surroundings to create a celebratory collage of the everyday textures and shades of the estate. Studio Morison developed the material mixes from rubble collected from a demolition site on the Becontree Estate, to make an environmentally-responsible and context-responsive upcycled cast concrete.
Windmill Road
Martin’s Corner
Goresbrook Road
Andrew’s Corner
Studio Morison founders Heather Peak Morison and Ivan Morison have worked together as an artist duo since 2003, establishing a significant collaborative practice that transcends the divisions between art, architecture and theatre, and acts in collaboration with many other areas of creativity and local communities.
Co-commissioned by Create London and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD). Funded by LBBD’s Strategic Community Infrastructure Levy.