HOUSE OF HABERDASH: Ben Philipps visits a multi-media – text and textiles – at the Torriano Meeting House
House of Haberdash
Torriano Meeting House
99 Torriano Avenue NW5 2RX
7 June - 10 August 2025
Open weekends 11am - 5 pm
I had forgotten that among the exhilarating panoply of medieval social types that is the ‘Prologue’ to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is ‘an Haberdasshere’. He’s one of a group of five guildsmen, who, Chaucer tells us, are ‘clothed alle in o lyveree [one livery] / Of a solempne and a greet fraternitee’. The Tales are unfinished, and we never get round to hearing from this well-dressed haberdasher. I wonder what his story would have been like, what elements of his trade might have found their way into it. Would the Haberdasher’s Tale have unfolded piecemeal, a makeshift patchwork of bits and scraps, or would it have flaunted the sturdiness of its suturing, its narrative seams and suave needlework?
HOUSE OF HABERDASH, a multimedia exhibition at northwest London’s Torriano Meeting House, thinks about the historical significance and artistic possibilities of haberdashery. The Torriano is a small venue, with spare white walls and a high ceiling (onto which a poem is projected). A low dais at the end furthest from the door offers a platform for speeches, readings, breathers. On the exhibition’s opening night – a clear June evening – artists and visitors spilled out onto Torriano Avenue. There were drinks, and excellent homemade cupcakes (topped, appropriately, with a tangle of strawberry laces). An hour in, we all piled back inside to hear from the curator, Lottie McCrindell, and from several of the poets whose work – mounted on embroidered screens, dangling on shining threads from the ceiling – was on show. The exhibition, as Lottie remarked, is structured by poetry, by metaphor: explicitly about materiality, it’s also about what materials can mean, how and where they touch the intangible.
By the door, Leo Boix’s Post-Constellation (After Augusto de Campos) – a concrete poem on bright blue paper – is alive to the tactile strangeness of words. As successive letters are dropped from ‘superclaster’ – ‘laster / aster / ster’ – the poem narrows to a point; elsewhere ‘button’ becomes ‘oh! but’, an object not just describing but transforming into an instant, an about-turn. (The exclamation mark feels like a needle threading itself through the cycling letters.) On either side of Boix’s poem, buttons hang like a rain of coins on woollen yarn.
Cleo Heywood’s poem ‘Red Box’ is displayed above the thing itself, austerely elegant in cherry-painted wood and filled with three generations’ detrital treasure. The poem, Cleo told us, can be read in any order – assembled and re-assembled, sifted through and rummaged around in. Katy Mason’s Spillage Purse Bag, an exuberance of material foraged by the artist from ‘waste objects’, hangs next to ‘Red Box’, as though channeling its vision of language through the stuff of everyday life.
Inspired in turn by the lived quotidian, Dan Janoff’s ‘Fancy Trimmings’ evokes the East End belt-and-button factory in which the poet’s father- and uncle-in-law worked. Words recur in Janoff’s poem, taking on different shades: ‘fancy’ like a new belt, ‘fancy’ like the daydreams of an addressed ‘child’. These threads of inheritance and ancestry run through much of the exhibition.
Where ‘Fancy Trimmings’ brings back the Jewish immigrant communities of the old East End (as I heard Janoff read, I thought of my own family’s long-gone smoked-salmon-and-auto-repair business). Zaina Ghani’s The Grandmothers – inspired by the ‘spider grandmother’ of Indigenous American folklore – imagines a workshop of women ‘finishing off a universe’. The poem, stitched in silver thread into a tea towel, shimmers and glints from within its icon of domesticity.
The ‘house’ of haberdash is frequently invested in the meaning of home. Kathryn Southworth’s ‘The thingness of it’, a meditation on what ‘remain[s]’ after ‘the children grew too old’, ‘cherishes / such uselessness’, the inexplicable joy of objects and bonds existing outside market instrumentality. Other contributors note genealogies beyond the familial. Troy Cabida’s wonderful ‘At the Mall’ is subtitled ‘After At The Movies With My Mother, Joseph Legaspi’. To note that your work comes ‘after’ another isn’t to say that its relation is necessarily deferential, and the exhibition’s ethos of ceaseless remaking, reusing, and reimagining entails a powerfully democratic conception of artistic community. Lottie’s own piece, itself called ‘House of Haberdash’, is a collage, a re-weaving of the exhibition’s variegated poetic fabric. But it doesn’t feel summative, and indeed the poem notes that it too comes ‘after’ ‘Red Box’. If this brings things full circle, it’s also the sign of a new beginning. And as I left the Torriano for home, the evening roads seemed threads, crossing and recrossing each other with a constant hum, as though stitching the erratic city.
Jul 5 2025
HOUSE OF HABERDASH
HOUSE OF HABERDASH: Ben Philipps visits a multi-media – text and textiles – at the Torriano Meeting House
I had forgotten that among the exhilarating panoply of medieval social types that is the ‘Prologue’ to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is ‘an Haberdasshere’. He’s one of a group of five guildsmen, who, Chaucer tells us, are ‘clothed alle in o lyveree [one livery] / Of a solempne and a greet fraternitee’. The Tales are unfinished, and we never get round to hearing from this well-dressed haberdasher. I wonder what his story would have been like, what elements of his trade might have found their way into it. Would the Haberdasher’s Tale have unfolded piecemeal, a makeshift patchwork of bits and scraps, or would it have flaunted the sturdiness of its suturing, its narrative seams and suave needlework?
Inspired in turn by the lived quotidian, Dan Janoff’s ‘Fancy Trimmings’ evokes the East End belt-and-button factory in which the poet’s father- and uncle-in-law worked. Words recur in Janoff’s poem, taking on different shades: ‘fancy’ like a new belt, ‘fancy’ like the daydreams of an addressed ‘child’. These threads of inheritance and ancestry run through much of the exhibition.
Where ‘Fancy Trimmings’ brings back the Jewish immigrant communities of the old East End (as I heard Janoff read, I thought of my own family’s long-gone smoked-salmon-and-auto-repair business). Zaina Ghani’s The Grandmothers – inspired by the ‘spider grandmother’ of Indigenous American folklore – imagines a workshop of women ‘finishing off a universe’. The poem, stitched in silver thread into a tea towel, shimmers and glints from within its icon of domesticity.
The ‘house’ of haberdash is frequently invested in the meaning of home. Kathryn Southworth’s ‘The thingness of it’, a meditation on what ‘remain[s]’ after ‘the children grew too old’, ‘cherishes / such uselessness’, the inexplicable joy of objects and bonds existing outside market instrumentality. Other contributors note genealogies beyond the familial. Troy Cabida’s wonderful ‘At the Mall’ is subtitled ‘After At The Movies With My Mother, Joseph Legaspi’. To note that your work comes ‘after’ another isn’t to say that its relation is necessarily deferential, and the exhibition’s ethos of ceaseless remaking, reusing, and reimagining entails a powerfully democratic conception of artistic community. Lottie’s own piece, itself called ‘House of Haberdash’, is a collage, a re-weaving of the exhibition’s variegated poetic fabric. But it doesn’t feel summative, and indeed the poem notes that it too comes ‘after’ ‘Red Box’. If this brings things full circle, it’s also the sign of a new beginning. And as I left the Torriano for home, the evening roads seemed threads, crossing and recrossing each other with a constant hum, as though stitching the erratic city.