Coming to Leith Hill Place this summer.
ENCLOSURE is a four-month creative programme exploring how our rural landscape has been shaped, fought over, and accessed across the centuries. Exhibitions, events, and performances delving into belonging, displacement, and access in the Surrey Hills.
House Exhibition
OPENS 6th June
A contemporary art exhibition drawing on the history of land, community and protest. Including new work by students from the University for the Creative Arts, the exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, printmaking and installation, to explore the boundaries that protect and confine, the histories hidden just beneath the surface, and the question of who — or what — gets to belong.
T-Time Talks
Artists, historians and activists tell the stories that have shaped the English countryside.
6th June — Monument to the Vanquished Peasant with Leah Gordon
Artist, curator and writer Leah Gordon discusses her exhibition and book Common People — a history of land dispossession told from below, and the remarkable visual culture of rural resistance it inspired. BOOK HERE
13th June — Holmwood Common: Uses and Abuses through the Centuries with Kathy Atherton
Local historian Kathy Atherton traces a thousand years of one Surrey common — how it came to be, how it survived, and what its story reveals about the communities who have depended on it. BOOK HERE
22nd August — The Three Founders and the Fight for Green Space with Helen Antrobus
Historian and curator Helen Antrobus explores the fascinating lives of Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley — and how their fight to protect the English landscape led to the founding of the National Trust.
29th August — The Fight for Our Right to Enjoy the Outdoors with Kate Ashbrook
Kate Ashbrook, General Secretary of the Open Spaces Society, reflects on 161 years of campaigning for public access to paths and open spaces — and what that fight looks like today.