Artist Preserves the Aylesbury Estate Through Wool Paintings and Concrete Fragments

Harriet Mena Hill, a South East London artist of nearly four decades, has created over 150 wool paintings and a series of concrete-fragment paintings to document and honor the Aylesbury Estate, a 1960s-70s public housing complex of 11,000 residents now undergoing phased demolition since 2020. Her Soft Concrete series reframes the estate—historically portrayed in media as violent and hopeless—as a place of living community and shared memory.