Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life.
How do we preserve histories that were never meant to be remembered? What happens to queer cultural legacies when the institutions responsible for safeguarding them refuse to acknowledge their existence? The story of the House of Beauty and Culture (HOBAC), an experimental design collective that flourished briefly in 1980s London, offers a striking example of this erasure. Though their influence is evident in contemporary fashion and design, their legacy remains largely absent from institutional archives.
Founded in 1986 in Dalston—then a neglected, desolate part of East London—HOBAC operated less as a conventional business and more as a provocation. Their shop, when it opened at all, was a space of creative rebellion rather than commerce. The floor was scattered with loose change, a wry comment on the collective’s near-total lack of money. The artists and designers who formed HOBAC worked with salvaged materials, not only out of necessity but also as an aesthetic and political choice.
Their designs—ranging from shoes and jewellery to furniture and garments—reflected the precarious environment in which they were made. Thatcher’s Britain was a hostile place for those living on the margins, and the AIDS crisis loomed over queer communities, shaping every act of creation and survival. Yet within this climate of adversity, HOBAC’s members embraced a radical approach to design: collaborative, makeshift, and defiantly outside mainstream systems of production.
The Influence Without Recognition
HOBAC’s impact stretched far beyond its short-lived existence. It is said that Belgian designer Martin Margiela turned to deconstruction after visiting the collective’s shop. In 2015, Kim Jones, then the menswear designer at Louis Vuitton, cited HOBAC as a major influence, drawing inspiration from their aesthetic for a runway collection. Yet, despite their undeniable significance, the work of HOBAC’s members remains absent from the permanent collections of institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum or the Design Museum. In the official narratives of design history, they do not exist.
Some of HOBAC’s members are still remembered within fashion circles. John Moore, the founder and shoemaker, is revered for his innovative footwear. Judy Blame, a jeweller and stylist, went on to shape the visual identities of artists like Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack. Christopher Nemeth became known for his garments constructed from old postal sacks. But others have been largely forgotten.
The Overlooked Radicals
Among the least recognised are Alan MacDonald and Fritz Solomon, who worked under the name Frick & Frack. Their furniture appeared on the verge of collapse—chairs assembled from salvaged wood with seemingly insufficient support, lamps built from bent pipes that looked unstable. Their work was laced with humour: a table made from a stolen parking restriction sign, a chair seat fashioned from the cover of an old parking meter reading “NO: WAITING, LOADING, UNLOADING.”
A friend of the duo, artist Dave Baby, often added provocative carvings to their pieces. When Boy George commissioned a set of chairs and tables, Baby carved penises into the armrests. The price was steep—£4,000 at the time (approximately £11,700 today)—not because of the materials used, but because of the skill and labour involved.
Despite the absence of institutional recognition, many of Frick & Frack’s pieces remain in private homes decades later. Their work is often mistaken for that of Andy Marshall, better known as Andy the Furniture Maker, another artist working with salvaged materials in the same period. While a recently rediscovered documentary has revived interest in Marshall’s work, neither he nor Frick & Frack have found a place in the collections of major design museums.
Derek Jarman’s Experiments in Living
HOBAC’s erasure from cultural institutions mirrors that of another radical creator: Derek Jarman. While Jarman is widely remembered for his films, his writing, and his shingle garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, his visual art has yet to receive a major retrospective at Tate Britain. His most radical act, however, may have been his approach to living itself.
In the 1970s, Jarman and his friends occupied abandoned warehouses along the South Bank, transforming derelict spaces into homes and studios. His early film Studio Bankside (1971) and his posthumously released Glitterbug (1994) capture the essence of this lifestyle—one that prioritised art, pleasure, and communal existence over stability and conventional success.
Jarman’s philosophy was simple: the space in which one lives should be an extension of one’s creativity. A hammock strung across a room, an impromptu gathering of friends, a makeshift studio—these were as much a part of his art as any film or painting. Though such ways of living may seem impossible in today’s economic landscape, their value lies not in replication but in inspiration. Yet inspiration can only be drawn from what is remembered.
The Ephemeral as Art
Queer histories are often rooted in the ephemeral—illegal raves, underground bars, secret parties. These spaces were not just sites of leisure but of cultural production, shaping identity and resistance in ways that often go unrecorded.
Gideon Berger, co-founder of the legendary NYC Downlow at Glastonbury Festival, emerged from the world of pirate radio and squat parties in 1980s London. His work exists in the realm of nightlife, a space frequently overlooked by cultural historians despite its profound impact on queer communities. Similarly, the Joiners Arms, an after-hours gay bar in east London, operated with a deliberate sense of permissiveness, becoming a vital space for those who found themselves outside mainstream gay culture.
The bar’s late owner, David Pollard, once described it as “a theoretical impossibility.” It should not have been able to exist—legally, logistically—but it did, sustained by the sheer desire for a space where pleasure could be taken seriously.
The Role of Institutions
The histories of HOBAC, Frick & Frack, Andy the Furniture Maker, Derek Jarman’s communal living experiments, and queer nightlife spaces all point to the same problem: institutions have consistently failed to recognise the importance of queer cultural production. Much of it has been lost, not because it lacked significance, but because it was never documented in the first place.
Museums and archives have a responsibility to correct this—to actively seek out these forgotten narratives before they disappear entirely. Until then, these histories must be reconstructed from the fragments that remain: personal recollections, scattered photographs, pieces of furniture that outlived their makers.
Without institutional recognition, the burden of remembrance falls elsewhere. The challenge is not just to uncover these histories but to insist on their value, to refuse their erasure, and to ensure that future generations can learn from what was almost lost.
Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter is published by Particular (€18.99).
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