1.

Word had been going round that IKEA Tottenham was due to close at the end of summer and my sister and I went to pay our dues, driving around the A406 for a final visit to a childhood Mecca. I love being a doll in your own doll’s house, my sister said. We park up past an abandoned Mothercare, in a dirty triangle of industrial retail land created by the intersection of two major roads—the North Circular and the A1055—and the river Lea. The triangle was known as ‘just off the north circular’ until a matt gold train station was erected and announced its name: Meridian Water, marooned as it is off Meridian Way. 

Inside IKEA, I pay a visit to the trompe l’oeil view of Tottenham High Road in one of the faux windows of a mock living room: a view of a UPVC window above a kebab shop, illuminated by a light-box, lurking behind a white blind. We eat a £7 meatball dinner and I buy a potato peeler and 100 tea lights. I feel nostalgia walking through mock kitchens and bathrooms, the visits made to the Marketplace at every major life event, sorrow at the passing of time.

Three weeks before closing, I was invited by AiR studios to do a guerrilla residency in witness of this IKEA’s end. Meridian Water is earmarked for development, they told us, and IKEA isn’t renewing its lease. Maybe Tesco Extra will be next. On our initial meeting we walk silently in single file through the vast blue box humming with people: children playing in the bedrooms, couples in earnest discussion with the kitchen sales team, and an orthodox jewish family doing a photoshoot in one of the living rooms. The restaurant is full, its windows overlooking a vast expanse of sky, the A406 in rush hour, the carpark and Tesco Extra. The tables are packed with trays of gravadlax, meatballs, mash potato and cheesecake. People gather around the fizzy drinks fountains, the yellow evening sun streaming onto the tables through floor-to-ceiling windows, just before the sky turns pink over Meridian Water. A poster at the front is advertising the closing festival: Big Discounts on All Display Lines; £1 Meatball dinner Monday-Wednesday, 5-7pm.

Two weeks later - a week before closing - I invite a friend for dinner as the sun is setting over the restaurant. We arrive to the site of three adults wrestling an entire, floor-to-ceiling kitchen unit head-first into a lift. There is something unnerving and shameful about non-flat-packed items being removed from IKEA. Fantasy bedrooms have been reduced to greying partitioned boxes with scuffed echoes of furniture, lit by a bare bulb, cordoned off with hazard tape. Kitchen units, shelves and lighting have been stripped from walls leaving nothing but grubby stains behind. Shelves are empty, displays dismembered.

Cardboard boxes of single picture frames choke the hallway, their lids ripped off, “£10” scrawled in red biro on the side. Stuffed dogs, cats and t-rexes spill out of the top of one of the boxes, along with a single green potty. Products are being advertised on whiteboards in the same scrawled handwriting. “Vessin” £6.50. I would expect this disarray, the deconstruction of a consumerist cathedral to disposable design, to bring me some glee. But instead I am met by a wave of disorientation and grief. The many homes I have lost fold in on themselves, the edges of their distinction dissolving. I see a morose stuffed panda straddling a wardrobe on its side with wonky drawers in an otherwise empty room. The disorder arouses feelings of abandonment. The restaurant is full with families and shoppers. My friend and I eat a three course meal, smoke a cigarette at the edge of a disused car park, and leave in the dark. 

A week later I go back to the closing down IKEA to witness its final moments with another friend. When we arrive at the restaurant we’re told the food has sold out early. No more meatballs. Workers, huddled together with end-of-school energy, are in the process of auctioning off the restaurant’s yellow chairs and tables over a tannoy. In the warehouse the floor to ceiling shelving is stripped almost bare. I pocket some lilac lavender bags before buying us chips, a hotdog, and a can of Diet Coke from the kiosk after the tills. Sitting in the disused carpark, dandelions pushing through the concrete, we smoke roll-ups and watch three teenage girls taking selfies in front of the entrance, spinning slowly around bollards on a flatbed trolley. IKEA’s used office furniture is being offered for free out the front of the building. The sun is setting like it does in late August, a golden ball refracting low in a big expanse of sky. A learner driver takes their final turn around the empty wasteland. We’ve been joined by two groups of young people. One pushing another round the carpark in a trolley, the other lying on the ground sunbathing in the warm evening light. My friend and I hold a ritual to the homes we have lost. I have a few, so do we all. We take offerings and leave them inside IKEA to go down with the ship.

We bet on how quickly it will take IKEA to remove their sign from the side of this blue box cathedral. I bet a week, some others a few days. IKEA itself isn’t closing down: they won’t want to dirty their brand with this eyesore of closure. The following day the gates are chained up and concrete road blocks are put in place. All posters and advertising is removed. The car park signs are taken down. Scaffolding is erected and within two days the chunky yellow IKEA letters are removed from the side of the building, leaving a legible ghost behind on the blue wall. A week later, a team of people are spotted painting over it in a blue that doesn’t quite match the box. If you stand at the right angle now, you can read the hastily covered up letters in grey-green Atlantic Surf, clashing with the unmistakable IKEA Blue.

2.

In the summer of 2022 I was having a hard time. I had lost a lot of things. I hit a recent ex-lover up for comfort. 

Are you around for a tea?

I’m not on the boat, he says. I’m cat sitting in Green Lanes. Want to come over for a bath?

Green Lanes! That’s where I grew up. What street are you on?

Roseberry Gardens.

[!!]

Time slows down a bit. I google search the house I grew up in: 100 Roseberry Gardens. 

No way, you’re on my road. This is the house I grew up in. 

I send J, my ex-lover, a screenshot of the green front door, UPVC living room window, low red brick wall, green garden gate.

My phone rings immediately. 

No fucking way, I’m in your childhood home. Wanna come over for a bath?!

I cycle down mini Istanbul, Green Lanes. Take a right turn down the redbrick Victorian terraced street that I grew up on. Flashes of my dad having a go at me for wearing tinted lip balm at the crossroads, of him cycling my sister’s miniature bike home from school in the morning, knees up around his armpits. Singing to himself. I cycle passed the house painted glossy yellow with bright red mortar and the neighbour’s pink pebbledash. My mum parking the car tight-lipped. Push open the garden gate a little loose on its hinges. Kick passed a crisp packet that meets my foot. There’s a doorbell now. I ring it. J answers. 

This is your life! He’s grinning inanely, eyes sparkling as he swings the door open. Come in.

In 2005, when I was 19, my dad became terminally ill. The downstairs of our family home was renovated quickly to make it accessible for a wheelchair and hospital bed. Afterwards I would stand and shower in the room that had been the under-stairs cupboard, smells of cooking onion wafting the wrong way through the extractor fan, thinking about the stockpile of canned food my parents used to  store here in case of the millennium bug. The uneven floor boards with intricate woodworm trails that I had watched my dad strip and sand were ripped up and replaced with laminate to level out the floor. I had moved out by then, as far away as possible. Everything in the house became pale, shiny and glossy. A glossiness that didn’t age well.

Stepping over the threshold, I notice that these owners have replaced the floor again. The floorboards are matt, sturdy, warm. The corridor has been painted a dusty brick red below a sage dado rail: three shades paler than the colours of this hall in my childhood. Through to the kitchen, I can see that they have replaced the bright blue door to the garden with sheet glass in a matt black chrome doorframe. My body expands and contracts to fit the dimensions of the corridor. I run my hands along the walls and feel that the woodchip wallpaper has been stripped, no more sticking points to pick at and islands to trace my fingertips over. Unfamiliar shoes sit at the bottom of the stairs. The french doors that temporarily separated my Dad’s sickbed from the living room have been taken back out. 

Strangely, this room seems to have been returned to how it looked before my dad’s illness: warm, bright walls, Persian carpets on the floor. Homemade birch ply shelves in the recesses of the chimney breasts lined with books and novels by leftist intellectuals. Harvey, Davies, and Hobsbawm. A book on Internal Family Systems. I run my hand over the arm of their sofa and sit on the floor where my dad would recline watching the nightly 10 o’clock news, a pile of sunflower seed shells left in his wake. A silent record player and a collection of vinyl. A desk in suspended animation. Not everything is the same: copies of the SWP paper and Radical Philosophy have become a stack of The London Review of Books.

In the kitchen, the sideboard my dad spent Mayday weekend building has been dismantled and replaced with an IKEA copy in pine. J has set himself up a studio on the floor making elaborate boot shaped flowerpots out of cardboard. I talk, he cuts. He cuts, I talk. One moment, I am aware that I am sitting on the floor of someone else’s house that was once mine, the next moment I forget. A while later I look up and out onto the passage between this house and the house next-door. The frames of the windows feel familiar. Uncanny sensations pass through me. The dimensions of the room and my body within it shift from feeling strange to familiar, and back. Your brain is normalising it, J says. I spread my legs out on the floor, the summer warmth passing between me and the wood. In the periphery of my vision I see the corner of the corridor between the wall and the door. The empty recess of dead space glitches, seeming to hold within it the everything-and-nothingness of my childhood. Playing in the hallway, sticking my hand through bannisters, pulling the tail of my tabby kitten. The small space created by the corner where the ceiling meets the wall holds the vast emptiness of family time. My grandad scrubbing my wounds with the brutality of an agricultural vet while my grandma holds me up to the light. 

I snoop through the kitchen cupboards, teasing J and the owners of this kitchen for their organic produce and all the other small ways I think their life differs to how mine was here. There is a note for J on the sideboard. Welcome J! it says, Help yourself to any of the food, there are beers and some leftovers in the fridge. The back door sticks a little, you have to pull it shut with force. Thank you for coming to stay. The writing gets smaller, squeezed around the corner of the page. Socks’ food is in the cupboard under the sink, we feed him a packet of wet at night and a bowl of dry in the morning. He likes to be called in at 9, we lock him in after that. The hairs on my arm stand on end. So weird, I say to J. The cat we had when I lived here was called Socks.