Magical Windows: A Camden Council Collaboration

Camden Council’s Rozita Leetham reflects on ‘Magical Windows ’ a 2023 project. The series of public artworks produced with Art School Plus, in collaboration with a number of community members, reflects the people who live and work in Camley and the collective walks they went on together over a number of months.

Connecting Camley Street

Magical Windows is a 2023  public realm artwork installation in an underpass at the northern end of Camley Street at the heart of the future location of a neighbourhood, as part of Camden Council’s Camley Street development. A series of artworks by different local communities will be hosted in this underpass gallery space over the coming years.

It is built of 5 billboard panels running down each side of the tunnel designed to brighten up the space and celebrate the local community as people often told the council they feel unsafe walking here. These boards are landscapes, mapping the journeys taken, and places seen, like windows into the everyday details we sometimes overlook, brought together with drawings and mapping by Kat Hudson and Toby Tobias Kidd.

Kat and Toby, alongside contributing artists Anna Reading, Dedéia Rocha and Lottie McCarthy  from Art School Plus, worked with families at the Edith Neville School Family Centre to tell their stories through different workshops.

The Connecting Camley Street programme came about in response to feedback from local residents. When we asked people about movement and safety in and around the Camley Street area, we heard that areas like the underpass and the walkway to Maiden Lane estate from Camley Street often feel unsafe and sometimes attract anti-social behaviour.

The engagement is the core of the Connecting Camley Street programme. For Magical Windows, our fantastic artist team created 3 inspiring and hands-on workshops with mothers and families at the Edith Neville Family Centre. We were taken on a journey where we explored through cyanotypes, sewing and drawing and collage and we learnt so much through meaningful conversations with the families we met. We also joined the Family Centre’s existing Monday walks – making connections with families in Somers Town and strengthening connections with other local institutions.

Our engagement activities reflect our aims to work with communities and imagine new ways to build future neighbourhoods that benefit everyone and were developed with residents’ input from the beginning. Working with artists like Art School Plus is one very small (and yet big) way that we try and make this a reality.

We are now almost at the end of the Magical Windows installation, and it has been a pleasure to look back at all the hard work that made it happen. We are looking forward to launching our next instalment of Connecting Camley Street – Queer Brown Stories. Follow the Camley Street Instagram page to stay in the loop and join us for the next chapter!

Art UK

This meaningful project was only temporarily at Camley Street but will is now accessible to art lovers across the UK digitally. This year the Connecting Camley Street project caught the attention of Art UK an art education charity that champions access to art for everyone. Art UK is an online home for every art collection in the UK with over 300,000 works to view including the murals created in this project, you can view them here.