A Chinese Grocery Store, 11 Limehouse Causeway
Limehouse Causeway, c.1910(?). Archives Reference Number: P04153
A striking image in the Archives depicts a Chinese grocery store on Limehouse Causeway. The shop sign in Chinese is clearly visible, yet most records refer to it simply as “a Chinese grocery store.” Bridgeman Images identified the Chinese characters on the signage as “安兆會 (An Zhao Hui),” reading from left to right. However, one can see that the sign also appears vertically on the shop window, suggesting that the establishment was in fact named “曾兆安 (Zeng Zhao An).” The horizontal sign should be read from right to left, in accordance with the Chinese conventions of the period. Moreover, the first character appears to resemble “曾” rather than “會.”
I pre-processed this archival image and used it as input for locally run Stable Diffusion XL ControlNet models. Stable Diffusion XL, released by Stability AI in July 2023, is a text-to-image diffusion model, while ControlNet is a neural network architecture designed to guide diffusion models by incorporating additional conditions. In this context, the reference image serves as a constraint on the AI generation process, exerting a degree of control over the resulting output. Using this method, I produced more than a dozen variations exploring what this grocery store might have looked like. However, none of these outputs constitute actual reconstructions; rather, I would describe them as speculative forgeries.
These speculative artefacts can be full of biases. For instance, whenever I included “Chinese” or “Chinatown” in my text prompts, the generated images almost always featured a red façade—unless I explicitly included a negative prompt instructing the model not to use red. Additional elements were also sometimes inserted arbitrarily, such as a lantern appearing in the scene without prompting.
The address of this grocery store was 11 Limehouse Causeway. A Google Maps search today points to roughly where it once stood. I did not know this initially, but through research using historical maps and trade directories from the 1920s–1930s, I determined that the building was located on the western end of Limehouse Causeway—now just beyond Westferry Station, opposite the Premier Inn on a small traffic island. I photographed this location on several of my local walks with my family, and my artist friend Stathis also helped me capture images of the site shortly before I created this work (as my camera had broken at the time).
I then layered and manipulated these contemporary photographs, inserting the AI-generated reconstruction of the grocery store into the present-day streetscape. In doing so, the past reasserts itself, unsettling the present and creating space for speculative futures rooted in marginalised narratives.