‘To Make Britain Concrete Minded’: Peter László Peri’s <em>London Life in Concrete</em> (1938)

In 1938, sculptor Peter László Peri staged a solo exhibition in London titled London Life in Concrete, a selection of sculptural works fabricated out of concrete. Contemporaneous critics enthused about Peri’s experiments with the exciting new medium. Multi-coloured relief works, set on a high ledge that encircled the room, showed scenes of everyday life in the capital: figures of shoppers, builders, and commuters arrayed across flattened backgrounds. The simple format of these sculptures belied the political entanglements of Peri’s chosen material. Rough finishes typify Peri’s concrete works, both those exhibited in London Life in Concrete and those later commissioned to decorate a post-war public housing complex in London. Their explicitly modelled surfaces present the medium as one tied to human labour and equate the work of builder and of artist. London Life in Concrete was sponsored by the Cement and Concrete Association (CCA), a new trade group established to promote the use of concrete in building projects in Britain. This paper traces the history of Peri’s concrete sculptures and the relationship between Peri and the CCA. It reveals the role that Peri’s work played in the commercial project to establish concrete as the architectural material best suited—both practically and ideologically—to the homes of the British working class.