Forest Estate
In 2017 I travelled to Lublin, Poland to document the Adam Mickiewicz housing estate, built in 1957 to cope with the post war housing shortage. The estate was planted with trees to give people green spaces and areas of community living and socialising. 70 years on I visited to find the trees vast, established and overgrown, and spoke with the original residents, now a declining elderly population whose children have moved out to live nearer their work in the cities. I found a group of people with a deep fondness for their environment despite the lack of land management in evidence. They told me how the trees give them shade in the summer, of the wildlife that lives in them and of the memories they have of planting and caring for the saplings as they built new lives.