By Sara Bright | Published 27 July 2024 | Last updated 20 June 2026
On 25 July 2024, Transport for London unveiled A Taste of Home, a commission of twenty-four billboards filling the Piccadilly line ticket hall rotunda at Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station. The artist behind the work, Joy Gregory, had spent the preceding months running lumen-printing workshops with asylum seekers supported by Refugees in Effective and Active Partnership (REAP), a Hillingdon-based charity. The resulting installation – cyanotypes, monoprints, and collaged poetry – occupies the threshold through which one million passengers pass each month.
The Making of A Taste of Home
Gregory’s method is rooted in cameraless photography: cyanotype produces a Prussian-blue image by placing objects on treated paper and exposing the composition to ultraviolet light; lumen printing uses expired photographic paper to produce darker images through direct solar exposure. She deployed both processes in workshops, asking participants – many from the Middle East, South America, and East Africa – to identify plants, spices, and ingredients that evoked home.
The billboards layer these botanical prints with excerpts from two poems: Warsan Shire’s Home – “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” – and Khaled Abdallah’s Seeds in Flight, translated from Arabic by Sara Vaghefian at a Poetry Translation Centre workshop. Ingredients discussed as “tastes of home” during the workshops – garlic, saffron, fennel seeds – appear as photographic fragments collaged over the botanical prints.
Eleanor Pinfield, head of Art on the Underground, described the commission as “an exploration of nature, food and plants in our city, exploring the histories and futures of both those who have lived in London for generations, and those newly arriving.” The work extends Gregory’s 2023 pocket Tube map cover, A Little Slice of Paradise, inspired by the mini gardens that TfL staff cultivate at stations across the network. That map became so popular that copies appeared on eBay within weeks of distribution.
A Career Built on Overlooked Narratives
Gregory was born in 1959 in Bicester, Oxfordshire, to Jamaican parents and grew up in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. She studied commercial photography at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1980s, then enrolled at the Royal College of Art under John Hedgecoe – Britain’s first professor of photography, whose commissions included portraits of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Her early career coincided with photography’s active exclusion from fine art collections. Alan Bowness, then director of Tate, stated photography would enter the Tate collection “over his dead body.” Gregory responded by working across media – digital video, Victorian printing, cameraless photography, installation – refusing categorical constraints. Her 1992–1995 series Objects of Beauty used collotype printing to examine objects associated with feminine beauty. Cinderella Tours Europe (1997–2001) placed gold shoes against European backdrops – the Christ the Redeemer statue in Lisbon, the canals of Venice – referencing those from former colonies raised on European culture but denied access to it.
Her twenty-year engagement with N|u speakers in the Kalahari Desert – South Africa’s oldest surviving language, declared extinct in 1974, spoken by an estimated twenty people – produced Lost Languages and Other Voices, her first major retrospective at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, in 2011. In 2019, she received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2023, she and the Whitechapel Gallery won the £110,000 Freelands Award. Catching Flies With Honey, her mid-career retrospective, opened on 8 October 2025. Her work is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, the Yale Centre for British Art, and the Arts Council Collection.
Heathrow as Site, Not Backdrop
Gregory’s decision to root the commission in dialogue with asylum seekers was deliberate. As she told 1854 Photography in 2024: “The language and methods that are used to talk about people who have come from elsewhere is to attack and dehumanise them. But when you hear the stories first-hand, it’s heartbreaking, how people end up in these places.” The installation arrived amid acute political turbulence – the same week saw the UK government suspend flights to Rwanda and remove the Bibby Stockholm barge from Portland. The Refugee Council estimated in December 2023 that more than 120,000 people were waiting for a decision on their asylum application, living what the council described as “life in limbo.”
Heathrow’s identity as a site of friction between mobility and exclusion has only intensified since. On 21 March 2025, a catastrophic fire at the North Hyde electrical substation shut down the airport for sixteen hours, disrupting 270,000 passenger journeys – the first complete shutdown in fifteen years. A cyber-attack on Collins Aerospace’s check-in software in September 2025 forced Heathrow into manual operations, with 629 disrupted flights in a single day. Gregory’s billboards – placed not in a gallery but in the underground passage connecting the terminal to the city – insist on the human stories that pass through this space daily. As she told The Guardian: “People like me have been told what they’re supposed to be doing for generations. I wasn’t going to carry on with that.”
Practical Information
Joy Gregory – represented by Ames Yavuz gallery, London and Sydney A Taste of Home – Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station, Piccadilly line ticket hall rotunda. Free to view during station operating hours. Catching Flies With Honey – Whitechapel Gallery, 8 October 2025 – 1 March 2026. Free admission. Website: joygregory.co.uk
About the author: Sara Bright is an art critic and editor at Creativity’s UK. She writes on contemporary visual culture, with a focus on emerging European artists and the intersection of traditional and digital media practices.
Sources: Art on the Underground, “A Taste of Home” project page; Joy Gregory official website; The Guardian, 8 January 2024; 1854 Photography, 25 July 2024; Business Traveller, 27 July 2024; Wikipedia, “Joy Gregory” and “Hayes substation fire”; BBC News, 2 July 2025; Sky News, 20 September 2025; Whitechapel Gallery; Autograph Gallery.
