You’ll get two wonderful visual treats for the (free) price of one if you visit the Two Temple Place gallery by the Embankment, with both the exhibition and venue vying for your attention.
Set in a lavish, Grade II listed, Neo-Gothic building, Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen looks to champion contemporary artists from working-class backgrounds, while also encouraging audiences to reappraise the work of underappreciated 20th-century figures such as Beryl Cook and Monica Ross.
About the venue
The building, designed after the Early Elizabethan style, was constructed for William Waldorf Astor in 1895 and consists of two floors and a lower ground floor.
It is built entirely of Portland stone, with the interior in the style of French Renaissance.
It is now managed and preserved by The Bulldog Trust, a charitable organization, and is hired out for personal and functions. It opened to the public as a gallery in October 2011.
About the exhibition
Art has a class problem. Historically, the representation of working-class life has been filtered through the reductive and distorting lens of the middle-class gaze.
Working-class subjects have been under- or misrepresented, stereotyped or sensationalised. Working-class artists have been misinterpreted, pigeonholed, or overlooked altogether.
And, for anyone looking for a career in the art world, a working-class background can present a significant barrier to entry.
Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen, a major new exhibition at Two Temple Place, seeks to explore and address these inequities head-on.
By celebrating and reevaluating working-class representation in postwar Britain the show sets out to overturn long-standing misrepresentations, enrich limited and limiting narratives, and trigger fresh thinking about the lives of working-class people, showcasing more authentic and nuanced depictions of working-class experiences and identities.
Conceived and curated by Samantha Manton, the exhibition includes more than 150 art works of painting, photography, film, sculpture and ceramics, exclusively from working-class artists and those from working-class backgrounds.
In keeping with Two Temple Place’s role as a major London platform for the UK’s regional collections, the exhibition brings together a wide-ranging body of work from museums and galleries, archives, artists’ estates and contemporary artists up and down the country.
Here’s a selection of photos of the exhibition, and of the venue. They’re both bloody gorgeous!
It was great to see the work of Brixton photographer Neil Kenlock included in the exhibition.
This splendid weather vane atop the building represents the caravel Santa Maria in which Columbus sailed to America.
More info
Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen
25 January to 20 April 2025
Free admission
2 Temple Place, London WC2R 3BD
Tube – Temple: 2mins, Blackfriars/Embankment: 10mins, Waterloo/Charing Cross: 15mins
Opening hours:
Monday: CLOSED
Tuesday: 11am – 6pm
Wednesday: 11am – 9pm
Thursday: 11am – 6pm
Friday: 11am – 6pm
Saturday: 11am – 6pm
Sunday: 11am – 4.30pm