Creative History of Tottenham Interpretation Project

The panelled cafe counter and the decorative carvings in the York stone floor of the cafe were created by Sarabande artists and alumni as part of the Creative History of Tottenham Interpretation Project in response to the history and past lives of the building as well as its place in the surrounding area.

This project was made possible by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players we support projects that connect people and communities to heritage. Our vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. From historic buildings, our industrial legacy and the natural environment, to collections, traditions, stories and more.

Heritage can be anything from the past that people value and want to pass on to future generations. We believe in the power of heritage to ignite the imagination, offer joy and inspiration, and to build pride in place and connection to the past.

Stone Carving

Sculptor Jo Grogan initially took inspiration from the fragments of historic wallpaper found at 808-812 High Road, prompting her to think about wallpaper as a signifier of the continual reshaping of the house by its inhabitants, speaking of a design language influenced by Huguenot craftsmanship and a moment when migration and craft were shaping domestic identity in Tottenham (the spread of decorative aspiration beyond London’s centre).

Jo’s research at Bruce Grove archives led her to consider Tottenham’s rural history, as well as the textile traditions carried into the area by its more recent migrant communities -  particularly Kurdish and Turkish communities - with Kilim weaving particularly shaping the conceptual direction of the work.

"This stone remembers the quiet makers. It carries the faded ornament of a Georgian parlour and the woven geometry of Kurdish and Turkish exile. One crafted to impress, the other to preserve — both held in the hands of people rarely seen in the records. These are their imprints, their echoes, stitched into the surface of a shared place.

My carving traces a hidden lineage between the refinement of 18th-century domestic interiors and the textile traditions brought to Tottenham by later migrant communities. The base pattern is drawn from an 18th-century design by Anna Maria Garthwaite, a Huguenot silk designer who worked in Spitalfields. Beneath it emerges a second pattern: fragments of kilim motifs traditionally woven by women across Kurdish, Turkish, and Eastern European cultures. These motifs speak of displacement, resilience, memory, and craft passed quietly through generations.

The work honours the unseen makers — decorators, weavers, women, refugees — who shaped Tottenham’s heritage without ever being fully recorded. It invites viewers to see the city’s layers not just as history, but as intertwined legacies of survival, beauty, labour, and belonging.”

Working with York stone for the first time, artist Tom Hemingway reshaped his own artistic practice to draw on the building’s origins in Georgian London, a city heavily marked by striking moral and economic disparity. Learning from other artists and craftspeople, including fellow Sarabande resident Jo Grogan, Tom translated the fluid immediacy of drawing into a medium shaped by resistance, weight and permanence. 

“London at the time was expanding rapidly - an age of refinement and aspiration, but also of widening divides between prosperity and hardship, abundance and scarcity. My carving offers a bountiful yet subtly treacherous harvest of organic goods, where rounded unusual organic forms and flora seem to both caress and kill one another, an image of plenty edged with danger. This tension echoes the contradictions of the Georgian era: surfaces of elegance overlaying harsh realities.

In developing the imagery, I also looked to the flourishing haberdasheries, imported luxuries and trade networks that shaped the area’s heritage, as well as Sir Hugh Smith’s history as a trade merchant. These threads of global exchange and local craft fed directly into the symbolism of the work - symbols of abundance that speak to both opportunity and exploitation.

Visually, the carving nods to the graceful lines of Georgian artists such as Joshua Reynolds and to the classical motifs once present in the house’s decorative scheme. By engaging with these histories through a contemporary lens, I hope to contribute a new chapter to the building’s creative lineage.

Ultimately, the work invites viewers to reflect on the ethics of desire and the impactful legacies of wealth and inequality - questions as relevant today in Tottenham as they were three centuries ago.”

Inspired by key moments in the building’s history, as well as elemental aspects of Sarabande,  hand engraver and goldsmith Castro Smith, created a ‘medieval hash-up’ with nods to Noah Davis’ coat of arms for the Underground Museum and Umberto Eco symbolic language.

At the heart of Castro’s piece is the sentiment that beneath the rubble and rot of an abandoned building lives many unseen lives, eventually reawakened through human spirit. 

“The traditional shield illustrates the protection of the building in the centre, and is being held by the hands of the community. Above the shield is a breastplate and helmet that was used in Alexander McQueen’s 1996 Dante collection. 

The mantle is the fabric that usually flows down from beneath the helmet, this curls into traditional decoration holding Sarabande’s moth emblem, a brush and craftsman’s hammer, symbolising the melding of vision and technique. We have combined deep stone carving with lighter comical linework to make the final design sketch-like.”

During a site visit in Summer 2025, multidisciplinary artist Yijia Wu was drawn to the building’s intimate architectural details, most of all the surviving keyholes that she found significant for their ability to mark thresholds between inside and outside, past and present, presence and absence. 

The carving, titled ‘The House Keeps Time’ developed from Yijia’s exploration of the fluid notion of home and the quiet ways in which objects hold shared and individual histories, resonating with her practice which often begins with overlooked domestic forms and materials that carry emotional weight, cultural memory, and the traces of movement between time and place.

‘The House Keeps Time’ reimagines the clock face using keys from different historical periods in place of traditional digits. Each key references a moment in the building’s long life, from its early Georgian origins to later Victorian and 20th-century chapters. 

Together they form a circular timeline, interwoven with carved architectural motifs taken from the house itself. At the centre, the clock hands point to 20:26, the year Sarabande’s artists will begin working in the new Tottenham studios, a moment that marks a new chapter for both the building and Sarabande.

Carved in stone, the work sits between permanence and transition. It invites visitors to consider how buildings, like people, accumulate stories; how thresholds mark both separation and connection; and how each new keyholder adds another chapter to the ongoing history of this place.

Cafe Counter

During artist George Richardson’s Sarabande residency he made many attempts at casting an umbrella, a difficult shape that can’t be 3D printed or cast easily due to its folds and materiality. This form is deeply symbolic to George of his time at Sarabande, and became a crucial part of this commission; a playful and curious object whose fabrication in solid bronze exists in direct conversation with the reclaimed doors, panelling and ironmongery from the building next door.

"My work often begins with small fragments, keyholes into other worlds, where familiar objects become slightly distant from their reference points. Sculpture that sits between fiction and reality, a way of understanding the world by shifting what we think we know. 

My approach to sculpture is one of listening as much as making, in this case listening to the building’s history by working with the Georgian internal doors leftover from the original building. Doors symbolise the boundary between public and private space and here they anchor the sculpture in the building’s origins. 

A bronze cast silk women’s umbrella hangs from the counter, the key work to draw [the viewer] you in; eye catching and seemingly impossible in its formal composition and materiality, whilst remaining oddly familiar."

This work is a sculptural intervention, visually bold, familiar and tactile. It is an invitation to look twice, to re-imagine the history of the people who once lived in the area and to experience the building in the present moment.