In 2022, we collaborated with the Youth Panel at Somers Town People’s Museum: A Space for Us, to design a new mural inspired by local history and environmental change.

The museum was set up by local residents with the aim of playing a part in sustainable development of cities and civic society, and reducing inequality. It is a space to preserve local voice and the area; to celebrate an incredible ‘radical, reformers and rebels‘ histories, to record the change now, as well as to campaign and preserve local working class heritage.

Visit the museum at 52 Phoenix Road, NW1 1ES, within the Ossulston Estate.

The Museum’s youth panel designed an artwork that speaks to the uncanny experience of changing of seasons within the city, inspired by the work of artist Gilbert Bayes.

Bayes was commissioned in the 1930s to adorn Somers Town’s new and innovative social housing projects with c.100 decorative sculptures. He was also commissioned to create a ceramic clock surrounded by the figures representing the four seasons and holding an hourglass at its centre. The clock is still located in Sidney Street Estate, Chalton Street.

The final mural designs referenced this clock, with four new seasonal characters designed to reflect contemporary relationships to the seasonal rhythms in Somers Town.

Over one sunny weekend in Somers Town local residents young and old joined professional street artists Bryony Ella and Tommy Watkins to paint the long mural design along hoarding on Phoenix Road. This took place alongside The Francis Crick Institute’s Family Day and during the London Festival of Architecture.

There was a great atmosphere, with some folk dropping in to paint smaller sections while others stayed for hours, absorbed by the activity. View photos of the installation happening below.

Images by Chris Pearson, Tommy Watkins, Ewelina Ruminska.