There are parts of London you can walk past a thousand times and never see. Shepherdess Walk, on the Hoxton end of the borough of Hackney, is one such place, a quiet residential road of Victorian terraced houses and post-war estates, sloping gently down towards City Road and Old Street Station. There is nothing on the pavement to announce it. Just a row of front doors and the occasional cat on a wall. And yet hidden behind these buildings is one of London’s most extraordinary pieces of public art, one of my absolute personal favourites, and most Londoners have never ever seen it.
Between numbers 107 and 128, there is a narrow gap, take the steps down, follow the passageway and emerge into a corner of Shepherdess Walk Park, this north-eastern corner is enclosed by a series of low walls. The walls are covered in colour. These are the Shepherdess Walk Mosaics.
At first glance, the work is unmistakably Roman. There are borders of leaves and shrubs, red berries crowded with birds. These are separated into panels filled with colourful figures and landscapes showing the four seasons, the kind found in villa floors across Roman Britain. The main panels hosts shepherdesses, with a mixture of shaggy sheep, hares dance at their feet, pigeons and plover fly amongst them.
It all seems to tally with imagery two millennia old, then you notice the jogger with his headphones, then the skateboard, and the dogs chasing the frisbee. The swimmer in the lido, the ice cream, the picnic and the leaf blower, the headphones. And a woman absorbed in the phone screen. The longer you look, the more you find. Hidden among the classical motifs is the entire texture of contemporary Hackney life, disguised, brilliantly, as the Roman Empire.
This is the work of the mosaic artist Tessa Hunkin, unveiled in 2012, the year of the London Olympics. The link is not accidental. Mosaic itself is an art form rooted in the ancient Mediterranean — Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Hunkin’s work tips its hat to that lineage while quietly anchoring itself in the present.
The naming of Shepherdess Walk is not accidental. This follows the line of an ancient route, a drovers’ track which once crossed open fields hereabouts, worn smooth over centuries by men and women bringing their flocks down on the long walk to Smithfield Market inside the City walls. Cattle and sheep arrived in London on foot for centuries, sometimes from as far as Wales and Scotland, along a network of droving roads that fed the capital’s appetite for meat. By the time they reached this stretch of fields they were close enough to smell the city.
The shepherdesses in the mosaics are not invented. They are real, ghosts of the people who passed this way so many years ago. The hares, rams and grazing ewes once moved across this exact patch of ground. The fields, these rural areas just outside of the old city are long gone, swallowed by Georgian and then Victorian London. The drovers’ path was laid down and became a street. The name remained, and the mosaics remember it still.
For me the most remarkable thing about the Shepherdess Walk Mosaics is not what is on the walls. It is who put it there.
The mosaics were created by the Hackney Mosaic Project, a workshop set up by Tessa Hunkin in 2011 specifically to work with people in recovery, from addiction, from illness, from hard lives. The core group of around thirty people worked alongside Hunkin two days a week, in a shop on Murray Grove, with drop-in volunteers from the local community joining as the project grew. Across two years, more than one hundred and fifty people had a hand in the work.
The numbers alone are staggering: two hundred and sixteen thousand individual tiles, cut and laid by hand. Over one and a half thousand hours of work.
But the more meaningful number is the human one. Many of the tiles were placed by someone trying to put a difficult life back together, one small coloured square at a time.
That, more than the Roman echoes or the Olympic timing or the medieval path beneath your feet, is the heart of what these mosaics are. They are an act of community, a piece of London made by people who found in art and communal working, a beginning to a way back themselves.
It’s a small space. You can take it all in within five minutes. But the longer you stand, the more it gives. The trick of the work is that it operates on three layers at once. You arrive expecting a Roman pavement. You smile at the modern jokes hidden in the borders. And then you understand that the whole piece is a kind of love letter from one part of Hackney to another. Made by people most of London had stopped looking at or in fact had chosen awkwardly to ignore.
A Roman pavement on the wall. A medieval drovers’ path under your feet. And, set between them, a quiet act of faith in what people can do when they sit down together with a pile of broken tiles and decide to make something beautiful.
The Shepherdess Walk Mosaics are in Shepherdess Walk Park, N1 7QE, accessed via the narrow passageway on Shepherdess Walk itself, between numbers 107 and 128. There are also entrances from Wimbourne Street and Buckland Street.
Nearest stations: Old Street (Northern line) or Hoxton (Overground), both about a ten-minute walk.
The park is open during daylight hours, year-round. Entry is free. It is best visited in good light, when the colours sing. Allow yourself a half-hour — and bring a friend, because half the pleasure is pointing out the small details to one another.
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