Of Bombs and Utopias: Two Exhibitions
Two art shows in London bring to mind Orwell's writing about housing
Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art, IWM London, 20 March to 1 November 2026
Estates: Fragile Utopia by Pavel Otdelnov, Lewisham Art House, 9 to 20 April, 2026
There are two exhibitions on in London that ought to be considered together. Beauty and Destruction at the Imperial War Museum immerses viewers in the ruins and ongoing menace of the Blitz; Pavel Otdelnov’s Estates: Fragile Utopia offers a Russian perspective on the idealistic, flawed housing solutions London’s architects reached in the long aftermath of Nazi bombing.
George Orwell provides an obvious bridge between the two. Writing from a bombed-out London for his Tribune column in February 1944, he made a case for a new approach to housing:
After the war there is going to be a severe housing shortage in this country, and we shall not overcome it unless we resort to prefabrication. If we stick to our traditional building methods the necessary houses will take decades to produce, and the discomfort and misery this will lead to, the patching-up of blitzed premises and filthy slums, the rent rackets and overcrowding, are easy to foresee.
Beauty and Destruction give a vivid sense of what wartime and postwar London was up against. It begins with an epigraph from Kenneth Clark—“bomb damage is in itself picturesque”—and cites his role as chair of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, which “compelled or commissioned” artists to produce a visual record of Britain throughout the war.
Many of the showpiece images are bombed variations on postcard images: The Houses of Parliament on Fire, May 1941 by Leonard Rosoman, A Flying Bomb over Tower Bridge, 1944 by Frederick T W Cook, and St. Paul’s from Cannon Street, 14th May 1941 by Ernest Boye Uden (which shows damage not to the cathedral, but to the warehouses in the foreground).
Then there are the more everyday scenes: two paintings, by Ruskin Spear and Joan Vernon Connew, show streets darkened according the blackout regulations. There is a scene of a wrecked barrage balloon on the tracks of Dulwich Station by A.M. Weston, of sandbags in Bethnal Green by Anthony Gross, and of incendiary bombs coming down over a suburb by Henry Carr.
Some of the paintings show “picturesque” ruins. Eliot Hodgkin’s The Haberdasher’s Hall, 8th May 1945, depicts the remains of a 1660s building destroyed by fire in 1940. Hodgkin was fond of the rosebay willowherb, also known as “bomb weed,” that grew over the ruins. His sunlit image recalls Orwell’s 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, in which the author celebrated the first spring after the war:
Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road. There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.
The most memorable images are those dealing with destroyed homes and people seeking shelter. John Minton’s ink-on-paper image A Town Destroyed, Poplar (1941) is warped, surrealistic, nightmarish. His Looking Down on a Bombed Building by the Thames, Poplar (1941) offers an almost Escher-like bird’s eye view that draws the eye deep into the post-inferno.
Priscilla Thornycroft’s 1939-1941 ink drawings of people sheltering on the Underground leave the viewer wondering which of her protagonists were sheltering from bombs and which of them had no homes to go back to.
Pavel Otdelnov, a Russian artist who moved to London from Moscow in 2022, and whose body of work contains powerful visual metaphors for Russia’s modern history and the war in Ukraine has, over the past year, explored his interest in London’s imaginative postwar housing projects: the Aylesbury Estate, Thamesmead, and Robin Hood Gardens, among others.
All of these projects were, as Orwell feared, realised decades after the end of the war, with residents not moving in until the 1960s and 1970s (long after Orwell’s death in 1950). They were original rather than prefabricated designs, but they do evoke, to some degree, the type of housing he hoped to see:
[T]he dislike of flats will somehow have to be exorcised. If people are going to live in big towns they must either live in flats or put up with overcrowding: there is no way out of that. A big block of flats, covering only an acre or two of ground, will contain as many people as live in a small country town, and give them as much room-space as they would have in houses. Rebuild London in big blocks of flats, and there could be light and air for everybody, and room for green spaces, allotments, playgrounds.
Otdelnov’s paintings interpret the buildings as optimistic, if ethereal, works.
The introductory image, of the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, positions the viewer at the bottom of the building looking straight up at an imaginary Soviet-style slogan attached to the roof before vivid blue sky: “A Better Life For All.” (A typical slogan on a Soviet building might have read, “Peace, Labour, May!”).
Otdelnov’s painting of Thamesmead, an estate that borders the boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley, looks like a version of an architect’s promotional drawing with a mother pushing two children in a push-chair, only there’s a ghostly element: they look fuzzy and fading, like figures in a timed exposure.
His rendering of architect Geoffrey Jellicoe presenting his 1960 model for Motopia, an unrealised scheme involving rooftop highways and ground-level green spaces, looks similarly spectral.
There’s a dark edge to the show as well. Otdelnov’s image of the architect’s model for Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar shows it against a black background with a mysterious hand entering the frame to jab at the central green space/playground with a red pointer. The hand doesn’t look so altruistic; indeed, one could imagine that it belongs to a Big Brother-like giant or malign Gulliver, who is cracking his whip at the little people inside and telling them how to live.
(The real Robin Hood Gardens was demolished between 2017 and 2025).
A small frame accompanying the main Thamesmead image shows spectral versions of Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange, a film that took on an infamous reputation in Britain thanks to tabloid headlines drawing tenuous connections between real crimes and the film. The painting reads as both an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s use of the estate as a location for the film, and an acknowledgement of the crime—and sometimes media-driven fear of crime—that dimmed the appeal of these optimistic projects.
A full-frame painting of Aylesbury Estate as viewed from Burgess Park looks gritty and semi-derelict, in line with the building’s current state.
An image of three residential blocks with the Soviet-style slogan “Glory to Labour” (which could also refer to Britain’s postwar Labour Party) being demolished brings to mind the Russian military’s bombing of inhabited residential blocks across Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin’s aggression has now displaced a third of the population.
One wonders if Orwell could see the dystopian potential within his idealistic vision of 1944. The answer is yes, of course, and it manifested in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the form of Winston Smith’s grim residence, Victory Mansions.
The parallels with the ill-fated estates that came into being after Orwell’s death are in the little details: the glass doors, the broken lift, the fact Winston’s flat is seven flights up—about three more than a typical pre-war council house, and the same as the smaller half of the Robin Hood Gardens complex.
The reader can imagine that Victory Mansions was once a visionary modernist project, perhaps predating the novel’s regime, but that its modernity was of a kind—too optimistic, demanding, and ultimately naive—for the future that awaited it.
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