An Artist's 500-Year-Old Manor House That's Been Left Untouched

Sophie Wilson doesn’t do perfect. When we first spoke to the artist and founder of 1690 Store about making a film about life in Crowland Manor, the tumbledown house she and three of her children have called home 2014, she warned us that we would have to “take us as you find us”. “We live alongside history here,” she continued, “rather than moving away from it.”

As well as paying heed to the lives she feels have gone before here by allowing the jumbled joy of life to play out against this positively un-perfect building, Sophie’s work plays into this too. Sophie’s handsome sgraffito-slipware ceramics – terracotta salt boxes, butter dishes and chargers, all made by hand in a requisitioned scullery beside the kitchen – are poetic expressions of the tug of history she feels here, often inscribed with literary bon mots and bygone rhymes.

When it comes to her children, “I think they’re beginning to understand the value of this building’s authenticity,” she says. Sophie herself needs no convincing. however. “I think because it’s so wonky and flawed, it’s a human place. It’s very close to being human… And so it’s easy to love.” In fact, everything Sophie says comes back to love. “I’ve always thought this house is the love of my life.” So what about the future, then, when life inevitably shifts and priorities change? Sophie is unsurprisingly sanguine. “I would leave this house for love, but nothing else.”

Film: James Coyle
Stills photography: Elliot Sheppard
Interview: Grace McCloud
Production: Hannah Phillips and Harry Cave
Graphic design: Tom Young

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