Luap and his bear

FOR more than 100 years, Hampstead police station existed to keep things in rather than out.

It was a place of law and order, rather than rule-breaking and creativity. The police cells with their subterranean feel were the last places people want to visit.

However, three artists are hoping to change that, as they get under way with an art show featuring a bear behind bars in a pink cell. An artist using the space, Eleanor Eagle, who lives in Hampstead Hill Gardens, has turned the old booking desk into a print table.

She said: “I was quite excited when I heard this had opened, as there’s no studio in this part of the world at all because property prices are so high.

“When I first came down into the cells it really gave me a shock, and I though about it for a while. A lot of people have been in here, and you have the Crimestoppers message in there asking them to shop their friends too, I think it’s awful.”

Despite living around the corner since the 1980s, she had only been in once when it was a functioning police station to report the family cat Sonny Jim, a half chinchilla half Persian tabby, missing during a storm.

Her work is inspired by the short walk to the police station from home and is named after the Ivor Cutler song “I’ve walked a hundred yards and I’m not the least bit tired”.

She said: “I am often just looking down at the pavement anyway because there is so many shapes but it changes throughout the seasons. The shapes have an emotional impression as well. I’ve walked past the police station hundreds of times when it was functioning.”

Eleanor Eagle

Hampstead police station was shut down in 2013 and later bought by the Department for Education with a view to turning it into a new home for Abacus primary school. This plan was turned down twice by Camden Council in a long-running dispute.

The building was then sold to a developer, Redington Capital, which plans to turn it into housing and offices. In the meantime, it’s being used by the Koppel Project Arts charity.

Another artist involved in the project Luap, whose real name is Paul Robinson, created the pink bear that has just returned from a trip to Mongolia where it was photographed alongside the country’s well-known eagle hunters.

It has been pictured behind bars symbolising the confines of the cell’s former use and also the restrictions mental health conditions can place on people.

The cell has been painted pink, with pink fur introduced on the old bed.

Jo de Banzie and, below, the old Hampstead police station

Luap said: “The pink element represents the brain and the inside of the brain, where people want to be safe, which mixes with the hardness and light of the cell, and obviously the bars will represent things that hold people back, in a cell that is built to confine them. With the pink it suddenly becomes a lot more joyful.

“I did start thinking about being in these environments and cells and was it helping rehabilitate people and their lives. I think it’s maybe something the police need to look at and how does it help change the direction of people’s lives.”

Another artist, Jo de Banzie, is producing photographs of the cells using the wet plate collodion process, a Victorian-era photography procedure, and her works focus on the experience of people who have been arrested and “the idea of waiting and the point between two states”.

The exhibition is due to open on November 24.