Making Home: Labour, memory, and belonging at the Museum of the Home

The domestic space not as a stable interior but as a site continually constructed through everyday practices, personal histories, and social conditions.

The new entrance of the Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye Museum) in Hoxton, East London. Following an £18.1 million redevelopment by Wright & Wright Architects, the museum reopened in June 2021 with 80% more exhibition space and double the previous public area. New subterranean spaces on the lower ground floor that explore the concept of "home" through various themes with the exhibition "Home Galleries".

The Museum of the Home’s permanent Home Galleries in Hoxton, London, explore what “home” means through objects and documents across the last four centuries, punctuated by a series of contemporary commissions that, avoiding any sentimental abstraction, frame home as something constructed, negotiated, disrupted, and continually remade through everyday practice.

The overall structure is thematic instead of chronological. Visitors move through sections dedicated to taste, housework, comfort, faith, and leisure, where historical furniture and documents sit next to contemporary photography and film. This interplay between past and present reveals that, while the technologies and aesthetics of domestic life transform, yet home remains closely tied to questions of relationships, status, identity, and vulnerability. Whether stable or precarious, whether a shared flat or a council property, home emerges as something shaped through emotional, physical, and economic labour, and deeply entangled with wider social and political conditions.

From a curatorial perspective, the Home Galleries reflect a broader shift away from object-centred displays towards storytelling and socially embedded approaches. Objects are presented through personal stories rather than isolated as design artefacts. Inhabitants and their daily practices are foregrounded, challenging traditional hierarchies that privilege design objects and the authority of designers or architects over lived experience. The home is presented as plural, contested, and dynamic, inviting visitors to reflect on their own experiences of domesticity rather than consume a singular historical narrative.

Home Galleries. The central glass case in the photo features Victorian Arts and Crafts style furniture and textiles. Photo by Em Fitzgerald.

That said, historical anchors still offer an essential orientation within the exhibition, confronting how certain values and experiences have transformed (or not) over time. Amongst the historical anchors is, for example, Frank Stanton’s Front Room on Islington High Street (1968). This oil painting depicts the richly decorated living room Stanton shared with his partner, Leigh Underhill, when homosexuality was still criminalised in Britain. In this context, the domestic interior functioned as necessary protection: a private sphere where identity and intimacy could exist beyond the reach of the law.

Frank Stanton’s 1968 oil painting, Front Room, Islington High Street, is a vivid window into the domestic life of the artist and his partner, Leigh Underhill. The composition is dominated by vibrant, blue-and-green flock wallpaper acquired from a passing antiques dealer, which serves as a backdrop for a carefully curated collection of antiques, including white folding shutters and a second-century Roman bust. Beyond its visual richness, the painting serves as a profound historical document of LGBTQ+ history; Stanton and Underhill shared this space during an era when homosexuality was still criminalised in Britain. In this hostile social climate, the meticulously decorated interior functioned as a necessary defensive sanctuary, providing a private sphere where their identity and intimacy could be safely expressed. Consequently, the room is staged as both a shield from the outside world and a declarative act of self-expression, capturing a pivotal moment in the gentrification of Islington and the hidden lives of its artists.

While Stanton articulates home as refuge, other works show how identity negotiates structural constraints. Mark Cowper’s Ethelburga Tower (2008) examines this through a typological study of a 17-storey brutalist residential block on Rosenau Road in Battersea. Photographing multiple living rooms from a consistent frontal position, Cowper produces a grid of structurally identical interiors animated by subtle differences. Sofas change, televisions shift, and plants accumulate. The high-rise is reframed from an impersonal mass into a vertical archive of domestic variation, where taste becomes a quiet form of resistance to anonymity.

Ethelburga Tower (2008) is a photography project by Mark Cowper that explores the interior diversity of residents living in a high-rise block in Battersea, South London. Cowper, who was a resident of the tower at the time, photographed 46 of the building's 98 flats between July 2007 and June 2008. The project highlights how individuals transform structurally identical spaces—specifically, two-bedroom split-level maisonettes—into unique homes that reflect their own tastes and personalities. Each photograph was taken from the exact same position and angle, usually in the main living room, to emphasise the contrast in decoration and layout. Despite the identical 5m x 3m living areas, spatial interpretations ranged from mock Victorian parlours and all-white Japanese-style dens to modern apartments styled after design magazines. The series serves as a typology of a culturally and ethnically blended city, showing how inhabitants of a high-density concrete structure "bend" uniform spaces to their own whims. Cowper photographed the rooms "as found," often making impromptu visits to capture the spaces without preparation from the owners. This captured genuine "moments in time," showing residents in the middle of daily activities like ironing or watching television.

Mina Salimi’s film, Shelf Life (2019), reinforces the idea that domestic display is a form of self-expression. East Londoners discuss the objects on their shelves and mantelpieces, showing that domestic display is never neutral. Amarjit displays a collection of dolls and religious icons (Sikh, Buddhist, Catholic, Jewish) born of frustration over the lack of multicultural representation during her time as one of Hackney’s first toy librarians. Farhana’s diasporic home has Bangladeshi textiles and souvenirs. Kollier shows us a salvaged Africa Centre sign that serves as a memento to displacement and bureaucratic uncertainty.

A frame from Mina Salimi’s film, Shelf Life (2019). Born in Sierra Leone and only recently granted British citizenship after decades in London, Kollier's collection of found object rescued from public space become personal markers of resilience and cultural continuity.

In the section titled In the Garden, the museum explores the garden as an extension of the home through a series of luminous lightbox portraits by photographer Sophie Verhagen (2007). The series presents Hackney elders holding photographs of their gardens, accompanied by short biographical notes that connect gardening to care, the solace of cultivating plants, and the gradual loss of autonomy in manual labour as bodies age.

One of the photos from In the Garden. The photograph was taken by Sophie Verhagen in 2007 as part of a project that documented a group of Hackney elders. The project focused on the solace and comfort these individuals found in their private gardens, even as they faced the challenges of maintaining them in old age. This specific portrait is of Beryl M. She is quoted in the exhibition with these words: "I met my husband here in 1958… When he was alive the garden was lovely because he looked after it and he would put seeds down if there was a patch and we had one side with flowers and the other with vegetables. But now I’m not able to do that.”

The section titled Love and Loss marks a shift toward rupture, absence, and responsibility through two projects by Kyna Gourley: Growing Care (2002) and Missing (2006). Growing Care presents portraits of young carers, revealing the overlap between childhood and responsibility. Missing turns instead to the domestic lives of families whose relatives have disappeared, documenting the quiet yet persistent presence of absence within the home and the prolonged uncertainty of waiting for news.

Lennicia (14) photographed by Kyna Gourley for the Growing Care series (2002). While the walls are lined with the icons of teenage life, the reality of her world involves the immense responsibility of caring for her mother who has sickle-cell anaemia. “Sometimes, it feels good to know that you're caring for somebody else. But other times you feel selfish and guilty when you want to do things for yourself. When Mum is in hospital I stay with different people, so I feel like I'm coming and going.I worry about her when she gets really ill. Once she was so bad she couldn't remember my name – it was like she was in a coma. Now she's bad so I stay with her most of the time.

Across the galleries, family duties, cleaning, organising, and preserving memories are presented as activities that shape interiors as profoundly as architecture or design. Comfort, stability, and identity appear not as inherent qualities of interiors but as outcomes of ongoing effort. This perspective aligns with feminist approaches that recognise domestic labour as an often invisible yet foundational structure.

This critique is sharpened by the inclusion of works from the See Red Women’s Workshop (1974–1990), a silkscreen-printing collective established to support the Women’s Liberation Movement. Working from the premise that “the personal is political,” the group used humour and direct visual language to expose sexism, gender stereotyping, homophobia, and racism. Their poster Capitalism Also Depends on Domestic Labour (1974), for example, depicts the home as part of a factory production line, showing women performing different household tasks. The image reframes housework as unpaid labour that sustains capitalist production, arguing that the traditional role of the housewife functioned as a mechanism through which women’s work was controlled and exploited.

"Capitalism Also Depends On Domestic Labour," was created in 1975 by the See Red Women’s Workshop, a London-based feminist collective. The poster is a cornerstone of socialist feminist art, designed to challenge the idea that "work" only happens in factories and offices. It highlights the "invisible" labor—cooking, cleaning, childcare, and emotional support—that women perform at home to sustain the workforce and, by extension, the capitalist system. The design uses industrial imagery, like the conveyor belt and factory chimneys, to show that the "Home Sweet Home" is essentially a subsidiary of the factory. See Red aimed to help women recognize that their domestic struggles were not personal failures but a systemic form of exploitation.

Ultimately, the exhibition does not attempt to define home but to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory, meanings simultaneously. The Home Galleries demonstrate that home is made, unmade, and remade through acquisition, cultivation, prayer, play, and care, as well as through migration, illness, and economic change. It is a lived negotiation between architecture and identity, a site where the world is most intimately negotiated. Domestic spaces are shown to absorb social transformations while simultaneously acting as sites where identity is performed and reconfigured.

Seen through this lens, the act of “making home” becomes less about decoration or ownership and more about creating conditions for belonging, however temporary or fragile those conditions might be.

---