Custom House, Our House exhibition & book launch

Saturday 14 June 2025

We are excited to announce Custom House, Our House exhibition and book launch, the culmination of community efforts to record Custom House heritage, thanks to The National Lottery Heritage Fund grant of £99,980 awarded in May 2024. Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players, the project has recorded intergenerational voices on the impact of community-led regeneration in Custom House, London Borough of Newham.

We are members of a small team of artists, designers and researchers (Jessie Brennan, Joseph Pochodzaj and Céline Strolz) from the Royal College of Art (RCA) who worked in collaboration with Custom House Bookshop (Denise Evans-Barr) and residents, and with project partners Newham Heritage Service, Newham Libraries and Rosetta Arts.

Individuals identified as having a connection to Custom House were trained in oral history interview techniques before recording an interview with another Custom House community member. The 12 oral history interviews were narrated by Custom House residents, shopkeepers, and stakeholders from a range of demographic groups including young (aged 18-35) and senior (aged 50+), different ethnicities, class, and housing tenures (e.g., homeowners, social rented).

Two photographers were commissioned to create new work for the project: Inés Yearwood-Sanchez has made 12 photographic portraits of oral history interviewees and Chris Dorley-Brown has captured Custom House heritage through the area’s street life.

The collection of oral history interviews and photographs is a valuable resource as it documents the lived experience of Custom House regeneration at a time of significant urban change through the words and images of those most intimately involved.

Project outputs (oral history interviews and photographs) will be shared publicly with audiences in 2025 via a range of formats: a photography exhibition at Rosetta Arts; printed and digital publications; a touring exhibition across five Newham libraries, and; a public engagement programme of events. The project outputs will be deposited at Newham Heritage Service and accessible for future generations. 

Special thanks to participant interviewers Ivorine Bogle, Jessie Brennan, Elizabeth Lutterodt-Clottey, Pat Leeson, Susan Mills, Kelsey Poyton, Terry Regan, Esmeralda Tecle, Joden Wyatt and Shadid Zamil. Thank you to participant interviewees James Blewitt, Denise Evans-Barr, Rokhsana Fiaz, Angela Fields, Leonida Gilliland, Suleica Lerebours, Betty O’Connell, Titus Odoi, Cynthia Poyton, Sarah Ruiz, Dami Segun and Tony Subryan.

Visit Custom House, Our House project website and RCA's press release to find out more.

Custom House, Our House

Custom House, Our House is an oral history and photography project with people in Custom House, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, starting September 2024.

DRAWING ROOM Opening - Save the Date! →

PV: Thursday 21 September 2023

Drawing Room's Directors, Board and Team invite you to join them to celebrate the opening of their new building and inaugural exhibitions:  

UNBUILD: a site of possibility
Jessie Brennan | Ian Kiaer | Tanoa Sasraku | Emily Speed | Do Ho Suh

Drawing in Social Space 
Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London | Mujeres Creando | Gluklya | Hassan Issah | University of Nevada Reno | Noureddine Ezarraf

Thursday 21 September, time tbc  

Drawing Room/Tannery Arts 
New Tannery Way, Bermondsey, SE1 5WS 
www.drawingroom.org.uk

BBC Radio 4 Front Row

I'd like to invite you to listen to BBC Radio 4 Front Row (Thursday 18 February, 19:15-45), as I am on the programme. If you didn’t catch it live you can listen again via the BBC Sounds app. I have contributed a brief segment, as part of 'Front Row Get Creative' which encourages audiences to try an activity inspired by an artist. I devised a 'blind drawing' activity in response to Covid-19, in order to restore intimacy with one another - even while at a physical distance.

Watch a short video on the Front Row website.

If you feel called to explore this activity I'd love to see your drawings, so please do share them online via social media if you feel comfortable doing so. The hashtag is #FrontRowGetCreative.

Soundcamp 2019

4 - 5 May 2019

The 6th Soundcamp will take place over the International Dawn Chorus Day weekend of 4 to 5 May 2019.

Please hold the date.

Soundcamps at Stave Hill Ecological Park in London and sites around the world welcome campers, visitors, volunteers, broadcasters, listeners and streamers to share live sounds at daybreak.

The London Soundcamp will feature:
• The Tent That Can Hear recalls soundings by Platform artists at Greenland Dock in the Summer of 1989. What has changed?
• Vision by Jessie Brennan reveals how the ecology park's seemingly natural landscapes have been made, while Sounds Interrupted transplants its sounds from the Rotherhithe peninsula to London Bridge station.
• Through the weekend Reveil 6 will make a 24 hour loop of the earth at sunrise, relaying live sounds from a global network of soundcamps and streamers.

For more information explore the Soundcamp 2019 London programme
soundtent.org

@soundtent
#Soundcamp2019
#Reveil2019

We are happy to acknowledge support for this event from:
Arts Council England, Southwark Neighbourhoods Fund, North Southwark Environment Trust, Friends of Stave Hill, University of Gloucestershire, Private supporters

Soundcamp is a not for profit arts collective. We welcome contributions large or small to support Soundcamp Reveil in 2019. Donate to Soundcamp.

Image: Exp 8 View from pot 2.5s 144* at 08.33, Sunday 4 May 2014, Soundcamp, Stave Hill Ecological Park, London 2 May 2015. Pinhole Zero 612b Kodak 100Tmax by Ky Lewis.

Aesthetics of Gentrification, International Conference

5-6 April 2019

Keynote Speakers:
Ayona Datta (Reader in Urban Futures, King’s College London)
Pheng Cheah (Professor of Rhetoric and Geography, University of California, Berkeley)

Download the program here.

Organisers:
Christoph Lindner
Raechel Root
Gerardo Sandoval

Royal Docks commission

UP Projects has commissioned London-based artist Jessie Brennan to develop four new, temporary public artworks in the Royal Docks, Newham.

The Ruskin Prize 2019 - Selector

For The John Ruskin Prize 2019, artists Barbara Walker MBE, Hew Locke and Jessie Brennan are announced as selectors of multidisciplinary prize which forms part of the Ruskin200 celebrations marking the bicentenary of John Ruskin's birth.

Further information: AN

Contested Territories Group

A print portfolio project devised by the Created and Contested Territories research group at Norwich University of the Arts.

Contested Territories Group

Image credit: NUA and Mike Hemsley

Territory

26 April - 4 May 2019

Symposium: Saturday 27 April, 10am - 6pm

‘Territory’ variously draws attention to power differentials, difference and dis/advantage made manifest by class, geopolitical or aesthetic conflicts.

With Neil Bousfield, Matthew Benington, Jessie Brennan, Desmon Brett, Doug Fishbone, Iuliana-Elena Gavril, Robert Hillier, Jade Montserrat and Dawn Brooks, Lynda Morris, Neil Powell, Carl Rowe, Karsten Schubert, Carly Sharples, Ross Sinclair, Magda Stawarska-Beavan, Milly Thompson, Paul Vousden.

CLB Berlin im Aufbau Haus
Prinzenstraße 84.2
Berlin-Kreuzberg
10969 Deutschland

FRIEZE LONDON

Jessie Brennan WE ARE HERE (2018)
A new limited edition print available exclusively from the South London Gallery, presented by Allied Editions (B20) at Frieze London.

Part of YOUR WORDS project commissioned by the South London Gallery (SLG) for Open Plan.
A poster publication is also available from SLG.

YOUR WORDS

Commissioned by South London Gallery

Jessie Brennan We Are Here (2018), text installation (situated on the roof of Heron House), Pelican Estate

In spring 2017, the South London Gallery (SLG) invited Jessie Brennan to collaborate with residents of Pelican Estate on a project titled YOUR WORDS. Jessie spent time listening to residents whose experiences, in different ways, celebrate the value of public housing and speak to the broader challenges often faced by those on council estates: the stigmatisation of social housing tenants; the lack of maintenance and ‘managed decline’ by councils; the threat of demolition and redevelopment by policies that value private ownership over state-funded homes.

To mark the end of the project, WE ARE HERE has been created: a text installation on the roof of Heron House and a poster publication distributed back to residents, which documents some of the conversations, contributions and research developed over the course of the project. Read Jessie’s introductory text and some of the conversations between Jessie and Pelican residents, here.

YOUR WORDS is part of Open Plan, a long-term public art and education project which invites international and British artists to create artworks with and for the SLG’s close neighbours on Elmington, Pelican and Sceaux Gardens housing estates, along with a programme of events at the gallery.

Recent press: The Art Newspaper; AN

RC21 Conference, Leeds

Rethinking Urban Global Justice: An international academic conference for critical urban studies

11-13 September 2017

Tuesday 12 September, 11:15-13:00, LHR1, University of Leeds

Jessie Brennan will present 'The Enabling Power', her paper on the regeneration of social housing estate Robin Hood Gardens, at RC21 Conference in Leeds. The panel is convened by Dr Debbie Humphry (Kingston University) and Dr Ben Gidley (Birkbeck, University of London), titled: 'Visualising the Fight for Home and Security: Revealing Injustice and Making Change'.

Download the full conference programme

Buy tickets

Grenfell Tower: Benefit Auction

'Art advisor Lucy Meakin collaborates with leading British contemporary artists and Artsy on an online auction to raise funds for the victims of the tragic Grenfell Tower fire in west London.

The UK's top artists have come together to donate works to an online auction to benefit the people affected by the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, from July 18 - August 1 2017 on Artsy.

Artists who have donated to the auction include: Charles Avery , Simon Periton, Ian Davenport, Michael Craig-Martin, Adam Fuss, Cornelia Parker, Peter Liversidge, Dexter Dalwood, David Batchelor, The Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Maryam Eisler, Ryan Mosley, Dave White, Juergen Teller, Paul Morrison, Richard Deacon, Ann-Marie James, Fiona Banner, Mona Hatoum, Robert Violette, Gavin Turk, David Austen, Jessie Brennan and Darren Almond.'

Press: FT, The Art Newspaper

Re: development reviewed in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography

Read the extended review of Jessie Brennan's Re: development: Voices, Cyanotypes & Writings from The Green Backyard, by Matthew Thompson (Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice, University of Liverpool).

“This is a unique book. […] [Brennan’s] pointedly political redeployment of the cyanotype method here turns blueprint planning on its head – an artistic device that brings to light what too often falls through the cracks between the lines drawn by planning professionals. […] Despite its charged political subject matter, there is a deeply sensory aspect to the book, evoking the hands-on quality of life in the Green Backyard, which asks to be touched and handled like a vegetable freshly pulled from the earth. […]

This collection is the most effective articulation I’ve yet come across that captures these tensions; that expresses in outward language the difficulty of balancing the demands of inward and upward in building social and solidarity economies. […] The real value of Re:development, then, is the gift it gives, not just to the casual reader, in expressing a more meaningful reality, but to the movement contesting the absurd state we’re in – by demonstrating the value of combining inward, outward and upward languages, and convincing the gatekeepers of this unsustainable political settlement that real value resides in other things, in people over products, in narratives over numbers.”

— Matthew Thompson, April 2017

Order a copy of Re: development

Re:development: Voices, Cyanotypes & Writings from The Green Backyard

Silent Grid, 2016

Re:development brings together voices, cyanotypes and writings from The Green Backyard, a ‘community growing project’ in Peterborough that, for years, was threatened with a proposed development. The book, a culmination of Jessie Brennan's year-long residency hosted by arts organisation Metal, brings together artwork and 10 essay contributions exploring the politics of land use and value. It is an attempt to explore in The Green Backyard one of Britain’s most contested territories: land ownership, and its radical political shift from communal to private. 

Contributing authors include: Sophie Antonelli (activist; co-founder of The Green Backyard); Dr. Alexandre Apsan Frediani (researcher of development practice; Lecturer at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL); Dr. Robert Biel (carpenter-historian; Senior Lecturer at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL); Dougald Hine (writer and social thinker; co-founder of Dark Mountain); Prof. Jane Holder (Professor of Environmental Law, UCL); Anna Minton (writer; Co-Director of UEL’s MRes course, Reading the Neoliberal City); Dr. Barbara Penner (architectural historian; Senior Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL); Prof. Jane Rendell (artist-writer; Professor of Architecture and Art, and Director of History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture); Prof. Ben Rogaly (geographer; Professor of Geography, University of Sussex); and Dr. Maria Walsh (writer and art critic; Reader in Artists’ Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London).

Available from bookshops, and order online:

AA Bookshop 

RIBA Bookshop

The Photographers' Gallery

Camden Arts Centre

Tate Modern

Whitechapel Gallery

South London Gallery

dalla Rosa Gallery

Press, reviews and mentions of Re:development and related project:

Guardian Cities 

Ken Worpole 

Chris Fite-Wassilak 

Guardian

See also Re: development - Inside The Green Backyard, a collaborative networked exhibition.

Voicing Experience: The 4th British Conference of Autoethnography

Department of Sociology, University of Sussex

15-16 June 2017

Jessie Brennan will present her project Re:development at the conference, about The Green Backyard.

Further details about the conference, including programme, registration and fees, can be found here.

Concrete Utopias: Metaphor and Material

Bluecoat

Friday 12 May 2017, 10 am - 4 pm

Speakers include music writer Mark Goodall, artist Jessie Brennan, poet Chris McCabe, sociologist Kirsteen Paton, photographer Chris Leslie, and Florian Urban, Head of Architectural History and Urban Studies at Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art. The programme is organised in collaboration with University of Liverpool and Bluecoat’s Sociologist in Residence, Paul Jones.

Free, booking required.

Sound of Memory Symposium: Sound-track / Sound-scape

Whitechapel Gallery

23 April 2017, 11.30 am - 6.00 pm, Zilkha Auditorium

Sound of Memory Symposium: Sound-track / Sound-scape is organised by The Sound-Image-Space Research Centre, School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent and the Unit for Sound Practice Research (SPR; Goldsmiths, University of London).

Participants include Gareth Evans, Sarah Turner, Aki Pasoulas, John Drever, Hildegard Westerkamp, Matt Parker, Sarah Turner, Jessie Brennan, William Locryn Finch, Ester Johnson, Tim Meacham and Francesco Bergamo.

Buy tickets

Re: development - Inside The Green Backyard

Carroll/Fletcher Onscreen

28 March - 1 May 2017

Jessie Brennan and ten collaborating organisations host an online exhibition celebrating the success of The Green Backyard’s resistance to a proposed redevelopment.

BOM | Carroll/Fletcher Onscreen | CGP London | Furtherfield | Jessie Brennan | Land for What? | Metal Peterborough | Shared Assets | South London Gallery | The Green Backyard | The NewBridge Project

#IfThisWeretoBeLost 

Beyond Words conference 2017

Plymouth University

14-15 March 2107

Jessie Brennan (artist) and Sophie Antonelli (co-founder of The Green Backyard) will present The Green Backyard at Plymouth University's international conference programme "Beyond Words".

Location: Room 605, Rolle Building, Plymouth University