Salvage Brutalism: Class, Culture and Dispossession in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Fragment of Robin Hood Gardens

This is an empirical study of a unique museum artefact, a whole apartment of a demolished council estate, salvaged by the Victoria and Albert Museum for permanent display at the new V&A East, where it will be a lynchpin in the culture-industries quarter of east London’s vast post-Olympics regeneration. World-leading in its originality, significance, and rigour, the article zooms in and out through the artefactual features of the exhibit and pressing social problems in class, museums, the housing crisis, public art, and urban regeneration. The article challenges dominant ideas of museum neutrality, heritage, and culture-led regeneration, showing how the exhibit’s ‘museum effects’, as the article calls them, serve to obscure the crisis of housing affordability and the devastating social impact of the estate-demolition programme. The article locates the exhibit within a trend in the public art of regeneration that it names ‘council-house art’, a theory created and used by the article to study how the exhibit shapes and is shaped by working-class dispossession and displacement. Part of a journal special issue on ‘art and class today’, the article develops an original and trans-disciplinary methodology for studying the exhibit’s class qualities and effects, grasping it as a complex and moving assemblage of artefactual, institutional, visual, and discursive parts, variously manifest in the exhibit’s different sites of instantiation and reception.