1. The origin story

“Without Obsession, Life Is Nothing” - John Waters

It all started quite innocently. Yes, I've been appreciating the work of artists working in sculpture and miniature for years - the exquisite detail of Alan Wolfson's nostalgic, tiny city environments; punkrock sculptures of Fernando Carpaneda, and the pretty Re-Ment packets of small food things I found in Japan. Chapman Brothers Fucking Hell exhibit at the White Cube had my head spinning with minuscule hellscapes for weeks.

(please keep reading behind the cut)

my inspo

From my 18th floor flat the city underneath appears like a model town, especially in a bright morning sunshine that casts shadows in that hilarious, unconvincing way; and I constantly catch myself gazing at dilapidated buildings and trashy pubs in my local cockney end of London, re-imagining them in miniature.... 

A December morning from my kitchen window

Real life inspirations

But the final tiny nail in the proverbial miniature coffin was driven by my friend Jessica, who works at the V&A, and who snuck me her invite for the private view of Small Stories, an epic dolls house exhibition at the Museum Of Childhood in Bethnal Green. In and of itself, the invitation was a true beauty:

And that was that, the magic spell was cast and I was hooked.

I'll come back to this exquisite exhibit many times on this blog I'm sure, just like I went back to the museum many times - once after dark for a candle-lit tour, where a Victorian maiden with a lantern thrilled us with ghost stories of haunted dolls houses and shrieking skulls...

Let's put a face to the blog....

As soon as I came back from the exhibition I began trawling Gumtree and Ebay for my first dolls house that I never had as child (aside from making cardboard box "rooms" for my barbies with sheared off hair and biro makeup). Better at the ripe of age of 33 than never, I figured. And soon I came across a half-finished Georgian townhouse (which had luckily been wired for lights), started and unfinished by a lady in Somerset, for whom it was also The First. I liked the symmetry in our stories, so I bought it, good bargain for £62, and thanks to the chain of my pals Genie and Iain (who actually own cars and evidently like me enough to pass cumbersome childs' toys along via their car boots), I soon had this huge, beautiful, entirely superfluous building taking up a ridiculous space of my already small flat. I told my partner that, with the property prices of 2015, this was my only chance to actually own a house in London, but in all honesty I was already imagining our bedroom hosting a city in 1/12 scale.

The starting point of my obsession