Source: The Conversation – UK
Long before Silicon Valley promised frictionless, universal solutions to how we live, people in the UK were re-imagining domestic life and the conditions of living from the ground up.
These forms of radical living, whether individual choices or wider movements, were born of dissent, necessity and the desire to live in ways society otherwise sought to restrict. This includes expressions of sexuality, religion, politics and identity. Some began as attempts to create households that escaped prevailing conditions of oppression. Others pursued utopian ideals or organised political campaigns enacted through the very conditions of everyday life.
What the state treated as radical was often, for those living it, the basics of a stable life and an attempt to escape oppression. Though their alternatives were often precarious and sometimes short lived.
Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK, a new exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, explores how people, places and ideas connect. The show aligns with author Ursula Le Guin’s critique of history by questioning whose stories get told and who tells them.
In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Le Guin argues that early human history is usually told as a hunting story, centred on a man with a spear bringing down a mammoth. “That story not only has action, it has a hero,” she explains. For this hero, “the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there”. Meanwhile, the people gathering food are sidelined.
Le Guin argued that the first human tool was probably a container used for gathering, rather than a weapon. Building on this idea, she suggests that stories can also function like carrier bags, gathering multiple people and ideas together rather than focusing on a single hero.
Earthly Paradise at the William Morris Gallery follows this thinking. The show explores how the home, which Le Guin calls “another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people”, has served as a space to challenge societal norms since the late 18th century. Indeed, Le Guin explicitly lists “the museum” as one of her essential containers, alongside “the medicine bundle” and “the shrine”.
A container for people
The lower gallery focuses on domestic objects and unconventional ways of living. Exhibition labels and press materials highlight how money and class enabled these lifestyle experiments.
Many radical domestic projects relied on substantial wealth, including Morris’s own, which was funded by his father’s investments in the Devon Great Consols copper mine – a venture built on far from utopian working conditions.
A 1947 photograph shows artist Madge Gill surrounded by fabric in her East Ham house. Nearby, photos of Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s Dungeness home following his HIV diagnosis, sit alongside images of 575 Wandsworth Road in south London, created by Kenyan-born poet Khadambi Asalache. After buying the house in 1981, Asalache spent 19 years covering its walls with hand-cut fretwork from reclaimed pine. Together, these images show the home as a refuge, nurture and creative space.
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Upstairs, the focus shifts to radical housing born of precarity and necessity. Fusions Jameen was a Black-led self-build cooperative in Lewisham. Members contributed over 1,000 hours of manual labour for discounted tenancies. It’s an arrangement the group’s chair Tim Oshodi termed “sweat equity”. Oshodi notes in the exhibition catalogue: “You shouldn’t build out of greed; you’re building out of need.”
The show traces connections from Danièle Lamarche’s 1980s photographs of Bangladeshi squatters in east London to a new commission by British artist Delaine Le Bas. Drawing on her Romani heritage, Le Bas combines painting, performance photography and activist documents into a large collage.
One featured photograph shows a toy caravan above a handwritten note: “If I was Sindy would you love me more?” Here, the Sindy doll represents conventional domestic ideals, questioning whether conformity would gain Romani people their denied rights. While children view toy caravans as symbols of freedom, the rightwing press often frames them with prejudice.
Sunil Gupta’s mid-1990s digital photo-montage Trespass 2 is set in the London home he shared with his partners. Bringing his work indoors into the kitchen, Gupta traces how a kitchen makeover by a third party contributed to his relationship’s demise. He layers images of daily domestic life with gay iconography and south Asian cultural artefacts, such as a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook cover. The work highlights, in Gupta’s words, “how a domestic space might also be a contested cultural site”.
By bringing these disparate struggles together, Earthly Paradise highlights the diverse experiences shaping contemporary life. It demonstrates how modern living frequently echoes historical ways of life, albeit under evolving social and political conditions.
Somewhere in particular
The radical experiments of the lower gallery, several of which foregrounded socialism, now find an echo in the utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley.
Tech billionaires often present their tools as engines of collective abundance. This is typified by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s promises of “shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today”. What this tech-utopian vision routinely leaves out, however, is the question of for whom this wealth is actually produced, and at whose expense.
That promise of emancipation through technology is made to everyone and to nowhere in particular. By contrast, every collective action depicted in Earthly Paradise is rooted in a particular place.
In the exhibition’s press release, curator Hadrian Garrard states that the show examines how the home acts as a site for challenging societal norms and explores “what the possibilities are for this in today’s world”.
That ambition could readily extend to a digital exhibition space. Rather than reinforcing online hate and conspiracy, a digital gallery could demonstrate how networked platforms foster collective organisation and grassroots change. Without the possibilities such counter-spaces afford, our homes will increasingly be shaped by Silicon Valley’s radical ideologies – leaving us with ways of living we never actually chose.
Peter Ainsworth is affiliated with UAL LCC
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/19/earthly-paradise-at-the-william-morris-museum-asks-how-we-can-live-radically-inside-our-homes/