Small Worlds of Archway

Exhibition on display in the Caxton House Community Centre foyer (ground floor) throughout September and October 2026

Our Small Worlds of Archway exhibition features a collection of miniature scenes created by the Caxton House Craft Group to celebrate the streets, shops, and spaces that make this corner of Islington home.

Created over 12 weeks, each diorama has been built by hand. Using paper, card, watercolour and paint, our makers have reimagined the local landmarks that shape their daily lives. For some this was their first time using a scalpel, working on 3D structures and learning the numerous other diorama techniques that formed their artwork. Laughing over cups of tea, while reading the horoscopes in the Metro, the group gradually built each layer of their creations. Countless hours were spent cutting, folding, painting and piecing, helping one another to add just the right detail on a shopfront or rooftop

The project was inspired by the intricate, playful and deeply personal work of artist Tirzah Garwood, whose own paper and mixed-media constructions captured the charm of everyday English life in miniature.

Even the frames have a story: Every diorama is housed in second hand picture frames that have been transformed into box frames, giving new life and purpose to discarded objects and new stories to familiar streets.

It felt fitting to mark Caxton House’s 50th Anniversary this way, by bringing people together, just as the Centre always has, to celebrate the streets and community around it, but now in miniature.

INSPIRED BY TIRZAH GARWOOD, 1908–1951

Eileen ‘Tirzah’ Garwood trained as a wood engraver in the 1920s before turning her hand to marbled paper, painting and to model-making, in her final years. From the mid-1940s she built small, richly detailed scenes of everyday life: a village baker’s shop, a garden, a family at tea, cut and layered from paper and card and set inside deep box frames of the kind once used by butterfly collectors. Playful, precise and full of affection for the ordinary, her miniature worlds turned the small stuff of home and high street into something worth treasuring. It is that same spirit of looking closely and making by hand, that set our Craft Group to work building the Small Worlds of Archway.