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Digitally printed tapestry 

45 x 65 x 4cm

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These images are made from stills photographed from Chas n Dave’s 1982 Christmas television special, set in a replica East End pub, in an idealised community gathered around music and performance. By 1982 this vision of London’s East End was already nostalgic. I watched the programme aged nine, sitting on my father’s knee. His family had been relocated from the East End to the New Town of Harlow following the post-war slum clearances. Looking back, I recognise that he was watching a version of a place that had already been lost, connecting not only with his own childhood but with inherited memories of parents and grandparents.

Replica becomes the central motif of these works. Chas N’ Dave preserved elements of Cockney language, music hall traditions and working-class sociability, presenting an affectionate but carefully staged version of Englishness. 

The replica East End pub also mirrors the heritage architecture of Britain’s New Towns. Places like Harlow recreated the appearance of tradition for housing communities displaced from city clearances. Memory becomes reconstructed through architecture, television and inherited stories. These works question how replicas come to stand in for heritage, and how nostalgia can both preserve and simplify the past.

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In Lancashire  pubs are becoming mosques and churches become Wetherspoons. Old people weep for the past that they assumed would be their future. The young are somewhere else, doing what they are supposed to do regardless. As it should be,