We have recently been asked by Waitrose for information and photographs of us working on the huge set of tile panels we painted 25 years ago for their store on King’s Road in Chelsea, London. This is because the shop has been closed for two years whilst they do a huge refurbishment. It is re-opening in March 2023. We are going to make the effort to go and see them again.

So I thought I would share a bunch of old photographs we found and scanned for them. They are doing an information board in the shop about the history of the tiles.

Here is our story with Waitrose:

We used to do Chelsea Crafts Fair with the Crafts Council, situated in Chelsea Old Town Hall.

In October 1992 a member of the Waitrose Interior Design team (called Ruth) picked up our leaflet at the fair, for her own use.

She then heard that the company were looking for some new decorative tiles and took our leaflet along to a meeting.

After ringing us for some samples to be delivered to a meeting, the heads of Design and Interior Design both visited our house and studio in North London, to discuss ideas for panels in their shops that were about to be refurbished.

A couple of weeks later we went to the Waitrose headquarters in Victoria with some designs we had done. We got the job!

We produced designs for behind the fish and meat counters and the first five stores were completed in 1993 (Bury St Edmonds was our first).

We also produced tiles for the cafes in several stores.

In 1996 we were asked to paint a special large panel for the Putney store – this depicted the world with foods from all over the world. It was later relocated to Richmond.

Then in 1998 we were asked to produce designs for the King’s Road shop.

It was to be based on Chelsea, so we decided to do the design depicting some of the wonderful buildings and noteworthy people of the area.

This was pre-internet, so I went to London for 4 days. (By this time we were living in our present house in West Wales).I went to the local library to do some research, went to a few bookshops and bought books on the local history.

Then I spent three days just walking around taking lots and lots of photographs.

We came up with large scale designs for the whole wall, featuring seven landscapes and a multitude of pictures for the surrounding border.

Ed painted the large panels and I painted the surrounding pictures and border pattern.

The streets needed to be populated with people so Ed took the liberty of putting in some friends and family. My parents are even in there along with their dogs!

The tiles were installed in early 1999 and the shop re-opened shortly after.

Later the same year we were commissioned to produce a similar but smaller tile panel for their Marylebone High Street store entrance.

We continued to produce tiles for Waitrose until 2002, 9 years after they first approached us. They were wonderful clients.

It has been fun looking back – we painted tile panels for over 70 of their shops, as well as tiles for a large supermarket in the Bahamas and several fish outlets.

We would love to get more large scale tile commissions! It is the largest tile panel we have painted to date.

Here are a selection of photographs of us working on the commission in our old studio (which is now our living room.)

The finished result in situ: