Peace, serenity, and reflection: these are the things you would expect to find in an art studio, not a dead fox in the basement.
But for Hackney musician J Appiah, the fox was the first of many challenges he faced when setting up his art space in Clapton in 2024.
“Literally nobody had been down there in 10 plus years or more, so we had to get a local company to disinfect the building and make it safe to actually work there,” he said.
Community is at the centre of the project. Appiah grew up around the corner from the building – a former bakery – and played the drums in the church which owns it. He remembers the smell of the bakery fondly.
Now it is the home of 219 Art Space, a community arts space that has held events and residencies with musicians and artists from the local community and much further afield.
“I feel I’m a steward. This is not a business, and this is not something I own,” he said.
He explained that “it didn’t necessarily start out with a very clear intention, and in many ways it still doesn’t have one, but it’s all about how space can transform and evolve over time organically.”
Appiah’s music foundations, built in Hackney, have served him well. Just this month he has toured the US with Gorillaz as a background vocalist. While on tour, his friends and family “chime in and help out.”
The space isn’t just for locals though: an architecture collective called Noma Architecture held a residency for a month in the summer of 2024, along with a group of musicians from Tokyo later that year.
“We had some really cool musicians from Tokyo in the building working on the space,” he said. “There have been some fashion events as well. But it’s my personal studio too, where I paint and work on my music.”
The philosophy behind the project, he said, is turning “a building that’s otherwise abandoned, derelict, and not very valuable into something valuable for the community through art.”
Appiah has high hopes for the project going forward and would like to get funding to move into other spaces which can embody the same ethos.
“The idea is to see how spaces can themselves become art projects,” he said. “London has so many characterful abandoned, derelict spaces just sitting there waiting to be sold or maybe turned into flats, but I think art brings so much more value to spaces and the community.”
This summer, he plans to host an exhibition centred around his latest album, ‘That’s The Thing About Time’.
He said that everyone is welcome in the art space: “The London arts scene is its sometimes seen as cliquey and exclusive, but I don’t really vibe with that to be honest.”
“If you’re into the arts and you’re into music, it’s the space for you. I very much think our art should be and can be accessed by everyone,” he said.
“I don’t know what the long terms plans will be for the space,” he said, “but I am really pleased that I’ve been able to build and create something artistic in the space and make a bit of a statement with it.”
Munro Waller is a Newspaper Journalism masters student at City St Georges University.