What the state treated as radical was often, for those living it, the basics of a stable life and an attempt to escape oppression. Though their alternatives were often precarious and sometimes short lived.<\/p>\n
Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK<\/a>, a new exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, explores how people, places and ideas connect. The show aligns with author Ursula Le Guin\u2019s critique of history by questioning whose stories get told and who tells them. <\/p>\n In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction<\/a>, Le Guin<\/a> argues that early human history is usually told as a hunting story, centred on a man with a spear bringing down a mammoth. \u201cThat story not only has action, it has a hero,\u201d she explains. For this hero, \u201cthe proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there\u201d. Meanwhile, the people gathering food are sidelined. <\/p>\n Le Guin argued that the first human tool was probably a container used for gathering, rather than a weapon. Building on this idea, she suggests that stories can also function like carrier bags, gathering multiple people and ideas together rather than focusing on a single hero. <\/p>\n Earthly Paradise at the William Morris Gallery follows this thinking. The show explores how the home, which Le Guin calls \u201canother, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people\u201d, has served as a space to challenge societal norms since the late 18th century. Indeed, Le Guin explicitly lists \u201cthe museum\u201d as one of her essential containers, alongside \u201cthe medicine bundle\u201d and \u201cthe shrine\u201d.<\/p>\n The lower gallery focuses on domestic objects and unconventional ways of living. Exhibition labels and press materials highlight how money and class enabled these lifestyle experiments. <\/p>\n Many radical domestic projects relied on substantial wealth, including Morris\u2019s own, which was funded by his father\u2019s investments in the Devon Great Consols copper mine \u2013 a venture built on far from utopian working conditions.<\/p>\n A 1947 photograph shows artist Madge Gill surrounded by fabric in her East Ham house. Nearby, photos of Prospect Cottage<\/a>, Derek Jarman\u2019s Dungeness home following his HIV diagnosis, sit alongside images of 575 Wandsworth Road in south London, created by Kenyan-born poet Khadambi Asalache<\/a>. After buying the house in 1981, Asalache spent 19 years covering its walls with hand-cut fretwork from reclaimed pine. Together, these images show the home as a refuge, nurture and creative space.<\/p>\n \n Upstairs, the focus shifts to radical housing born of precarity and necessity. Fusions Jameen<\/a> was a Black-led self-build cooperative in Lewisham. Members contributed over 1,000 hours of manual labour for discounted tenancies. It\u2019s an arrangement the group\u2019s chair Tim Oshodi termed \u201csweat equity\u201d. Oshodi notes in the exhibition catalogue: \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t build out of greed; you\u2019re building out of need.\u201d<\/p>\n The show traces connections from Dani\u00e8le Lamarche\u2019s 1980s photographs<\/a> of Bangladeshi squatters in east London to a new commission by British artist Delaine Le Bas. Drawing on her Romani heritage, Le Bas combines painting, performance photography and activist documents into a large collage. <\/p>\n One featured photograph shows a toy caravan above a handwritten note: \u201cIf I was Sindy would you love me more?\u201d Here, the Sindy doll represents conventional domestic ideals, questioning whether conformity would gain Romani people their denied rights. While children view toy caravans as symbols of freedom, the rightwing press often frames them with prejudice.<\/p>\n Sunil Gupta\u2019s mid-1990s digital photo-montage Trespass 2<\/a> is set in the London home he shared with his partners. Bringing his work indoors into the kitchen, Gupta traces how a kitchen makeover by a third party contributed to his relationship\u2019s demise. He layers images of daily domestic life with gay iconography and south Asian cultural artefacts, such as a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook cover. The work highlights, in Gupta\u2019s words, \u201chow a domestic space might also be a contested cultural site\u201d.<\/p>\n By bringing these disparate struggles together, Earthly Paradise highlights the diverse experiences shaping contemporary life. It demonstrates how modern living frequently echoes historical ways of life, albeit under evolving social and political conditions.<\/p>\n The radical experiments of the lower gallery, several of which foregrounded socialism, now find an echo in the utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n Tech billionaires often present their tools as engines of collective abundance. This is typified by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman\u2019s promises of \u201cshared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today\u201d<\/a>. What this tech-utopian vision routinely leaves out, however, is the question of for whom this wealth is actually produced, and at whose expense.<\/p>\n That promise of emancipation through technology is made to everyone and to nowhere in particular. By contrast, every collective action depicted in Earthly Paradise is rooted in a particular place.<\/p>\nA container for people<\/h2>\n
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\n Why the Dungeness landscape is so inspirational for writers and artists<\/a>
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\nSomewhere in particular<\/h2>\n
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