Tottenham Tales

Tottenham Tales (completed 2021) is a public, collaborative, tiled artwork located in Tottenham. It was commissioned by Jan Kattein Architects and Haringey Council following an open competition to design a public artwork as part of Tottenham High Road redevelopment. The design was informed by a workshop with students at the local Brook House Primary School. A key motivation for us as a design studio was to involve local residents - the people who pass the site on Tottenham High Road every day in the design process and reveal the culverted river Moselle flowing beneath it. In a collaborative drawing workshop with primary school children, we collected motifs relating to the area's history and the everyday experience of young Tottenham locals. Over the course of a day, a large-scale map of the area became a canvas to be filled with sketches of personal landmarks, favourite activities, encounters with local flora and fauna and imagined inhabitants of the River Moselle. Together with key streets and the course of the underground river, these became the starting point for the development of a tiled mosaic map. Its colours were carefully selected to match colours of the local area. The final design is made from 22,925 single mosaic tiles and was installed by The Mosaic Studio right across from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.