Havering London will shortly launch two significant new public artworks by the acclaimed artists Richard Woods and the artist duo Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan. Delivered under the strategic leadership of Havering London, the commissions represent an important moment in the borough’s evolving cultural identity. Installed across green spaces and civic sites, the works respond to Havering’s layered histories, architectural character and expansive landscapes.
The first artwork to be unveiled will be Woods’ Upright Timbers, a constellation of fifteen vertical forms created for Havering’s green spaces. These playful sculptures are based on processed timber stock typically found in commercial builders’ yards, yet they are fabricated in aluminium and finished with brightly coloured powder-coated woodgrain. The result is both playful and subtly disorienting: industrially manufactured objects that simulate organic material. Woods’ practice has long operated in this territory between authenticity and artifice. Since the 1990s, the artist – trained at the Slade School of Fine Art – has resurfaced buildings, interiors and everyday objects with exaggerated decorative patterns drawn from vernacular materials such as woodgrain, brickwork and dry-stone walling. His works adopt a cartoon-like clarity that references DIY culture and domestic improvement, while quietly questioning assumptions about material truth.
“I see the works in a similar way as a trip to the timber yard; that wood is displayed in manageable workable chunks. It is important therefore that the totem works then get placed back amongst the landscape...back amongst growing trees.”– Richard Woods
As Woods explains: “I see the works in a similar way as a trip to the timber yard; that wood is displayed in manageable workable chunks. It is important therefore that the totem works then get placed back amongst the landscape…back amongst growing trees.” In Havering, Upright Timbers establishes a particularly resonant dialogue with the borough’s architectural evolution, which traces a trajectory from royal manor and market town to railway suburb and post-war modern borough. This layered history is especially visible in Gidea Park. Created in 1911 as the Romford Garden Suburb, it was conceived as an ‘ideal’ estate in which architectural individuality, craft detailing and landscaped domesticity could coexist. Influenced by Arts and Crafts principles and the legacy of William Morris, the development privileged expressive timbering, decorative brickwork and a strong integration between house and garden. In 1934, the estate hosted a Modern Homes Exhibition that introduced flat roofs, smooth render and stripped- back geometries, signalling a shift from handcrafted surface to modernist rationality and standardisation.
It is precisely this oscillation between craft and modernity, ornament and reduction, authenticity and stylisation that Woods draws upon. His exaggerated woodgrain recalls the Arts and Crafts reverence for natural material and repeated pattern-making – particularly wallpaper design – collapsing organic motifs into graphic surface. In this sense, Upright Timbers operates not simply as sculpture in landscape but as a conceptual return of manufactured timber to suburban woodland, mirroring Havering’s own transformation from rural territory to designed environment.
A related interrogation of architecture, surface and spatial language underpins the second public artwork by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan. Emerging from Glasgow’s vibrant art scene in the late 1990s, the duo has developed a practice spanning sculpture, performance, installation and publishing. Their work frequently examines the institutional and architectural frameworks through which art is presented and understood, engaging critically with codes of authority and display. Site-specific projects for venues including Studio Voltaire in London, Quiantan in Shanghai and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle demonstrate their sensitivity to context and their ability to inhabit space with works that question the structures of the built environment.
Their artwork for Havering, The Future Now, takes the form of a sculptural clock tower clad in richly coloured handmade tiles. The work pays homage to the decorative rooflines, expressive chimneys and textured brickwork of Romford’s Gidea Park estate. Gidea Park’s importance in British architectural history lies in its carefully orchestrated relationship between house and garden. The early Arts and Crafts houses translated ideals of craftsmanship and material honesty into a middle-class commuter landscape, while later modernist interventions introduced abstraction and efficiency. This historical tension between ornament and rationalism resonates strongly with Tatham and O’Sullivan’s longstanding interest in the relationship between decorative language and structural form. The Future Now is both functional and sculptural. It recalls civic timepieces that punctuate town centres, yet its patterned surface and brick construction anchor it firmly within the domestic vernacular of the area. In an urban environment such as Romford, loaded with commercial signage and civic messaging, the work operates simultaneously as object and commentary, drawing attention to the ways public space is organised and communicated.
Together, these two commissions articulate a broader ambition within Havering London’s cultural strategy: to reintroduce art and craftsmanship into the public realm not merely as embellishment but as infrastructure. Cultural policy often frames public art as a driver of economic resilience, social cohesion or place- branding. While such narratives can risk reducing artistic practice to measurable outcomes, the selection of artists with conceptually rigorous approaches signals a commitment to maintaining critical integrity. In outer London boroughs such as Havering, cultural investment can counter narratives of marginality by asserting creative ambition beyond central London institutions. Public artworks become markers of civic confidence, yet their enduring value lies less in branding than in everyday encounters.
Richard Woods’ engagement with green space unsettles assumptions about authenticity and representation within constructed landscapes, while Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan’s intervention in the urban fabric probes how authority and temporality are inscribed in architectural form. Each commission stages a dialogue between past and present, craft and modernity, nature and design. By foregrounding the political, ecological and social dimensions of place, Havering London positions culture not as peripheral to development but as central to shaping lived experience. In doing so, these artworks suggest that the construction of ‘a good life’ is inseparable from the cultural imagination through which space is conceived, negotiated and shared.