VAUGHAN MELZER Photographer

As a child in the 1940s, my single-parent mother and I were housed in rooms of large Chelsea houses under the care of the local Council. My mother talked a lot about housing need and how council housing was a good thing and how we should value it.​

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Returning to a London bedsit from Leeds university in 1969, I signed onto Haringey's Council Housing list, and five years later Haringey Council surprised me with the offer of a flat on a single-block estate of 138 mixed-size flats close to Haringey Station. Friends and social workers gave worried grunts, saying that Chettle Court was a den of iniquity and other unflattering epithets. Though nervous, I moved in, to what has become a lifelong, safe and loved home, and with many warm and lovely neighbours.

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It is this prejudice about council (euphemistically called ‘Social’) housing that the following photographic projects seek to dispel. Some of this work was funded with grants; some I funded fully myself.

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Photographing the interiors of people's homes was one of my earliest projects. I was fascinated to see how we each put our own personality

onto our homes making a same space look and feel quite different for

each home.