B (183)

46

B+W

Likewise the German author Heinrich

Böll suggested that the size of the plants

and grasses that spread rapidly across the

enormous piles of rubble that remained of

most German cities might give an observer

some indication of the precise date of the

destruction that had consumed the place.

Since so much social housing was

constructed on former bomb sites, the

random demolition of that war played an

unintended part in giving rise to the London

we know today. It is a city where rich and

poor live more or less side by side, and in

which few areas can be said definitively to

belong to one class or another. This process

might now be said to be in reverse, as the

economically and socially vulnerable who

so often came to inhabit the ruin sites of

inner London are gradually evicted to make

way for foreign investors, and prosperous

internal exiles, tired of life in suburbia and

the Metrolands.

Coleman’s photographs are not a direct

response to the Heygate’s destruction and

the scattering of its residents, but the trees

themselves are silent witnesses to it, with the

dust of the Heygate’s obliteration perhaps

even embedded in their growth rings. When

construction of the new estate is complete

and the Heygate and its inhabitants have

been all but wiped away, the surviving

trees will be a reminder of what came

before. Landmarks perhaps for the traveller

returning to an estate that he has not visited

in some time, and which has since changed

beyond all recognition.

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