Arts & Crafts Streetscape
It was a pleasure to be invited to paint a recently pedestrianised North London road with an arts and crafts-inspired mural last month. Commissioned by Islington Play Association, my brief was to create a streetscape that would bring life and colour to a tarmacked area on Freeling Street, ahead of it being turned into a pocket park with the installation of community planters. Trees and bicycle hoops had already been added by the time I arrived to the site and so I spent six long days in the sun (often grateful for the shade of the new trees) hand-painting the road with lilies and berries.
As the commissioner and I discovered that we shared an interest in the ethos of the arts and crafts movement (indeed, my undergraduate thesis revolved around William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites), I focused my design around the Francesca pattern by socialist artist Walter Crane, which I adapted to work across a 20 metre space, updating with a contemporary palette and an alternative composition to weave lilies around the community planters. The mural joins the wider ‘Cultivating Cally’ project, which is supported by the Mayor of London ‘greener cities’ Fund.
It has been a joy to contribute to the work going into transform this newly pedestrianised street into a space for play & planting and I’m looking forward to seeing the next stage when flowers will be added to the street by local school children. Caledonian Road is about to get a lot more colourful! It was a delight, too, to talk to the many local residents who passed by while I painted and shared their appreciation of art and nature being introduced into shared civic spaces. So many people stopped to talk while I was on site, two of whom stand out for me in particular. One, a man on his way to work early in the morning who told me:
"I’m going to take this colour as my inspiration and carry it with me into the day.”
And a boy who came by with his parents every day, anxious for me to hurry up and finish the painting so that he could play on the artwork!
“I’m going to be a bug and I’m going to climb all over the stems and leaves and into the flowers!”
Two of many wonderful reasons for more botanical, colourful streetscapes in our cities!
