Recreating Paolozzi’s great Tottenham Court Road Mosaics
A look at the recent project to replace and repair the amazing Tottenham Court Road Mosaics designed by Eduardo Paolozzi.The history

The Crossrail Project
The building of a new major East-West rail link for London, Crossrail, will see the station growing further. Work on the new line began in 2009 and the intersection of Crossrail, Central Line, Northern Line meant that a number of the Paolozzi mosaic were demolished in the process. Unfortunately Transport For London (TFL) the current authority for London’s transport network, had already decided that large sections of the removed mosaics were not going to be replaced, in particular the great mosaic arches that spanned the escalators going down to the platforms. The remains of these were sent to Edinburgh School of Art. For a while it looked like the whole mosaic scheme was in danger of being demolished, thankfully TFL changed track on that and after a public campaign decided to preserve the rest of the mosaics.
The replacement mosaics
I was brought in by the main tiling contractor to recreate five of the Central Line panels that had been destroyed in the rearrangement works along with a number of smaller patch repairs to other damaged panels. This work was solely for the areas made in the Smalti piastrina plates. The first stage was to analyse records to see what had been there before, unfortunately, no one had taken proper photographs before the pieces were demolished, nor did they properly salvage the materials to either re-use or check the colours. luckily most of the work had been photographically surveyed some years earlier in 2007, though the colours were all distorted. Tracings of the in-situ damaged sections were taken in order to make the patches. This was a strange experience. Descending into the underground network in the middle of the night to be met with dark un-signposted tunnels, festoon lighting and everywhere construction workers in their bright orange overalls hammering and drilling was a little like going down a mine. Each section was carefully traced and annotated for colours. the tracings were then matched up with the digital archive so that the original missing tesserae could be drawn into the ‘void’. These tracings then went on to be transferred to the paper cartoons.
The Pop–Up Studio
Working out exactly which colours were needed and in what quantity was proving a big headache, increased by the difficulty of having to order from Italy. What we really needed was to have the whole stock of the factory just around the corner so we could just take material as we needed it. Then Giulia Vogrig, one of my studio team said “why not move the studio to Friuli”. At first it seemed a bit crazy but the more we discussed it the more obvious it seemed – set up a temporary studio near the Donå mosaic workshop and simply walk in and to buy just what we needed as we needed it.



Craft Skills Award 2016
The refurbishment of the Paolozzi Mosaics at Tottenham Court Road station on the London Underground has been awarded ‘The Great Western Railway Craft Skills Award from the National Railway Heritage Awards. The refurbishment of the historic mosaics included the making of five replacement panels and numerous patches in Smalti Piastrina by Drostle Public Arts Ltd.Worshipful Company of Tylers and Bricklayers Triennial Awards 2017
The Tottenham Court Road mosaic restoration project received the 2017 Trienniel award in the Wall and Floor Tiling category from the Worshipful Company of Tylers and Bricklayers.


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