In 1952, a film called The Happy Family was released. It was filmed in 1951, just as the Festival of Britain site was being constructed. In its opening sequence, the camera pans across the South Bank, revealing in flickering greyscale the very same location that Kossoff began painting that year. Riverside Building Site (1951, Ferens Art Gallery) is one of his earliest adventures into painting the process of reconstruction, and it marks the beginning of a decade-long engagement with subjects such as that depicted in City Building Site. ‘City Building Site’ was a title which Kossoff gave to several works from this time. Another is in the Royal Collection of Art (RCA) collection and dates to 1956. He donated it to the RCA when he completed his studies there, clearly identifying himself as an artist with these subjects of reconstruction. Though he was to spend the rest of his career working in London, the city must have felt especially new and vital at this time. Following life as an evacuee in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and after a period of service in the 2nd Battalion Jewish Brigade between 1945 and 1948, the city of his birth would have seemed like a different place to the one in which he grew up. It was the fascination with something familiar, yet something so entirely new, which prompted Kossoff to start painting these scenes. Though London did not fully recover from the Blitz until the late 1960s, it was not so long before the rubble was cleared and rebuilding commenced. By 1961, the year in which Kossoff painted City Building Site, many sites were advancing with groundworks. New foundations had to be laid and large steel stanchions were erected around the edge of building sites to stop them from caving in. These stanchions were a source of visual fascination for Kossoff, and he used them as an armature around which to compose his paintings. This style of composition is especially apparent in City Building Site, which is arranged around a sequence of muscular verticals and diagonals. Much like the building site itself, the painting has an architectural structure to it. The long sweeping stanchions and girders are used to anchor thick waves of paint, which cascade outwards in intervening passages. The great mass of paint employed in this work is in sympathy with the vast excavations required for the building site’s groundworks. Looking down into a cavernous subterranean world, City Building Site does more than represent a glimpse into the bowels of post-war London. It speaks of the material conditions and the scale of architectural regeneration in the decades after the Second World War. To make such richly communicative art, Kossoff took the old art of painting and skilfully repurposed it, responding to the new and unstable conditions of the post-war era.