In it’s 150th year of trading, J. A Braithwaite is a family owned and run independent business, a Tea and Coffee Merchant located on Castle Street, Dundee. The project seeks to carefully record the shop’s rich interior, a space that has evolved and adapted over time. The study seeks to sensitively capture the site as it is today, between it’s past, and before it’s future; and in doing so, to inform and enrich both. The timeline seeks to record the span of history the shop has traversed, through the prism of a single family, and business, in the context of a city, country and world.

In isolating the shop from its context through the act of drawing and writing, might we also be able to celebrate this space in isolation, as architectural form, as a stage set for life; set apart from history, politics, economics, trade and nostalgia, development and potential, and yet simultaneously and conversely, see the interior as symbolic to all of these. A product of now; a comma in time to inform and instruct in the narrative of Dundee.

This project came out of the opportunity to exhibit at nomas projects* in the city, and the subject matter came out of my desire to create work specific to the city, and attempt to see what could be revealed through the study of one space and place within it.