In May 2010, a group of artists studying at Central St Martins were invited to create a show at Valentines Mansion, a restored seventeenth century house set in a park in East London, set amid walled gardens, a dovecote and grottoes. The brief was, in a few weeks, to make a piece that responded to the space.

The house was built in 1696, and residents through the centuries included a family with links to the East India Company and Belgian refugees during the Second World War.

The artists taking part worked in very different ways. Some felt the weight of the history of the house, reflecting on particular episodes or inhabitants, but in each case using them as a prism to examine their own concerns. Others responded to the physical, architectural space of the elegant, classical home, filled with cracks that bore testimony to its age, like the wrinkles on a face; others still responded to the vivid life and colour of the gardens, then in full bloom; some examined the role that the house plays in its environment today, with its shifting cultural role.

The house lay derelict for 15 years until 2007 when an extensive restoration programme was undertaken with Redbridge Council and Heritage Lottery funding, and it opened to the public in 2009.

The show ran between May 30th and June 6th 2010.