A wallpaper exhibit based on the lockdown experiences of a Hackney social club, Hackney Brocals is on display for the Hackney Museum’s upcoming ‘Collecting Covid’ archive titled ‘Out of the Man Cave’.
Hackney Brocals, a social club for men over 50, created the exhibit with artist and wallpaper designer, Angela Groundwater. Their last trip before lockdown to Chislehurst Caves, Kent in February 2020, became the inspiration for the custom wallpaper design that is on display.
The exhibit combines the wallpaper with testimonies written by the ‘brocals’ to share the men’s memories and to explore their experience of the pandemic.
The club was set up by local resident Anne-Marie Payne in 2018, and aims to combat loneliness in older men through regular meet-ups, trips, activities and supportive relationships with volunteers.
During the pandemic, the club had to meet on Zoom instead. Payne said that “we got our volunteers to go and visit the Bros [Brocals] on their doorsteps and chat to them about what they did during lockdown. And then Angela combined their different objects and drawings of them into the wallpaper”.
The exhibit includes a written passage called ‘Hop-Picking Memories’, where John Payne, 68, shares that the worst part of lockdown for him was that he wasn’t able to do his weekly drive out to the hop fields down in Kent. “It’s a different world down there,” he shared in the piece.
The group has resumed in-person activities and plans to go to the Walthamstow Wetlands in November. The exhibit will remain open until February 2022.
