The Ballad of Peckham Rye presents Mark Lewis's work Children's Games, Heygate Estate (2002). Children’s Games, Heygate Estate highlights the gap between utopian visions and everyday realities. The work takes the form of an uninterrupted travelling shot, 7 minutes and 21 seconds in length, in which the camera moves along the elevated walkways of South London’s now-demolished Heygate Estate. The camera glides around a complex network of these 'streets in the sky', weaving between stairwells and tight corners, swooping with the seamless movement of a computer game.
"Commissioned almost a decade before the demolition of the estate, the work allows us to reflect not only upon the historical layers of urban architectural design, but also the underlying social principles and subsequent state-led gentrification to have informed it. The rapid progress in the redevelopment of Elephant & Castle has dramatically altered the physical environment as well as the local social fabric. Buried deep underneath new concrete plazas, shimmering facades and manicured pocket gardens, the memories of the Heygate Estate linger. The past may be out of sight, but through an act of remembering we can see beyond these contemporary superstructures to a space where alternate visions and realities might still be possible."
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Children's Games, Heygate Estate by Mark Lewis was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Cornerhouse in 2002, and later acquired by the Arts Council Collection. The work is on loan from Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.
