Making Places, Changing People
In 1891, sixteen-year-old George Edward Clay moved from Lancashire to Darnley Road, Gravesend, to work for surveyor / master builder Adolphus Rayner, formerly of Leyton, London, at nearby St James Road. He returned to Lancashire to qualify as an architect, but eventually settled in Gravesend, raised a family and started what would become the George Clay Partnership in 1904.
Throughout the 20th Century, the fortunes of the practice mirrored that of the town, encompassing two World Wars, the Great Depression, the popularisation of cinema, an explosives factory, the birth of the paper industry, growth of Gravesend and Rochester ( where a second office opened in the ‘50s ), the Post-War housing and school building booms, a second generation of Clays, a succession of partners, the collapse of the paper and ship building industries, and the ‘90s recession.
In 2000, Kasan Goh and Camilla Prizeman moved their family to Darnley Road, to take over the George Clay Partnership from Richard Fullbrook. A decade passed before they arranged a reunion of ex-Clay alumni.
The goodwill and the wealth of reminisces this unleashed inspired them to partner with Design South East and secure HLF funding for a local history project Making Places, Changing People.
The project explores a century through the eyes of a practice, using archive photographs, documents, drawings, projects and oral accounts stretching back as far as records, archive material and memory can reach. We are interested in the relationship between history, community, architectural practice, and the places and stories this engenders.
Funding enabled the training of volunteers in oral history interview and cataloguing skills. We documented and recorded the visual archive and supplemented it with oral history interviews with local residents and retired Clay associates and partners. The work culminated in an exhibition, videos, archive and making places, changing people, a free community resource and digital version of the exhibition.