For 37 years the kaleidoscopic tesserae of the Equality–Harmony mural presided over Broadwater Farm, a sprawling Corbusian housing estate in Tottenham, north London. Affixed to a five-storey bin chute on the Tangmere House block, the mosaic was commissioned in the wake of the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985, sparked by the death of Cynthia Jarrett, a Black woman who suffered a heart attack during a police raid on her home. Designed by local artist Gülsün Erbil, it became a potent symbol of hope and healing in the wake of destruction.
In 2022, Haringey council commenced the planned demolition of Tangmere House, which had been found to be at risk of collapse. Soon after, Historic England granted the mural Grade II-listed status, prompting a long and complex preservation process, which is currently underway at the heart of Broadwater Farm. ‘It was listed in the middle of a demolition programme, which is very difficult in terms of the sequence of events that we were trying to follow. It meant that we had to down tools,’ says David Sherrington, director of the estate, who is overseeing regeneration plans in the area. ‘We were looking at how we could take elements and embed them in the landscape so we didn’t lose it entirely. Then we had to radically change our plan because, obviously, a Historic England removal and restoration is somewhat different to the ideas that we had.’
A team of specialists from the restoration company DBR was drafted in. As the bulldozers roared around them, the conservators erected scaffolding to survey the six-metre-high mural, before the challenge of dismantling and relocating all 50 tonnes of it could begin. Using ancient Roman preservation techniques, the team applied a layer of wheat-starch paste to the tiles, followed by hessian, liquid rubber and jesmonite plaster. ‘It’s like a cast for a broken bone,’ says Talia Weiss, one of four conservators working on the £2 million restoration. ‘So if there were any vibration, movement or loose tesserae, they would stay intact and in place.’ The mosaic was then sliced into 21 sections using two diamond blades. ‘The smaller blade did pilot cuts around the back face of the concrete first,’ Talia says. ‘We then attached each section to a crane, which started to lift and give a bit of tension for the actual cutting-through process. Each block is about two and a half tonnes, so we had to control their movement in every capacity.’
A pop-up restoration facility was erected in the shadow of Broadwater Farm’s remaining towers, where the conservators first cleaned the mosaic block by block. In the 1990s, the base of the mural, which depicts two hands dancing over the keys of a piano, was enclosed within a new entranceway, while the upper section – a musical stave conjured by the hands, stretching past emblems of hope and symbols of the surrounding area – remained exposed to the elements. After removing biological growth and graffiti, the conservators set about repairing and replacing the broken tesserae. ‘We counted 33 colours and three sizes of tile,’ says lead conservator Paolo Volpi, adding that his team are ‘trying as much as possible to use a like-for-like replacement system’.
An abstract artist from Turkey, Gülsün Erbil first studied under the painter Neşet Günal, himself a pupil of the French Modernist Fernand Léger, before completing master’s degrees in ceramics and textiles at Goldsmiths. In 1985, she was living on Broadwater Farm with her two children and witnessed the reaction to Cynthia Jarrett’s death first-hand. One police officer, Keith Blakelock, was killed during the riot, and Gülsün’s own car was destroyed. ‘I could have done something negative, but I did something positive,’ she says. ‘It’s about equality. If equality comes to the world, there will be harmony in the world.’ But her motivation for creating the Equality–Harmony mural extended beyond the riot, which took place 40 years ago this October. Gülsün wanted to introduce residents – in particular her own community of Turkish migrants in Tottenham – to modern art. To create the mural, she was given a vacant unit in Tangmere House, where she taught the Byzantine mosaic technique to volunteers. ‘I used to ask my students: “You are very talented – why didn’t you study?” They were around my age and they used to say: “My family is not rich enough for me to do art.” You know, nearly all my friends were from the villages. It was shocking for them, really; they’d never been to a museum or a gallery,’ says Gülsün. Now based in Turkey, she has visited the pop-up facility several times and, in 2024, hosted a mosaic class for the current generation of residents.
The restoration comes as the Twentieth Century Society spearheads a campaign to preserve the UK’s postwar murals. At least 1,000 were commissioned between World War II and the 1980s, with those like Gülsün’s forming part of the ‘community mural movement’ of the latter decade. These public artworks were often created with neighbourhood groups, incorporating elements of local history into their design. Gülsün’s motifs cascade from the global to the local: the two hemispheres dominate the top of the mural, tower blocks from the estate feature midway down, while a colourful representation of the nearby Shell Theatre decorates the lower section.
‘Such murals are wonderfully creative, visually rich chapters of our national story that have for too long been overlooked,’ says Oli Marshall, campaigns director at the Twentieth Century Society. More than 25 have been saved since the campaign was launched in 2008; however, the majority are by recognised and established artists. Two further murals on Broadwater Farm – Peace by Anthony Steele (1987) and Waterfall by Bernette Hall and Donald Taylor (1991) – have recently been turned down for listing, with a report claiming they lacked intrinsic special interest.
While the restoration is scheduled to wrap in mid-2025, a new location on the estate for Equality–Harmony has yet to be found. But with nearly 300 social homes recently approved, and droves of new residents likely to move in over the coming years, Gülsün’s legacy of hope will live on. ‘It presents an opportunity to change people’s perception of Broadwater Farm, because the common perception is of what they see on TV and the riots,’ says David Sherrington. ‘Actually, when you come down here, it’s nothing like that whatsoever. It’s a lovely community with people just going about their lives’.
A version of this article also appeared in the February 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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