Pop down to The Cornershop

Some time ago I wrote about a project called The Cornershop, for which the artist Lucy Sparrow was seeking funding through Kickstarter to enable her to open an old-fashioned corner shop, of the kind which are sadly few and far between these days, but with all the items on sale made out of felt.

She managed to raise over £10,000 in donations, vastly exceeding her initial £2000 goal. I made a contribution myself, which entitled me to my very own soft tin in advance of the shop's opening. After getting in touch with Lucy and telling her all about my blog, and she very kindly offered to make me a special tin of corned beef - seen here in my kitchen, alongside a real tin. I like the fact that due to the stuffing inside it, it looks like it's bulging slightly, as if it's been languishing on the shelves of a corner shop for far too long.

Lucy spent seven months stitching together hundreds of items for the shop, which opened last Friday in a long-since closed premises just off Columbia Road in east London.

I had been following the regular updates she had been sending out during her months of preparation, so had some sense of the scale of the task she had taken on, but even so I was staggered when I visited on the opening night. The number of different items on display, and the amount of detail put into each one, is just incredible. It's mind-boggling to think how many hours of painstaking work must have gone into the project - and how much felt, too. Just about everything you could ever expect to find in a cornershop is here in soft form, and in fantastically vibrant colours - cleaning products, ice lollies, chocolate bars and sweets, tobacco, fruit and veg (with cute little faces on them), newspapers...and of course lots of tins. A fabulous array of tins. I was very happy indeed, and got a little trigger happy with my camera, as you can see:

 

 

 

 

 

There were long queues to get in on opening night, with a security person ensuring that it was one-in, one-out, and we all had to loop round the shop in single file rather than being able to browse at our own will. But there was free cake (real cake, that is, not made of felt), so you could hardly complain even if you'd wanted to. As it was, it has just given me a reason to go back and have another look around at a quieter time.

There was also a reporter and cameraman there from the digital TV station London Live, and as one of the original funders of the project through Kickstarter, I ended up being interviewed briefly with Lucy outside the shop, which was a good excuse for a shameless plug of this very blog.

Unfortunately my interview didn't make it up onto the London Live website, but you can see another one with Lucy from earlier in the evening, with me lurking in the background while I was looking around the shop (fortunately I had finished shovelling cake into my mouth by that point).

The Cornershop will be open every day until 31st August, from 10am to 7pm. All the items on display are for sale, but so that as many people as possible are able to see the fully-stocked shop, everything will remain in place for the month it is open, and you can place an order for whatever takes your fancy (either in person or online), which will be sent out in September. It wouldn't surprise me if everything did sell though, so if you think you'd like a pint of milk, box of cornflakes or even a pregnancy test kit made out of felt, you might want to get down there sooner rather than later. But it's such a fun idea, and so brilliantly realised, that even if you don't bag a tin of beans on your visit, I promise you'll leave having felt it was worth it...