I walk through a mostly empty courtyard to an 8 story, yellow brick, new-build apartment building in the eastern-most corner of the London’s Royal Docks. We could be anywhere in the city. It’s part of a recently completed large-scale residential development which has become the norm across the docks. 

Thomas and William McLucas’ “Post-Post-Industrial” archives the nearby Beckton Gasworks site as a tribute to a defunct industrial site as part of Newham Heritage Month. The site has endured change across time: as gasworks, as a post-industrial wasteland and now as an empty plot, primed for redevelopment. The gasworks have always had a presence in the brothers’ lives having grown up nearby in a former gas worker’s cottage. 

Whilst there is an austerity to the setup with small archive photographs neatly grouped on grey board, there is also a sporadic quality to the exhibition with photographs, videos and found objects dotted throughout the space. With the archive photographs and documents, the site’s past is recalled. With the 3D scans, found objects, casts, and video recordings, we receive the site in its vacant state. Within the gallery housing these objects, we are pointed to the future of the Beckton Gasworks site. A pane of glass curtain-walling, leftover from construction and propped up on pallets even becomes part of the setup. 

The artists’ affection to the gasworks is clear. In a film showing footage of the vacant site, the “art” of gas-making is described in excruciating detail and reproductions of ornamental features of the gasworks place particular emphasis on how these were once the pride of industrial Britain. It is impossible to wholly document the 30-acre site. In this exhibition we experience it in tender fragments. The casts of the ground are particularly intriguing after learning how they were made through the repeated melting of gelatin in the brothers’ family home, a material chosen specifically because it is non-toxic. Here, the contaminated ground is abstracted, made a sculptural object and lifted onto a plinth. Ultimately, the exhibition sees Britain’s industrial history as something to be cherished despite its rapid and forceful erasure.

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