Gabriel's Wharf

Gabriel's Wharf, located on London's South Bank, is a historic community-owned creative quarter famous for a trompe l'oeil mural of a Georgian shopping street painted on a blank factory wall. Named after timber merchants who leased the land in 1815, local residents bought the site for £1 million in 1984. In 1988, it was transformed in three months for £78,000 into London's oldest pop-up market.

London · from the walk “The Artist's Thames” · audio ~4 min · Generated

Gabriel's Wharf, 56 Upper Ground, London SE1 9PP

How did Gabriel's Wharf on London's South Bank get its name?

Look around you. This colourful little courtyard... it shouldn't exist. Not according to the developers, anyway.......... As a visual artist, you'll appreciate a place that was literally Painted into existence. But first, the backstory. Do you know how a timber merchant from the seventeen seventies left his name on this stretch of the Thames?......... Christopher Gabriel was a maker of woodworking planes from the seventeen seventies, but from around eighteen twelve, his sons changed the business to importing and selling timber, and in eighteen fifteen, they took a long lease on this very site. The business was extremely successful, and Christopher's grandson, Thomas, rose to become Lord Mayor of London in the eighteen sixties. And here's a detail most people walk right past... the Gabriel family name continued with singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel, who is Sir Thomas's great-great-great nephew!......... But by the nineteen seventies, this whole stretch of the South Bank was desolate. The residential population of the area had fallen from fifty thousand to just four thousand five hundred. In nineteen seventy seven, plans to build Europe's tallest hotel and over one million square feet of office space between Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges were announced.......... And that's when something remarkable happened. The campaign for Coin Street lasted Seven years and included two public inquiries. Local residents fought back. In nineteen eighty four, with the Glc facing abolition, the community acquired the land for just one million pounds.......... Now here's where it gets beautiful for an artist's eye. This place was a construction compound until nineteen eighty eight, when, in partnership with the operators of Camden Lock Market, it was opened to the public alongside retail designer studios, housed in factory-built garage units with shop fronts added. The Entire transformation took just three months and cost only seventy eight thousand pounds... and created sixty jobs.......... But the masterstroke? Look at the walls behind the shops. Within three months, a team transformed a blank factory wall with a spectacular mural depicting a Georgian shopping street. What may look like upper-storey windows on the buildings are actually clever trompe l'oeil paintings, giving the entire space an effortlessly whimsical aesthetic. It's a technique that goes all the way back to Ancient Greece... architecture conjured from pigment and perspective. The buildings you think you see above these little shops... they were Never there.......... Gabriel's Wharf now carries the legacy of being London's oldest pop-up. And today, Southbank Printmakers have been here for over twenty years... a cooperative of forty independent, established artists, all working in their own studios on many kinds of printmaking.......... So the next time someone tells you art can't change a city... point them here. A place where painted windows fooled the eye, and a community of makers fooled the developers.

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