Supermarket ruins: exploring heritage through visual storytelling

This visual essay presents outcomes from a cross-disciplinary collaborative live brief for illustration animation students, in partnership with TETRARCHs (UCL) and Recycle Archaeology: Supermarket Ruins.

The project focuses on how student illustrators make sense of, and find meaning in archaeological datasets. Students explored the discovery and reinterpretation of a medieval bridge and undercroft buried beneath a John Lewis store in Kingston town centre, remnants of which were unearthed during 1980s excavations and re-exhibited in a community art space nearby on the banks of the River Thames.

Although the physical site has been partially reactivated, the accompanying archival materials remain largely inaccessible to the public, housed at the London Museum Archaeological Archive.

TETRARCHs (UCL) studies creative research methods and processes for meaning making in relation to archival material. Outputs from this project support its mission to re-enchant archaeological data and to gain a greater understanding of how people interpret the data in diverse ways. This was their first experience working with Illustration Animation Students.

Through workshops, field trips, archival and material engagement, students researched Kingston’s ‘supermarket ruins’ using archaeological material as a catalyst for generating new perspectives of our changing townscapes. This visual essay reflects on the outcomes and how interdisciplinary creative practice, and the use of deselected archaeological artefacts, can reframe heritage as a collaborative process, reanimating everyday ruins as catalysts for storytelling, community engagement and placemaking.