Door Locks, Wall Stickers, Fireplaces: Assemblage Theory and Home (Un)Making in Lewisham’s Temporary Accommodation

Ella Harris,Katherine Brickell,Mel Nowicki

doi:10.1111/anti.12639

Ella Harris, Katherine Brickell + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12639

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Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores resident experiences of life in PLACE/Ladywell, a “pop‐up” social housing scheme in London providing temporary accommodation for homeless families. Specifically, we consider barriers to, and assertions of, homemaking in this temporary setting through fixtures and fittings—a door lock, wall stickers, and a fireplace. The paper utilises assemblage thinking to understand homemaking within these time‐limited and constrained circumstances. Despite their seeming banality, fixtures and fittings offer a material, politicised, and lively means of studying the attempted and thwarted production of home by residents living in PLACE/Ladywell. The absence of door locks reduces parents’ ability to maintain privacy and intimate relations; restrictions on hanging pictures and other decorative measures are circumvented by the use of wall stickers; and a defiant decorative fireplace establishes a sense of home in a temporary setting. Together, these objects constitute vital elements in negotiations between fixity and impermanence in temporary accommodation.

Highlights

Whatever you have in your rooms think first of the walls for they are that which makes your house and home, and if you do not make some sacrifices in their favour you will find your chambers have a kind of makeshift, lodging-house look about them ... (William Morris delivering a 1882 lecture about wallpaper and “The Lesser Arts of Life”)In a cupboard, in a flat purpose-built as temporary accommodation, sits a large roll of Laura Ashley1 wallpaper
We suggest that the door lock, wall stickers and fireplace were so significant to our participants because they are objects which require, and are mobilised, to generate fixity
If affective life is “alwaysalready mediated; emergent from specific material arrangements” we argue that affective experiences of precarity and stigma emerge from the constrained assemblages of homemaking at PLACE/Ladywell

Summary

Introduction

Whatever you have in your rooms think first of the walls for they are that which makes your house and home, and if you do not make some sacrifices in their favour you will find your chambers have a kind of makeshift, lodging-house look about them ... (William Morris delivering a 1882 lecture about wallpaper and “The Lesser Arts of Life”)In a cupboard, in a flat purpose-built as temporary accommodation, sits a large roll of Laura Ashley1 wallpaper. We consider how the attempts of residents to territorialise the flats in PLACE/Ladywell as a home are enacted through, and made difficult by, objects and materials that the building’s stakeholders provide them with or prohibit them from using.

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