NORTHCOTE ROAD COMMUNITY MURAL

You might know us for our AMAZING mural campaigns and TOP OF THE RANGE brand partnerships, but in fact, at JOY! the thing we are MOST passionate about is how art and colour can help improve spaces, people and communities, so when we get an opportunity to design and paint a community mural on Northcote Road, we jump at the chance.

A recent mural campaign we designed for Farrow & Ball required us to locate fresh new sites across London, all in close proximity to a F&B store for a really targeted demographic. We love a challenge, and with new challenges and new sites come new opportunities. When we found the Northcote Road site, we just knew that a replacement community mural was needed and would perfectly celebrate the vibrance and independence of the community.
Luckily, the lovely people at Bayfields Opticians, owners of the mural site, loved the idea too!

As a collective made up of artists, designers and creatives, even when designing and producing a campaign mural, we always ensure the artwork is giving back to the community in some way. Our Farrow & Ball murals did just that! We painted a series of murals celebrating their new colour collection, but there were art pieces in their own right. But When it came time to replace one of them, we decided to do something a little different. Instead of simply painting over it, we turned the wall into a celebration of the community around it.

We spent a day on Northcote Road chatting with locals, hearing stories about what the street means to them, its changing character, and its deep history. One detail kept coming up; that Northcote Road was once the path of the old Falconbrook river. As people spoke of the street, water flowed through their words.

It became clear that the mural needed to be a poem. We worked with the language we’d gathered to craft a collective piece; part memory, part rhythm, part river. From that poem, we drew out a typographic design that ripples across the wall, paying tribute to the hidden waterways beneath the street and the voices that brought them back to life.

A mural that began as an advert ended as a love letter, to Northcote Road, to its people, and to the river still flowing quietly beneath their feet.