Bath on a summer’s day is, unsurprisingly for the only city in England to achieve World Heritage status, swarming with tourists. They marvel at the postcard beauty of the honey-coloured stone and Palladian-style bridges, and take risky selfies by the River Avon. It’s a scene that harks back to the 19th-century season of balls and social activities of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey; the unhurried movement of the modern crowd suggests a similar setting of “holiday mode”.
Outside one of the grand Georgian houses, Arthur Timothy radiates a sunniness aligned with his surroundings. The 68-year-old architect and artist gamely poses on the street when I insist on taking pictures of his impossibly trendy NTS Radio T-shirt, before he and his wife, ceramicist Erica Timothy, usher me inside, offering tea and biscuits.
The quintessential Englishness of it all is delightfully interrupted by Timothy’s huge paintings of his African family in the living room. There’s a portrait of his parents in their twenties, titled “Adeline & Bankole Timothy”; his mother slim and elegant in a white shirt, his father, clad in a stylish suit, casually balances a cigarette holder. Placed opposite is a painting of four perfectly done-up women — his mother and three of her friends — adorned in gold, hair coiffed and handbags clutched: “Party Frocks”. They are images that are at once boldly colourful and touchingly intimate.
Born in Ghana and trained in architecture in Sheffield, Timothy established his own studio, Timothy Associates, in 1986 and is still director of the firm, which focuses on “urban design solutions”. Its projects have ranged from new-build London apartment blocks to historic refurbishments and a winning design for a memorial garden in London’s Hyde Park, to commemorate the Africans whose lives were sacrificed to the transatlantic slave trade (a project that is seeking funding).
It was the death of his father in 1994 that sparked a cathartic process of painting images of photos taken from old albums. “There were photographs of his time in Ghana and it was fascinating to see life then as it was in black and white,” he says. “It’s funny, because there’s something about [painting] these things at a larger scale where you almost become part of the picture. It has felt at times like a way of being close to those people.”
In 2018, his son Duval, 35, a musician and multidisciplinary artist, suggested that Timothy take his dabblings more seriously and presented him with a hand-stretched canvas for Christmas. Six months later, Timothy had two works on display at the Royal Academy of Arts summer exhibition. A sold-out show at Ronchini gallery in 2020 marked a shift to life as an artist, and for the past four years he has been represented by Gallery 1957, which has outposts in London and Accra. Opening this week is a new solo show at its Hyde Park Gate space. When I suggest that making the leap must have felt quite dizzying, he is sanguine. “At this stage in my life, it is much more fulfilling,” he says.
If Timothy’s story is an optimistic late-life tale of new beginnings, his Bath home fits neatly into the narrative. He and Erica moved there in 2008; two of their three children had flown the nest and they decided to put the family home — a Victorian semi-detached house in Brockley, south London, where they had lived for 22 years — on the market. He remembers the property fondly: “It had a huge south-facing lawn and the kids on the road used to climb over the wall into each other’s gardens.”
Bath wasn’t altogether unfamiliar territory; he had been at boarding school in Taunton and had always admired the city’s houses. “We came here to play rugby,” he says. “Before and after the match, we always had some time, so I would wander around with friends, and somehow it just got stuck in my mind.”
The transition from the commotion of London to the relative tranquillity of Bath didn’t feel jarring, says Timothy, as he has been navigating distinctly different worlds since he was a boy. He spent his early childhood in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and moved to the UK at the age of nine. “When we went to school [here], I think we gradually picked up an English reserve,” he recalls. “Then we’d go back to Sierra Leone [to visit my father’s family] and everyone is all over you — there are no formalities whatsoever; there’s no such thing as private space.”
Similar contrasts existed between the family homes he grew up in. In Freetown they lived in his grandmother’s colonial-style concrete house, built in 1950. The space was filled with locally made hardwood chairs and sofas. In the UK, he found himself in London’s Bayswater, with his father and brother in a mansion flat with enough space for Timothy to practise triple jump.
It’s hard to work out how exactly these experiences have influenced the style of his house in Bath. “One of our friends described it as a mixture of African Regency and American style, but it’s not very African, except for the artwork,” he says. “It’s actually quite traditional. I wanted to be sensitive and restore the Georgian detailing.”
The house had previously been joined to the next-door property and used as a hotel; when the Timothys first saw it the space had been partitioned into lots of tiny rooms and bathrooms. “This room, for instance,” he says, gesturing to the bright, open-plan living room we’re sitting in, “had a wall through the middle, front to back. We could see that there was a grand building here underneath what looked like a dormitory.”
It took less than a year to redesign the house to the current airy structure. Timothy’s plan worked to revive the original features and create fluid movement; floors are now solid timber or travertine. Erica, meanwhile, acted as the project manager. “In the final weeks I lived in the basement with my daughter, Issy,” she recalls, “so I could deal with problems as they occurred — including seeing a foot come through the ceiling!”
Erica Timothy also trained as an architect (the couple met at the University of Sheffield), then as a landscape architect — an area she oversees as a director at Timothy Associates. It’s also a practice that feeds into her ceramics, their organic forms often inspired by motifs found in nature. A recent collection of sculptures, for example, was inspired by the seed pods of British and west African plants.
There are examples of her colourfully glazed and shapely vessels dotted all over the house, alongside shelves brimming with books, and walls filled with prints and paintings. One of the central features is a wood-beamed staircase, the wall beside it showcasing a long Congolese tribal textile piece made from flax.
But it is two abstract oil paintings by Duval, hanging side by side at the entrance to the first-floor drawing room, and playing with broad strokes and hues of green, which Timothy singles out as his favourite works in the house. “I love his paintings,” he says with pride. “He did them both at sixth-form [college].” In the same room, another highlight is the two grand fireplaces. “They are marble copies of the Georgian fireplaces at Hampton Court,” says Timothy. “I had permission to draw and measure them.”
In the basement are the couple’s adjacent studios. While Erica’s space is office-like, with stacks of books and a clear desk, Arthur’s side reveals a painterly hive of activity. A half-finished oil, depicting Queen Elizabeth II on a state visit to Sierra Leone in 1961 across three large canvases, will be part of his third exhibition at Gallery 1957, titled Othello’s Countrymen (The Krio Enigma). He describes the show as an exploration of “the complex intersections of race, identity and belonging through the lens of the Krio people of Sierra Leone — and their historical parallels with Shakespeare’s Othello”. A defining quality of Timothy’s work is the shift between imagined worlds and lived history.
From the studio, a door leads into the garden, where wild flowers bloom around a small table and chair. “We often sit here in the afternoons and have tea or coffee,” Timothy says. He tells me that he thinks Jane Austen once visited the house, and later sends me a copy of the letter she wrote to her sister Cassandra when staying on the street in 1813. Even at that time, it seemed to be a place of both calm and possibility. “The streets are very empty now,” she writes. “Charming weather for you and us, and the travellers, and everybody.”
Arthur Timothy, “Othello’s Countrymen (The Krio Enigma)”, Gallery 1957, London, from July 10 to August 30
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