British Artists Lampoon ‘Absurd’ Housing Prices

With rents and mortgage rates skyrocketing in recent years, British artists are responding to the housing crisis in some surprising ways.

If you have wandered around London in recent years, you may have happened upon the city's smallest real estate. Brickflats is a project multidisciplinary artist and director Raphael Vangelis began in 2020.

'The housing situation—in London particularly, but also globally—at the time became absurd to the point of hilarity,' he said.

Vangelis instals his whimsical mini-flats in found spaces in walls across London, Barcelona, and Salzburg. His colourful tenants are contorted in cramped poses to fit in their 'cosy' (to use real estate agents' favourite euphemism) homes.

Passers-by may enjoy the installations' playfulness while also recognising their potency in the current economic climate.

Last year, full-time employees in England could expect to spend around 8.3 times their annual earnings buying a home, up from 3.5 times their annual earnings in 1997. Renters in London now spend more than half their income on housing costs, well above the 30 percent of take-home pay stipulated by global affordability standards.

'More and more people can relate to the project, and the absurd stories I hear and read about give me ample fodder and motivation to keep the project going and growing,' Vangelis said. 'In a way I've become a miniature real estate developer exploiting the housing crisis.'

Another London artist developing 'miniature real estate' is Harrison Marshall, co-founder of design studio CAUKIN. For the last six months, Marshall has been living in SKIP House, a collaboration between CAUKIN and SKIP Gallery.

SKIP House lies at the juncture of public art and performance, as Marshall has pledged to live in the skip-turned-tiny-house for one year. Located in Bermondsey, SKIP House is equipped with a bed, kitchen, and even a living area (more than can be said for many London flats), all contained by its innovative design. A portaloo is accessible nearby.

The project brings attention to excessive rent prices in London and elsewhere. As rents hit an all time high across the United Kingdom, bidding wars on rented flats or paying several months up front have become the norm to secure adequate shelter.

Other initiatives, like the Grayson Perry-backed A House for Artists, provide new possibilities for affordable creative living and working. Launched by Create London, artists and their families can live and work there at 65% of the market rate in East London.

According to a representative, 'We always hoped that — although small in scale — A House for Artists could inspire new ways for planners and housing providers to approach long-term affordable housing for creative practitioners with benefits to the wider community.'

Many other artists cannot afford a place to work due to the rising cost of living. Manchester-based artist Laura Yuile has turned to digital media while a studio is out of reach.

'The sheer abundance of property development yet the impossibility of finding genuinely affordable housing was—and is even more so now—impossible to ignore,' explains Yuile.

Her project ASSET ARREST (2015–ongoing), in which the artist and others infiltrate the luxury real estate market through organised viewings, has developed as a podcast.

'We record a conversation before and after the viewing, the aim being to publish an alternative "image" of these hidden and exclusive spaces through the means of language rather than the idealised images that usually depict them,' she says. 'The viewing itself becomes this strange performance featuring me and the estate agent, both saying what we think the other one wants to hear.'

Next, Yuile aims to interrogate foreign investment in the U.K. rental market. Her new film invites viewers to 'follow me on a trip to Hong Kong, as I go in search of my landlord.' —[O]