#1: The Utility of Overlapping Experiences
Allyship & Alleywork
The devil is in the historical detail of Angel Alley, a dark, narrow passage in Whitechapel, East London. Named after the long-gone Angel Inn and once connecting two significant thoroughfares, Wentworth Street and Whitechapel High Street, it rose to proletarian prominence (and genteel notoriety) from a delta of Victorian backstreets that coursed through the urban grain of East London. With cartographical records dating back to at least 1676, Angel Alley has been the setting for Samuel Pepys’ burning love affairs, a 17th century clothworking industry and an 18th century sugar refinery industry, ‘low’ lodgings for defiant Irish tenants and high-paying sex work for wayward lives, historic convenings of the Jewish radical Left, and of course the residence of the Anarchist haven, Freedom Press and Bookshop.
The spectacle of Angel Alley’s longue durée precedes its sombre, at best unassuming, appearance today. Yet, beyond first impressions, its manifold legacies of urban contestation live on. It is a theatre of competing realities; an arena for police misconduct with local vulnerable populations, opaque entanglements of land access rights, slum landlordism, institutional failure, young people’s illicit leisure activities, art programming, urban planning mysteries, radical activism, and more-than-human geographies.
Our work in the Alley, between December 2021 and April 2023, intended to scale back the initial ambitions of a brief set by Whitechapel Gallery and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH), to lay the foundations for what we called ‘Stage 0’. In order to do this, we worked closely with the ‘Angel Allies’: a unique configuration of Angel Alley stakeholders assembled by Luke Gregory-Jones and Siobhan Forshaw of Whitechapel Gallery to support the longstanding stewards of the alley, Freedom Press, and help coordinate a collaborative, care-centred response to a rise in tensions in the alley in 2021. Freedom Press, alongside Cardboard Citizens, the UK’s only homeless people’s professional theatre company, played a central role in the Angel Allies, and the group also included organisations such as the homelessness charity Providence Row, the social centre House of Annetta, and a variety of empathetic individuals and practitioners.
This was alleywork, not artwork. And as such, steered by input from the Allies and the sensitivities of the environment, we constructed a project without final outputs or public visibility. Instead, we sought to recover missing gaps in the recent history of the alley, produce tangible interventions for the alley’s most vulnerable users, facilitate difficult stakeholder conversations around land ownership and access, identify the lived experiences and psychogeographies of the alley, and build strategies between Whitechapel Gallery and Freedom Press – all done, befittingly, from the shadows. This approach attempted to recognise and negotiate a historic power inequity between Whitechapel Gallery and Freedom Press, a landscape of varying vulnerabilities, and intersecting layers of top-down and bottom-up governance in the alley. It prioritised working methods such as workshopping, interviews, ‘emotional mapping’, ‘deep hangouts’, information dissemination, archival research, and fugitive planning.
The slow recovery of the alley’s obscured recent history and a nurtured, working solidarity with Freedom Press and the Angel Allies became the project’s residue; sometimes solidifying as ‘Know Your Rights’ murals in the alley (see Pamphlet #4: Know Your Rights) or maps locating collective memory and emotion (see Pamphlet #3: “A Chaos and A Harmony”) but at other times dissolving into correspondence (see Pamphlet #1: The Utility of Overlapping Experiences) and archive diving (see Pamphlet #2: “An Important Piece of the Jigsaw”). As partial accumulations of this sediment, these four pamphlets elucidate a series of chosen relationships, histories, and present conditions in Angel Alley. Together, we hope that these documents make the case for God in the detail of allyship and alleywork, evidencing the futility of further permanent artistic intervention and physical improvements – a ‘Stage 1’ in Angel Alley – without antecedent and enduring systemic change.
Letters of Correspondence
These letters of correspondence capture the RESOLVE team’s reflections in the early stages of alleywork. They take the form of a dialogue between the gallery and an imagined external party hired to investigate the current context of the alley. Taking cues from the written exchanges we frequently found in the Whitechapel Gallery archives, the formal tone of the letters is overlaid with introspective annotations, sketches and questions that reveal how hesitation and caution guided, and sometimes inhibited, our early decision-making processes.
This pamphlet can be picked up for free at the Whitechapel Gallery, please contact publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org to reserve your copy.
