Original artwork description:

This painting is the fourth of 4 designs for a mural that I painted in 2025 in Whitechapel London, UK.

I believe murals can play an important part in making a neighbourhood feel like home, safe for families and creating positive signs of change, fostering a sense of community, cultural diversity and enabling a sense of historical context.

The painting was made as the fourth design for the mural I was to paint in Whitechapel London. The themes picked out by the John’s Place tenants and residents association, indicate how much has changed over the decades - and even centuries on this footprint of land called Whitechapel. This mural is a great opportunity to signal today that the Sidney Street area is a great place to live, work and play, igniting a sense of pride and well being for local residents.

In thinking about how to go about the design, I felt it needed to lift the viewer upwards from the bottom, and be layered, allowing contemporary activities to be set against a back drop of social historical images, and towards the top, the mural becomes like a map that contains many of the iconic buildings of the area, in the final mural these buildings will be painted in more detail - they are just sketched out here.

The centre of the mural shows a family walking through a market surrounded by people from the wider community, I wanted to display a sense of calm, happiness and confidence, while all around them there is a complexity of people and images depicting historical trades of the area, and historical events that have impacted on Whitechapel. In this fourth design which I made in monochrome, oil paint on linen - I added a lot more details than the previous versions, there are nearly 25 portraits of local residents and historical figures in this version.

This canvas is something of an historical document as it is the fourth design made for the mural in London.

Materials used:

oil paint

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