Developers, up yours ! Anti-gentrification postcards – in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/apr/25/developers-up-yours-gram-hilleards-anti-gentrification-postcards-in-pic
Red telephone boxes, sunlit Beefeater parades, smiling royals: London’s postcards can be misleading. South London artist Gram Hilleard has created a series of postcards showing the city as he sees it: grey skies, soulless skyscrapers and boarded-up shops. The series, entitled Developers Up Yours, attacks the capital’s rapid gentrification. “My family’s been in this area of London for the last 200 years,” says Hilleard, “but now the indigenous Londoners have been moved out. The city is so overwhelmed by money that Londoners themselves don’t count any more.
London’s postcard image has been one of palaces, Kings and Queens. Artist Gram Hilleard counter-blasts this ‘accepted’ reality with an exhibition of postcard provocations that seemingly better reflect the Capital’s actuality: the language of ever authoritarian developers, the wanton language of commerce and the epic loss of unique places with seeming disregard.
“Under the reign of the peroxide clown’” Hilleard explains, “London has been redeveloped like never before. The poor are moved out, whilst councils drop their planning regulations, hipsters are encouraged to gentrify, before they’re replaced with overseas buyers. Eventually swathes of the city become uninhabited ghost areas with no citizens, no people. Why and for who?”. ” The postcards are at the Offsite gallery, London WC1, until 31 May. 
