‘It had four storeys and everything was wrong with it.’ Tim Jones and Meena Chodha laugh as they recall their first impressions of the building they now call home. It was 1998 when the pair, with two young children in tow, moved into a dilapidated greengrocer’s in southeast London, replete with mirrored plasterboards and shop-front roller shutters.
The building was a far cry from its former life; the greengrocer had moved away a couple of years earlier, along with the local butcher and baker, after a Sainsbury’s opened nearby and swept up the local customer base. Left in a state of disrepair, the structure was deemed unusable either as a shop or a house. But for Tim and Meena, its impracticality was part of the excitement: ‘A place in terrible condition is the best thing because you’re going to wreck it anyway,’ Tim explains. It was the perfect playground for a couple who’d met in the architectural department of Southbank University, and who shared a love of design.
‘The lack of money was profoundly constant,’ they admit, but this never proved to be an issue. Deptford Market became a local haunt; objects and materials they chanced on were brought home and stored before their final fitting. The couple’s innovative outlook led them to marry mismatched glass windows, banisters made of scaffolding and makeshift wooden pillars. One can still spy planks of wood leaning against the wall, waiting to be used for the next project.
In the beginning, Tim and Meena tried to steer clear of shelves, keeping their bare-brick walls free to hang artwork, and using metal boxes sourced from the market for storage. ‘But after a while, that became impractical.’ Meena laughs. ‘You don’t know what’s inside them.’ Eventually, they reverted to more traditional shelving, though the metal boxes have remained, repurposed as plinths for sculptures and magazines.
Tim and Meena hadn’t anticipated building a front window in their home. In the first two years, they’d made do with roller shutters as a façade, using a cut-out door for access. But an opportunity appeared in the shape of English Heritage and their local council, which offered them a grant to restore the exterior of their home to its original shop front. ‘It was sort of foisted upon us’, Meena explains. ‘They wanted to portray this Victorian-village-shop style’, when in reality all the shop fronts on their road had been built in the 20th century. Despite having to bend the historical truth, it was nonetheless an opportunity they couldn’t turn down.
One immovable stipulation came with the grant: the restoration had to include a large window with double doors, in reference to this ‘Victorian’ façade. Tim and Meena used their influence, having both worked in architectural fields, to produce a front that was perhaps more reflective of a Brutalist design, but by using hardwood materials typical of 19th-century construction, they were able to slip through the loophole.
For the sake of privacy, once the restoration was complete, they placed a plywood screen to separate the window from their home, leaving a conspicuous metre-deep gap. This new-found dead space, looking out on to the road, provided endless amusement for the couple. ‘Sometimes we’d put all our wood in the window, another time all of our books, sometimes all our metal,’ Tim recalls with a smile. He’s a painter and sculptor in his own right, his studio occupying the hollowed-out basement that was once used to store fruit and veg. After a while, Tim began to put his own work in the window, standing on the opposite side of the road for a better view – ‘to get a critical distance,’ he jokes. And so Window135 was born.
The idea was simple: every week a new piece of art would take pride of place in the window. It was important that it was made available to as many artists as possible; ‘there’s so much focus on “the market” that no-one talks about the people who actually make the work,’ says Meena. The couple wanted to put art back in to the community, where it couldn’t be hidden away in a white, ticketed gallery space. Nowadays, one shouldn’t be surprised to pass Tim and Meena’s place and chance upon two people dancing in their shop-front window, smothering Vaseline on the glass; a week later, in that same window, one might spot a delicate curtain of broad beans strung from the ceiling – all traces of Vaseline removed. An artist is given full rein for a fortnight, as long as they provide two pieces, ‘to keep things fresh’, Meena says. They’re always open to anyone who reaches out with an idea. Their next artist is Edgar Avila from Paris. ‘We’ve never met and we don’t know what he’s making’, the couple laugh, ‘but that’s a lovely thing too.’
There’s a quiet anonymity to the shop-front window, despite looking out on to a busy road. Tim and Meena seem to enjoy this contradiction. ‘It’s ridiculous, really, because the window is permanently on show to thousands of people yet at the same time remains somehow invisible.’ But that’s not to say it goes entirely unnoticed. They frequently receive notes through their door containing anecdotes of people’s interactions with the rotating display. Meena takes out a piece of paper from 2024 that reads: ‘Ecstatic that you’re still exhibiting. Visiting the area for the first time since leaving in 2009.’
It’s an enormous amount of work, but after speaking with Tim and Meena, one quickly senses that nothing about it feels like labour to them. Even after 20 years, it’s still just as exciting as when they were messing about putting their pots and pans in the window.
Find out more about Window135 on Tim and Meena’s website, window135.com
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