Salvage Brutalism:Class, Culture and Dispossession in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Fragment of Robin Hood Gardens

This article investigates the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent acquisition of a section of Robin Hood Gardens, salvaged amidst the demolition of this Brutalist council estate in East London. The V&A’s fragment is revealed to be a fraught and class-ridden artefact, implicated in the dispossession and demolition of working-class housing. The fragment confounds this interpretation, however, for its destructive valence is bound up with its capacity to appear as a seamless artefact of modern architectural heritage. Hence the article first unpacks the fragment’s features by showing how it bears certain ‘museum effects’ that obscure and contain the crisis of social housing – effects of cultural history, the public, neutrality, and civic exchange. In a second move, the article considers the fragment’s direct implication in, and fashioning by, the Olympics-legacy regeneration of East Bank, a new cultural-industries quarter, where it will be sited as part of the planned V&A East museum. To understand the fragment’s features here, the article locates it within a regeneration trend that turns council housing into public art, before focusing on the exhibition film by the artist Do Ho Suh and the physical exhibit’s likely form at the V&A East