Mark Leckey & Arthur Jafa summon ghosts into an ever-shifting
shopping centre
Two seminal moving image artworks come together in the
unlikely setting of a run-down shopping centre in Croydon, South London. Works
by Mark Leckey & Arthur Jafa take over a former electronics store in the Whitgift
Centre, a project organised by gallerist Gavin Brown with local affordable
studio provider, Conditions. Ellie Brown went along to think not only about
the works, but also their meaning when extracted from a gallery setting &
repositioned into a space awaiting demolition.
Outside
the Whitgift Centre in Croydon, bright green signs affixed to lampposts point in
the general direction of HARDCORE / LOVE, an exhibition which takes its name
from two video works on show: Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me
Hardcore (1999) and Arthur Jafa's Love Is The
Message, The Message Is Death (2016). Staged in a former electronics
store within the shopping centre, the exhibition brings these pivotal video
works to Croydon’s late 1960s shopping centre with rich context.
![]()
![]()
Entering the Whitgift Centre from Croydon’s North End, the emptiness of the centre is immediately striking. Orange traffic barriers cordon off an unused set of escalators, while green scaffold netting suspends a clear view of the glazed atrium. A café seating area outside the former Allders department store remains sectioned off by a wood and glass partition, the tables and chairs that once filled the space long gone. The nostalgia-tinged aesthetic of the ‘dead mall’ phenomenon has crept into the British psyche in recent years, a term that originated in North America, where suburban malls have fallen into decline and disrepair over the past three decades. This makes it easy to see the Whitgift Centre as yet another example of commercial decline – yet, HARDCORE / LOVE forces the visitor to see the space of the shopping centre along different lines.
For sure, shopping centres across Britain are currently littered with empty shops and a wander around the Whitgift Centre in search of HARDCORE / LOVE confirms that there is no exception here. Amongst the vacated retail units – demarcated by shuttered grilles or closing down sale signs left hanging in window displays – an ever-dwindling number of retailers operate. The Japanese-inspired clothing company, Superdry, is a recent casualty: the wood panelling and glazed frontage often used by the retailer for its storefront design in shopping centres and on high streets the only indication that it once occupied a prominent, three-storey unit in the Whitgift Centre’s main square. Banners advertising a clearance sale at fashion retailer New Look indicate that this might be next.
![]()
![]()
But in other ways, the Whitgift Centre is far from empty. Shoppers mill about with shopping bags, people meander through the interior spaces, and benches are occupied by those who sit to eat, chat, take a call, or watch life in the centre quietly go by. If many large retailers have ceased to operate shops in the Whitgift Centre, smaller, alternative spaces have sprung up in their place – with a recognisable a shift towards the opening of new arts and cultural spaces and community initiatives that many shopping have, in recent years, turned towards (see also 00228 & 00137).
A clothing repair café operates out of unit, as does the Windrush Generation Legacy Association charity, and in recent months, a veg stall opened inside the shopping centre. A security guard helpfully points the direction of HARDCORE / LOVE, located in a quiet area of the centre, near retail units occupied by Turf Projects, a Croydon-based artist-run studio space that has operated out of the Whitgift Centre since 2017, as is Pollock’s Toy Museum, forced out of its former Fitzrovia premises in 2023.
HARDCORE / LOVE is easily identifiable by the green fascia that hangs above the unit in the same bright hue as the signs outside the shopping centre – an ode not to Brat, but to the green brick former bicycle factory building in North Croydon used by Conditions, a low-budget studio and alternative arts education programme for artists. Founded in 2018 by artists Matthew Noel-Tod and David Panos, Conditions provides affordable studio space and arts programming to equip an annual cohort of artists and practitioners with resources at a time when many have been priced out of the capital.
![]()
fig.v
In this regard, HARDCORE / LOVE marks a departure from the kinds of exhibitions and events that Conditions more typically run. Both Leckey and Jafa are established artists – the former was recipient of the 2008 Turner Prize and the latter won the 2019 Venice Biennale Golden Lion. Instead, HARDCORE / LOVE was born out of a discussion with New York-based gallerist – and Croydon native – Gavin Brown, in order to raise the profile of Conditions. In any case, the screening of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death is well-suited to the unconventional gallery setting of the shopping centre: both works hover between art and popular culture, combining music, video, and found footage to dissect broader issues such as class and race, respectively.
Inside the former electronics unit, two side-by-side flyposters are pasted onto a white wall. The same graphics have been put up around Croydon and loosely reference rave posters of yore: as Noel-Tod explained to Uncle (the flyposting advertising agency behind the campaign), such posters “often state a place, but no specific address, so you have to find it yourself.”[i]
![]()
![]()
Once inside HARDCORE / LOVE, however, an attendant is on hand to direct visitors into the exhibition with the aid of a torch. Behind the white wall, the space has been entirely blacked out, with two screens at either end of the room that creates a dialogue between Leckey and Jafa’s works. During brighter moments of either work, the screen has the effect of illuminating the otherwise pitch-black environment, offering glimpses of the remnants of suspended ceiling tiles, mostly punched out, that would have once concealed wiring and circulation pipes from shoppers.
In Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Leckey uses found footage of an evolving British nightlife in the late twentieth century, from the emergence of Northern Soul in the late 1960s and culminating with ’90s rave culture. Footage of the latter has contributed to Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’s entrance into a cultural lexicon of British youth culture, buoyed on by a nostalgia for the rave scene in recent years. In combining clips of Northen Soul dancers and Acid House revellers over time, Leckey forces the viewer to query this nostalgic longing and to question the loss of space for social gathering and community. For example, Wigan Casino, a mecca of Northern Soul, closed in 1981 when the council declined to renew the venue’s lease in favour of comprehensive redevelopment. Though these expansion plans ultimately did not go ahead, a shopping centre was built on the site of the nightclub in 2007.
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
In a different way, Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death dissects the plurality of Black American life. Jafa splices together his own footage with clips gleaned from the late nineteenth century to the present day, taken from films, news broadcasts, sports events, and phone footage off social media in order to present a rich, wide-ranging, and at times harrowing, account of the Black experience. Jafa contrasts footage of police brutality and violence against Black people with footage that captures a richness and diversity of everyday life – Jafa’s mother dancing, his daughter’s wedding – and of pivotal moments in recent history taken from political, cultural, and sporting life, such as footage of Martin Luther King, The Notorious B. I. G., and Serena Williams, amongst many.
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
In the almost ten years since Jafa made Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death it has, like the afterlife of Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, taken on new significances. For example, the video is set to Kanye West’s 2016 track Ultralight Beam – a song by an artist whose antisemitic and right wing actions in recent years undoubtedly complicate the message. In using montage, Jafa forces the viewer to assess our relationship with the past through a jarring confrontation with historic and present atrocities.
HARDCORE / LOVE shows the kind of mid-late twentieth century world in which the shopping centre, as a new kind of architectural form, blossomed. In different ways, Leckey and Jafa examine the commercialisation of social and racial identity to the detriment to collective belonging. The commercialisation of space, through the construction of shopping centres like the Whitgift Centre, has played its part in this.
In the context of viewing Jafa’s work within a shopping centre, what comes to mind is the racism deeply ingrained within the framework of the mall model: designed to accommodate a primarily white, suburban consumer, the proliferation of the mall emerged as part of a post-war segregation along consumer lines (by contrast, the urban location of the British shopping centres somewhat mitigates this, though the policing of non-white consumers cannot be underemphasised).
In one brief clip used by Leckey that works as a segue between footage of Northen Soul to rave, the camera’s operator records pedestrians and shoppers walking through an open-air shopping precinct at point from the 1970s. Where this documented precinct is located is not clear, but it bears a passing resemble to the Croydon shopping centre in which HARDCORE / LOVE is on show. From the present day, this is hard to see, but the Whitgift Centre was built around the turn of the 1970s as an open-air shopping development. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the shopping centre underwent a significant renovation, during which the precinct was fully enclosed with the addition of a glazed roof and reimagined along a Neo-Victoriana theme. But echoes – or, ghosts, to take from the Leckey playbook[ii] – linger on in the Whitgift Centre.
![]()
![]()
It is not difficult to trace a post-war vision for an improved urban experience onto the floorplan of the Whitgift Centre: it was designed to provide covered spaces to meet, to sit, and to shop. The reality is that, over the years, the latter has successfully supplanted this more civic intention. The original surfaces of the centre have long since been upgraded, from weather-proof paving slabs to shiny checkerboard tiles – as Croydon-born writer John Grindrod writes of the centre’s redevelopment: “Frumpy, functional Rosa Klebb had been given a makeover and was emerging as flouncy, fairytale Princess Di … the future being tarted up as the past.”[iii]
Emerging from the exhibition, it is hard not to see the Whitgift Centre with fresh eyes. The future of the Croydon’s shopping centre has hung in the balance since 2013, when plans were unveiled to transform the site into a Westfield Centre on a scale akin to the retail conglomerate’s outposts in Stratford and White City. These plans were delayed and eventually scuppered, firstly because of Brexit and then the pandemic. Instead, five years on, the shopping centre will be demolished and the site redeveloped – still by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield – into new residential, commercial, and cultural space.
The shift from mall to mixed-use underscores the developer’s admission that the extent of retail development in the twentieth and twenty-first century went “too far”.[iv] One could have visited HARDCORE / LOVE – an exhibition which underscores the plurality of social life in all its richness and diversity – and arrived at a similar conclusion.
[i] “Conditions Studio”, Uncle (July 2025), www.manfromuncle.info/features/conditions-studio
figs.i,ii
Entering the Whitgift Centre from Croydon’s North End, the emptiness of the centre is immediately striking. Orange traffic barriers cordon off an unused set of escalators, while green scaffold netting suspends a clear view of the glazed atrium. A café seating area outside the former Allders department store remains sectioned off by a wood and glass partition, the tables and chairs that once filled the space long gone. The nostalgia-tinged aesthetic of the ‘dead mall’ phenomenon has crept into the British psyche in recent years, a term that originated in North America, where suburban malls have fallen into decline and disrepair over the past three decades. This makes it easy to see the Whitgift Centre as yet another example of commercial decline – yet, HARDCORE / LOVE forces the visitor to see the space of the shopping centre along different lines.
For sure, shopping centres across Britain are currently littered with empty shops and a wander around the Whitgift Centre in search of HARDCORE / LOVE confirms that there is no exception here. Amongst the vacated retail units – demarcated by shuttered grilles or closing down sale signs left hanging in window displays – an ever-dwindling number of retailers operate. The Japanese-inspired clothing company, Superdry, is a recent casualty: the wood panelling and glazed frontage often used by the retailer for its storefront design in shopping centres and on high streets the only indication that it once occupied a prominent, three-storey unit in the Whitgift Centre’s main square. Banners advertising a clearance sale at fashion retailer New Look indicate that this might be next.
figs.iii,iv
But in other ways, the Whitgift Centre is far from empty. Shoppers mill about with shopping bags, people meander through the interior spaces, and benches are occupied by those who sit to eat, chat, take a call, or watch life in the centre quietly go by. If many large retailers have ceased to operate shops in the Whitgift Centre, smaller, alternative spaces have sprung up in their place – with a recognisable a shift towards the opening of new arts and cultural spaces and community initiatives that many shopping have, in recent years, turned towards (see also 00228 & 00137).
A clothing repair café operates out of unit, as does the Windrush Generation Legacy Association charity, and in recent months, a veg stall opened inside the shopping centre. A security guard helpfully points the direction of HARDCORE / LOVE, located in a quiet area of the centre, near retail units occupied by Turf Projects, a Croydon-based artist-run studio space that has operated out of the Whitgift Centre since 2017, as is Pollock’s Toy Museum, forced out of its former Fitzrovia premises in 2023.
HARDCORE / LOVE is easily identifiable by the green fascia that hangs above the unit in the same bright hue as the signs outside the shopping centre – an ode not to Brat, but to the green brick former bicycle factory building in North Croydon used by Conditions, a low-budget studio and alternative arts education programme for artists. Founded in 2018 by artists Matthew Noel-Tod and David Panos, Conditions provides affordable studio space and arts programming to equip an annual cohort of artists and practitioners with resources at a time when many have been priced out of the capital.
fig.v
In this regard, HARDCORE / LOVE marks a departure from the kinds of exhibitions and events that Conditions more typically run. Both Leckey and Jafa are established artists – the former was recipient of the 2008 Turner Prize and the latter won the 2019 Venice Biennale Golden Lion. Instead, HARDCORE / LOVE was born out of a discussion with New York-based gallerist – and Croydon native – Gavin Brown, in order to raise the profile of Conditions. In any case, the screening of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death is well-suited to the unconventional gallery setting of the shopping centre: both works hover between art and popular culture, combining music, video, and found footage to dissect broader issues such as class and race, respectively.
Inside the former electronics unit, two side-by-side flyposters are pasted onto a white wall. The same graphics have been put up around Croydon and loosely reference rave posters of yore: as Noel-Tod explained to Uncle (the flyposting advertising agency behind the campaign), such posters “often state a place, but no specific address, so you have to find it yourself.”[i]
figs.vi,vii
Once inside HARDCORE / LOVE, however, an attendant is on hand to direct visitors into the exhibition with the aid of a torch. Behind the white wall, the space has been entirely blacked out, with two screens at either end of the room that creates a dialogue between Leckey and Jafa’s works. During brighter moments of either work, the screen has the effect of illuminating the otherwise pitch-black environment, offering glimpses of the remnants of suspended ceiling tiles, mostly punched out, that would have once concealed wiring and circulation pipes from shoppers.
In Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Leckey uses found footage of an evolving British nightlife in the late twentieth century, from the emergence of Northern Soul in the late 1960s and culminating with ’90s rave culture. Footage of the latter has contributed to Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’s entrance into a cultural lexicon of British youth culture, buoyed on by a nostalgia for the rave scene in recent years. In combining clips of Northen Soul dancers and Acid House revellers over time, Leckey forces the viewer to query this nostalgic longing and to question the loss of space for social gathering and community. For example, Wigan Casino, a mecca of Northern Soul, closed in 1981 when the council declined to renew the venue’s lease in favour of comprehensive redevelopment. Though these expansion plans ultimately did not go ahead, a shopping centre was built on the site of the nightclub in 2007.
figs.viii-xiii
In a different way, Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death dissects the plurality of Black American life. Jafa splices together his own footage with clips gleaned from the late nineteenth century to the present day, taken from films, news broadcasts, sports events, and phone footage off social media in order to present a rich, wide-ranging, and at times harrowing, account of the Black experience. Jafa contrasts footage of police brutality and violence against Black people with footage that captures a richness and diversity of everyday life – Jafa’s mother dancing, his daughter’s wedding – and of pivotal moments in recent history taken from political, cultural, and sporting life, such as footage of Martin Luther King, The Notorious B. I. G., and Serena Williams, amongst many.
figs.xiv-xvii
In the almost ten years since Jafa made Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death it has, like the afterlife of Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, taken on new significances. For example, the video is set to Kanye West’s 2016 track Ultralight Beam – a song by an artist whose antisemitic and right wing actions in recent years undoubtedly complicate the message. In using montage, Jafa forces the viewer to assess our relationship with the past through a jarring confrontation with historic and present atrocities.
HARDCORE / LOVE shows the kind of mid-late twentieth century world in which the shopping centre, as a new kind of architectural form, blossomed. In different ways, Leckey and Jafa examine the commercialisation of social and racial identity to the detriment to collective belonging. The commercialisation of space, through the construction of shopping centres like the Whitgift Centre, has played its part in this.
In the context of viewing Jafa’s work within a shopping centre, what comes to mind is the racism deeply ingrained within the framework of the mall model: designed to accommodate a primarily white, suburban consumer, the proliferation of the mall emerged as part of a post-war segregation along consumer lines (by contrast, the urban location of the British shopping centres somewhat mitigates this, though the policing of non-white consumers cannot be underemphasised).
In one brief clip used by Leckey that works as a segue between footage of Northen Soul to rave, the camera’s operator records pedestrians and shoppers walking through an open-air shopping precinct at point from the 1970s. Where this documented precinct is located is not clear, but it bears a passing resemble to the Croydon shopping centre in which HARDCORE / LOVE is on show. From the present day, this is hard to see, but the Whitgift Centre was built around the turn of the 1970s as an open-air shopping development. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the shopping centre underwent a significant renovation, during which the precinct was fully enclosed with the addition of a glazed roof and reimagined along a Neo-Victoriana theme. But echoes – or, ghosts, to take from the Leckey playbook[ii] – linger on in the Whitgift Centre.
figs.xviii,xix
It is not difficult to trace a post-war vision for an improved urban experience onto the floorplan of the Whitgift Centre: it was designed to provide covered spaces to meet, to sit, and to shop. The reality is that, over the years, the latter has successfully supplanted this more civic intention. The original surfaces of the centre have long since been upgraded, from weather-proof paving slabs to shiny checkerboard tiles – as Croydon-born writer John Grindrod writes of the centre’s redevelopment: “Frumpy, functional Rosa Klebb had been given a makeover and was emerging as flouncy, fairytale Princess Di … the future being tarted up as the past.”[iii]
Emerging from the exhibition, it is hard not to see the Whitgift Centre with fresh eyes. The future of the Croydon’s shopping centre has hung in the balance since 2013, when plans were unveiled to transform the site into a Westfield Centre on a scale akin to the retail conglomerate’s outposts in Stratford and White City. These plans were delayed and eventually scuppered, firstly because of Brexit and then the pandemic. Instead, five years on, the shopping centre will be demolished and the site redeveloped – still by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield – into new residential, commercial, and cultural space.
The shift from mall to mixed-use underscores the developer’s admission that the extent of retail development in the twentieth and twenty-first century went “too far”.[iv] One could have visited HARDCORE / LOVE – an exhibition which underscores the plurality of social life in all its richness and diversity – and arrived at a similar conclusion.
[i] “Conditions Studio”, Uncle (July 2025), www.manfromuncle.info/features/conditions-studio
[ii] Finn Constantine, The Exchange with Arthur Jafa and Mark Leckey: “I always
say I’m an undertake, I’m interested in where the bodies are buried”, Plaster(2 July 2025) www.plastermagazine.com/features/the-exchange-arthur-jafa-mark-leckey-conversation-ica-london
[iii] John Grindrod, Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar
Britain (2013)
[iv] Sam Chambers, Westfield chief Jean-Marie Tritant: Online can’t beat real
shops, in The Times (30 October 2022) www.thetimes.com/business-money/article/westfield-chief-jean-marie-tritant-online-cant-beat-real-shops-5fp5hnb06
Arthur Jafa (American, b. 1960) is an artist, filmmaker and
cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice
comprising films, artifacts and happenings that reference and question the
universal and specific articulations of black being.
In 2019, the jury for the 58th Venice Biennale presented its
Golden Lion award to Jafa, recognised as best participant for the film The
White Album. His films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York, and
Black Star Film Festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated
collections worldwide including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of
Modern Art, Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in
Harlem, High Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, MCA Chicago, The Stedelijk
Museum Amsterdam, Luma Foundation, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden and at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
www.spruethmagers.com/artists/arthur-jafa
Mark Leckey (b.1964, Birkenhead) is known for his innovative
work at the intersection of video, sound and popular culture or even punk
subculture. Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2008, he explores themes
linked to memory, technology and the impact of cultural objects on our
identities.
His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions,
including Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2025); Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo
(2024); Sant'Andrea de Scaphis, Rome (2022); Tate Britain, London (2019-2020);
Glasgow International, Glasgow (2018); Cubitt, London (2017); SMK, Copenhagen
(2017); MoMA PS1, New York (2016-2017); Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2016);
Cabinet, London (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
(2015); WIELS, Brussels (2014); Hayward Gallery Touring (The Bluecoat,
Liverpool; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; De La Warr Pavilion,
Bexhill-on-Sea) (2013); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); The Banff
Center, Banff (2012) ; Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Gavin Brown's
enterprise, New York (2010); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2009); Le
Consortium, Dijon (2008); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2003).
His work can be found in numerous public collections,
including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;
Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
www.markleckey.com
Conditions is a low-cost studio programme for artists. The
project is an artist-run studio space in Spencer Place, Croydon, used for
production, development, exhibitions and events, started in 2018 by Matthew
Noel-Tod and David Panos. Conditions has also used short term spaces in the
Whitgift Centre, Croydon. Conditions are currently fundraising to ensure its
sustainability for the future.
www.conditions.studio
Ellie Brown is
a writer, editor and researcher. She recently completed a PhD in architectural and design history, looking at the development of British shopping centres in the 1970s. Her writing focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary art, culture and design.
www.emadeleinebrown.com
His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2025); Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo (2024); Sant'Andrea de Scaphis, Rome (2022); Tate Britain, London (2019-2020); Glasgow International, Glasgow (2018); Cubitt, London (2017); SMK, Copenhagen (2017); MoMA PS1, New York (2016-2017); Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2016); Cabinet, London (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2015); WIELS, Brussels (2014); Hayward Gallery Touring (The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea) (2013); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); The Banff Center, Banff (2012) ; Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York (2010); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2009); Le Consortium, Dijon (2008); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2003).
His work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
www.markleckey.com
Conditions is a low-cost studio programme for artists. The project is an artist-run studio space in Spencer Place, Croydon, used for production, development, exhibitions and events, started in 2018 by Matthew Noel-Tod and David Panos. Conditions has also used short term spaces in the Whitgift Centre, Croydon. Conditions are currently fundraising to ensure its sustainability for the future.
www.conditions.studio
Ellie Brown is
a writer, editor and researcher. She recently completed a PhD in architectural and design history, looking at the development of British shopping centres in the 1970s. Her writing focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary art, culture and design.
www.emadeleinebrown.com
visit
fig.i
Wellesley Road entrance of Whitgift Centre (2017).
© HzH. Used under Creative Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whitgift_Centre_-_Wellesley_Road_entrance.jpg
fig.ii Sed consequat ante eget magna rhoncus ultricies laoreet sit amet odio. © Lorem Ipsum
images
fig.i
Wellesley Road entrance of Whitgift Centre (2017).
© HzH. Used under Creative Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whitgift_Centre_-_Wellesley_Road_entrance.jpg
fig.ii Whitgift Centre, Croydon (2018). © Matt Brown. Used under Creative Commons. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/londonmatt/43708983392
fig.iii Allders Square, Whitgift Centre (2022).
© diamond geezer. Used under Creative Commons. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/52301747811
fig.iv Superdry, Croydon, London CR0 (2012).
© Kake. Used under Creative Commons. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kake_pugh/7760178042
fig.v Conditions Whitgift Centre spac,
featuring work by Kate Paul. Courtesy Conditions.
fig.vi
Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016). Installation view, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
(November 12 – December 17, 2016). Photo by Thomas Müller.
Courtesy
of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Sprüth Magers, Sadie Coles HQ. © Arthur Jafa.
fig.vii
Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London (May 19 –
June 26, 2011). © 2011 Mark Blower.
figs.viii-xiii Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me
Hardcore, 1999, Video. Credit: Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery,
Cabinet Gallery, Galerie Buchholz.
figs.xiv-xvii
Arthur Jafa, Love is the
Message, The Message is Death, 2016, Video. Credit: Courtesy of the artist,
Gladstone Gallery, Sprüth Magers, Sadie Coles HQ.
fig.xviii
Whitgift Centre, Croydon, UK, in 1976 (2018).
© John Shepherd. Used under Creative Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whitgift_Centre,_Croydon,_1976.jpg
fig.xix The Whitgift Centre, Croydon (1990).
© Dr Neil Clifton. Used under Creative Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Whitgift_Centre,_Croydon_-_geograph.org.uk_-_694473.jpg
publication date
29 July 2025
tags
Ellie Brown, Gavin Brown, Commerce, Conditions, Croydon, Demolition, John Grindrod, Arthur Jafa, Mark Leckey, Rave, Redevelopment, Shops, Shopping Centre, Uncle, Whitgift Centre
fig.ii Sed consequat ante eget magna rhoncus ultricies laoreet sit amet odio. © Lorem Ipsum
