Plotlands of Shepperton: Photographs 2004 - 2016

by Stefan Szczelkun

This book provides photographic documentation of the houses on five plotland sites in Shepperton. 27 small colour photographs document Hamhaugh Island in 2004. There are then 14 full page photos of views across the Thames showing the riverside dwelling on the other bank. In addition there are 21 full page photographs of the plotland chalets in close-up view. Two of these are panoramas across a two page spread. A short section to finish has photographs of riverside chalets further downstream at Sunbury, Hampton and Eel Pie Island in Twickenham. Finally, there is a photograph of author JG Ballard's semi-detached brick house in Shepperton. The 'footnotes' that run along the bottom of the pages under the photographs are a river of words which are intended to reflect deeper significance into the images floating above them. This is the second collection of colour photographs in a series that will illustrate the Plotlands of the UK in a way that does not seem to have been attempted before. It is hoped that this will provide the basis for a renewed debate on this method of providing first homes for working class people.

54 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2020

About the author

Last three books:
'Dementia Painting' April 2023.

'Exploding Cinema 1991 - 1999: culture and democracy' was published in 2021 - a short version of my PhD dissertation at RCA.

'SiLENCE! the great silencing of British working class culture' plus related photoboooks on UK Plotlands and other stuff. See Openlibrary link for full list of books.

Most of my books are available as ebooks or PDFs. If you contact me I will send you a review copy.

Whilst having my year out from my architecture course in 1969 I came across The Scratch Orchestra and although not a musician I joined with glee and experienced the power of collective improvisation. This did result in a publication, but much later. By 1971 I was back at college in Portsmouth attempting to finish my course whilst living in a van. Architecture did not seem to be located in human needs… So I decided to take John Cages’ advice and ‘start from scratch’. Before architecture came shelter so I started collecting stuff on basic forms of shelter making. That turned into collecting scrapbooks of material on our basic life supports - shelter, food and energy. It was a revelation to me because I was finding my own categories and structuring knowledge for myself rather than following existing classifications.

I had the good luck to take my collection into Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton at an opportune time. The poet proprietor of Unicorn, Bill Butler, could see the potential for a British version of The Whole Earth Catalogue. The first completely hand-drawn ‘Survival Scrapbook 1 Shelter’ came out early in 1972. ‘Survival Scrapbook 2 Food’ came out later that year and ‘Energy’ in 1974. They sold well and the rights were sold to Schocken in NY. I was sent on a 37 radio and TV talk show tour of America and they sold by the thousand.

The next thing I got into was a concept of ’Total Ability’ where the idea of ‘going back to first principles’, which my school physics teacher used to bang on about, was applied to human functioning. It started when I came across a page-long description of standing in a classic book on Yoga. What if I collected things like that on all our human abilities… creating a sort of self-knowledge through doing. Anyway that project was bought by a big publisher called Wildwood House. But then they went bust and as the Seventies progressed the bottom fell out of the hippie alternative market as things got less visionary. So ‘Sense -Think - Act’ got put on the shelf until Gordon Joly turned up and offered to publish it as a Wiki on his own backyard server. From there it was finally made into a self-published paperback book.

But to return back to the Eighties… By then I felt a need to explore who I was. And I still hankered after the peer collectivity I’d experienced in the Scratch Orchestra. First of all I decided that I should follow my inner mojo and be an artist rather than a half-hearted professional architect. Help for my confused state of being came in the form of a class conscious form of co-counselling. Through this I came to realise I was still as working class as my family, in spite of my pretensions to be an author and artist! I joined a newly formed Brixton Artists Collective with other working class artists and started running radical and inclusive exhibitions in three railway arches. It was a breath of fresh air compared with the stuffy art world.

The next thing was I realised was that I was still Polish. In spite of losing the language and being second generation I was still an immigrant with attitude. Two practical actions came out of this almost simultaneously.

The first was meeting a Polish artist in Lincolnshire, through the mail art network, (Leszek Dabrowski) and realising I could do with being part of a Polish artists group. Then I met Kasia Januszko living in my squatted street in Kennington and with her help the project took practical shape. The group, called ‘Bigos: artists of Polish origin’ ran from 1986 to 1997 with

Reviews

[Bob Stanley · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This book is wonderful. The text is just as strong as the images. Szczelkun writes about the plotlands in a way I haven't read anywhere else: I've got a memoir of a Basildon plotlander which is rosy nostalgia, and Colin Ward & Dennis Hardy's Arcadia For All which is fascinating if a little dry, but the notion of working class settlements growing up free from imposed taste and architectural norms isn't written about enough."

[Mr Christopher]

Fascinating and well photographed contribution to an aspect of the UK's 'informal architecture'.

[Jon Wallsgrove · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating study and photographic essay examining what the photographer and author Eric de Maré celebrated in 1950 as “a kind of modern folk art, the crude but spontaneous origins of a culture nurtured by limited time next to the leisurely river”. Stefan Szczelkun admires the surviving chalets from the end of the 1st World War up to the 1948 Planning Act, but also loves the ongoing process of change, the tweaking, ornamenting and rebuilding from the last 70 years. He considers the plotland houses to be “a form of working class cultural expression – an art of architectural improvisation”. Though he acknowledges that “although essentially a landscape of the poor, this very fact in turn attracted to such areas its own bohemian clientele…. actors, actresses, artists and writers…… which contributed to the libertarian atmosphere of such places”. As someone who lives and has self-built in plotlands, I can confirm that to this day it still attracts architects, designers, musicians and other creatives, who live the non-conforming relaxing life of “the river shanty people with their houses on stilts and a rowing boat at the ready”.

[Ann Bodkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of hope, recognising how human creativity thrives at the edges. As the narrative unfurls, we understand the context of why it emerged, and question could this happen today. Critical-thinking for an age when land use is eclipsed by the single issue of land value.