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Drawing Room/Tannery Arts CIO Unit 1b New Tannery Way Bermondsey London, SE1 5WS
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Tannery Arts is a small, independent charity concerned with supporting the professional development of emerging and established artists through the provision of affordable studios, promoting their practice through opportunities to exhibit work, develop projects, generate partnerships with local authorities, private property owners and social housing organisations as well as engage in learning activities.
Drawing Things Together was a six-month artist community residency (August–December 2025) with artists Leonie Rousham and Ishwari Bhalareo, the duo known as KNEED. https://kneed.info/
The residency began with listening, observing, and building on existing relationships. Working alongside Neighbourhood Connector Leila, the artists spent time understanding Bermondsey’s community landscape, how people connect, where support already exists, and how small businesses and local groups might better support one another.
From these conversations, a shared idea began to take shape.
The idea of condiments emerged as a central theme, symbolising preservation, change, and the layered histories of Bermondsey. It also connects directly to Drawing Room’s site, once a pickle factory. Chutney became both a practical and poetic way to bring people together: something that could be grown, made, shared, and talked about.
Throughout autumn and winter, the artists worked with Drawing Room, Schoolhouse Café, Big Local Works, The Blue Market, local allotments, traders, families, and community groups to make and share a chutney together.
Made from green tomatoes grown in nearby allotments, produce from independent shops, and preserved using vinegar once produced in this neighbourhood, the chutney became a way to share stories and spark conversations asking “What is growing? What is surplus? What histories do we carry—and what futures do we want to imagine?”
“This chutney—our Bermondsey Blue Chutney—draws from the distinct industrial history of Bermondsey and re-imagines a contemporary factory floor, owned by the people who live here.” – Kneed
The first batch of Green Tomato Chutneys was made with Schoolhouse Café and Chef Agnese. Additional ingredients came from St James Supermarket, which opened Bermondsey’s first 24-hour supermarket over 15 years ago.
This batch reflects the tastes, smells, plants, people, and stories of the neighbourhood, with the intention to continue producing seasonally based on local harvests across Southwark.
The artist’s hope is that this condiment becomes a way to feed value back into the local area—supporting local infrastructure and thinking collectively about community power.
Through workshops with children and families, participants brainstormed, drew, and collaged the ingredients that make up their neighbourhood, both the one that exists now and the one they’d like to live in.
Conversations ranged from forming relationships across fences and growing vegetables on windowsills, to stories of gardens, nature, spotting birds, and the need for safety, freedom, and joy. Many spoke about the lack of spaces for children and young people to simply be and have fun, especially in response to closures across the area.
The Risograph printed chutney jars in the window display grew directly from these sessions. A Year 5 class at Grange School created the jars at the front of the display, each one naming something they value and want to preserve, support, or bring to South Bermondsey.
Over the course of the residency, Drawing Things Together included:
A Saturday market stall pop-up at Bermondsey Blue “tastes of our neighbourhood”
A Family Studio Takeover in the Community Studio “the best chutney in the world”
A Half-Term Workshop in the Community Studio “Let make the best chutney in the world”
A Saturday Workshop in the Community Studio “welcome to the chutney factory”
A participatory market stall at the Drawing Room Winter Makers Market to distribute the first batch of chutney.
The residency resulted in both tangible outputs and longer-term community connections:
Bermondsey blue Chutney – made with Schoolhouse Café using surplus tomatoes from local allotments
A Riso-printed zine documenting the project, including research, recipes, and contributors
New and deepened connections across Bermondsey’s community and allotments
About the Artists
Kneed is a collaborative practice formed by artists Ishwari Bhalerao (b. Nagpur) and Leonie Rousham (b. London). Through sound, film, performance, text and textiles, they explore and articulate structural violence, hostile bureaucracy, collective histories and informal economies of care embedded within the ecologies and contexts they find themselves within. Their approach to making is collaborative, informed by walking, conversations, planned and chance encounters; with care workers, educators, artists, migrants and more. By probing at the postures of domination within language and image production, they attempt to complicate power relations ingrained in looking, listening, making and documenting.
With thanks to:
Inspiration from:
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