Nye Bevan Commons

Nye Bevan estate Clapton London E5
2012
 

Nye Bevan is widely regarded as the builder of Britain's welfare system, its free universal healthcare, schooling, public sector housing and so on. A vision of a post-war social order that was systematically degraded over the 80s and 90s. 
Into a new century Nye Bevan Commons is an amalgam of ideas that revolve around the Commons from within the built inheritance of 70s socialist planning that still structures our cities. The concept addresses the void in public thinking with the unregulated extension of the market into every aspect of life alongside the erosion of welfare state institutions. This has led to a broadening appeal of the commons tradition in an attempt to retain any meaningful sense of a shared collectivity in contemporary life.

Nye Bevan Commons was an attempt to see this in terms of practice. The project developed social exchanges to explore a Commons imaginary through everyday processes that extend out from Commons land to engage waterways communities, housing estates, neighbourhood centres and community kitchens.