Kensal House, London, 1937, shot by clandestine communist Edith Tudor-Hart who was blacklisted for her political activism
Kensal House in London, designed in 1937 by a team of architects led by Edwin Maxwell Fry and social reformer Elizabeth Denby, was a pioneering social housing project in inter-war Britain. Among the photographs taken at its completion, one group stands out for its slightly unconventional approach – more akin to social documentary – the author was Austrian photographer Edith Tudor-Hart. Born Edith Suschitzky, she studied photography at the Bauhaus; her Jewish heritage, social activism and political leanings prompted her to leave her native Vienna for London in 1933, when she married British doctor Alex Tudor-Hart. In Britain she used the camera to document social injustice, but also collaborated with architects such as Ernö Goldfinger and took photographs of the Isokon flats under construction. Tudor-Hart was an anti-fascist and clandestine member of the Communist party; her work was consequently blacklisted by the Ministry of Information and she was eventually forced to give up photography.