RIBA North, Liverpool
Review for Building Design, June 2026
“If we destroy this people, we’re destroying a little part of ourselves. The part we kill is not just show and empty flamboyance, but independence and the spirit of freedom.” This was the BBC voiceover to a 1969 documentary, which narrates a short film by Romany artist, Liza Mortimer called Take Us As We Are. Her work is part of RIBA North’s new exhibition, Roaming Britain: Gypsy and Traveller Homes.
The film shows black and white archive footage of Mortimer’s great-grandmother, Minty Smith and the interior of a spotless caravan, with three smartly dressed women chatting between fluted glass and shelves of Crown Derby porcelain. This rare glimpse into a lost world is cut with footage of contemporary writer, Damien Le Bas trying to conjure it back by staring intensely into the camera while lighting a cigarette on a caravan step or wringing his hands next to a fire in a metal grille.
New photography in the RIBA collection
Curator, Lauren Alderton talks me through photographs by Romani artist, Corrina Eastwood, a series commissioned for the Roaming Britain book and now part of RIBA’s permanent collection. They highlight the inventive use of materials on Eastwood’s family’s council-run site, such as caravan steps made of a stack of pallets wrapped in astroturf. There’s a ‘shed’, an improvised timber lean-to strung with cloths and pots. Each image is paired with a photograph of thematchstick boxes that her father made in prison.
She writes about the sheds as “structures built to contain family life”. This could be a universal definition of home, couldn’t it. Aesthetically, her pictures are a long way from the Douglas Fir benches on terracotta tiles we’re used to seeing in the design press. What comes through in her pictures is home defined by family and utility, rather than tidy joinery…
Read the full piece: Building Design
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