The built environment and social & economic infrastructure of east London is continually changing quickly. For Trading Places three artists with strong personal connections to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, reflected on the changing nature of east London and presented a challenging new perspective into the past and future of this area.

Going back hundreds of years, the thoroughfare Norton Folgate has been home to numerous small businesses with connections to trade routes reaching around the world. Gillian Wearing, Peter Liversidge and Adham Faramawy made new works about this important cultural story in east London and its complex networks of international trade and migration.

Adham Faramawy created an advert that questions the part digital images play in the shifting nature of commerce in Tower Hamlets. Peter Liversidge has reconstructed the façade of Baker and Sons, once a family run butcher shop at 37 Norton Folgate from around 1910. Gillian Wearing has paid homage to Taj Stores, one of the UK’s first Bengali grocery shops, founded in the Brick Lane area in 1936 and still thriving today.

The Trading Places commission is supported by British Land.