Waiting for the Property Bubble to Burst. And Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting....

Estate, by Robert Clayton tells the story of the Lion Farm Estate in the Black Country, a heavily populated, industrialised/de-industrialised region in the Midlands of England. It shows life in and around the nine residential tower blocks that made up the estate (six of them were demolished in 1992).

The book begins with texts by both Jonathan Meades and Laura Noble which set the scene of the Lion Farm Estate, how Clayton began photographing in 1991, shortly after the 'right-to-buy' had both extended the possibility of home ownership to millions at the cost of creating a two-tier housing system, and effectively putting an end to social housing in Britain. We can still feel the effects of these policies in Britain's overheated housing market, a mass psychosis in which the possibility of affordable, decent housing is ruled out for the majority of the British population.

Where once, affordable housing was more or less affordable to all, now the only way to get it is if you buy it. And if you don't live in an area where housing is affordable, then the only way to buy it is if you are wealthy already. And if you are wealthy already then you have property. So the only people who can buy houses are people who own houses. That is exactly how it works in large parts of the UK and the best thing is it's cheaper to buy a house than to rent a house. It's unfathomable and unsustainable but somehow we can't seem to accept that things can be any other way - even though they were a relatively short time ago.

The book starts with a wide shot of the estate, the towers rising above green fields and the rooves of terraced housing. It goes closer into the estate, the empty car parks, the boarded up windows, the general neglect of a recession hit England.

Then there are interiors which fall somewhere between Nick Waplington and David Moore, but with a more natural feel to them. They show people living normal lives in normal rooms in normal flats. Everything is a little bit crowded; the piles of clothes, the slide in the living room, but it is recognisable. I've lived with piles of clothers with slides in the living room and so have most people I've known. It's the way most people live.

There are high views of empty car parks; car parks with no cars in. Which is telling. And then we're into the exteriors. The bad sculpture, the kids playing, the people moving furniture, the advice being given in the estate office (there's a nod to Paul Graham here maybe), the shops, the graffiti and the food.

It's a very strong overview in other words, one that fits in with books like Peter Mitchell's Memento Mori, a strong documentary aesthetic that combines British colour with a strong social voice. The book itself is a basic hardcover picture-on-a-page-kind of affair. The printing isn't great, but never mind that. The book is a really strong study of British housing. It's not spectacular, it doesn't have the explosive effect of Richard Billingham, it isn't gritty or overly grim, and that's what makes it interesting. It's a snapshot in time, an overview of housing as it used to be and is no more, a book that finds a middle ground between affection, sentiment and the crushing reality of the property market in Britain today.

Buy Estate here.

Fighting the Fascists of Interior Design: David Moore's Pictures of Real Interiors

The late, great Elmore Leonard passed away this summer, but his stories will always live on. So will his ten rules for writing fiction, number 10 of which was 'Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.'

That applies to photography as well, but most of the time it doesn't. The world is awash with boring photographs that are used to pad out a story ( often in the name of a narrative that is fictional only its misuse of the word narrative).

I thought about Elmore Leonard's 10th rule when I first saw David Moore's Pictures from the Real world, a slender volume of 18 pictures of interiors from Derby, England.

Made in the late 1980s, every one of the 18 is a humdinger, with a narrative flow concealed beneath the peeling wallpaper, the mould stains and the bottles of milk; it's a photobook where bottles of milk and mould stains are key elements in the visual story. Fantastic!

The first time I saw the book, I thought it was some kind of commentary on poverty and the grimness of living life in a crappy interior. More because that's what one is supposed to think and that is where the whole viewing theory points to. And there is grimness, especially in the one picture with the obese woman and the child's toys on the floor. It's so grim it could almost be contemporary.

But then I thought about all the places I have lived with their crappy interiors and their mould stains and cracked windows, and the little judgements that have been projected onto me by OCD housecleaners with their identikit IKEA-decorated houses (not that there's anything wrong with IKEA - why, my house is full of the stuff).

That made me wonder if Pictures From the Real World isn't really a commentary on the world of interiors that existed before IKEA and Changing Rooms and A Place in the Sun came around. The accompanying essay in the book helpfully points out that the first IKEA opened around the time the pictures were made and so that confirms my wondering.

In which case, Pictures From Home isn't so much a critique of Thatcherism, poverty and poor housing conditions (although it is all that as well), but is more of a memento mori of the chaos of interior design before most of us had a clue of what it was all about, a chaos that has more life and soul than anything the present poor person's interior has to offer. It's a critique of design in other words.

Or possibly not. Perhaps it is just a bunch of pictures that are just that - a bunch of pictures that stand out from the crowd for their content, not for any statement that might arbitrarily be made up to go with them.

But I might be wrong on that. Still, I like the thought that somebody is taking on design fascism in at least one of its contemporary forms. So I'll stick with that thought.

Pictures from the Real World

To commemorate Thatcher's funeral, here are some of David Moore's  Pictures from the Real World, out now as a book published by Here/Dewi Lewis - and a suitable reminder of what Thatcher really believed in.