Ratcliffe Orchard

Maps Cabinet Verses


Conceptual urban design project and art installation exploring the history and current circumstances of the lost maritime village of Ratcliffe, near Limehouse in London. Investigations ranging from propaganda and surveillance to opium, Bengal and the English East India Company provoke a 'den of vice' to redefine the area.




Ratcliffe was once a maritime hamlet on the river Thames, long since subsumed by London's eastern expansion. Today the area is nondescript, a no-man's-land, home to part of the east end's enormous Bangladeshi Bengali population but without significant markers of this or any community presence. Few physical reminders of Ratcliffe's past remain. One relic is a single old warehouse, bearing the arms of the English East India Company, which stands between the river and the Highway.

One of many products with which the East India Company enjoyed great commerical success was opium, harvested from Bengali poppy fields and shipped raw to be processed and consumed by a vast and reluctantly-addicted Chinese market. As trade winds blew the bounty of empire back to London's docks, Ratcliffe became notorious for its Chinese influences, immigrants - and opium dens.

Bengal, China and Ratcliffe... bound by the ties of a drug trade enacted spectacularly by a single commercial body.

In the Ratcliffe Orchard this story is reinterpreted into a modern tale of exploitation. A Company will establish a development in the midst of today's Bengali population, on the same ground that has changed hands so poignantly already, to abuse and manipulate for profit and power.

Portsoken (Make Me A Viceroy) Blush and Haggard (from the album Vessels)




© No Spinoza
2008