Hetain Patel's 'Hobby Cave' Elevates Amateur Craft in Croydon

Hetain Patel has transformed a former Wetherspoon pub inside the defunct Grants department store in Croydon into 'The Hobby Cave', an Artangel-commissioned exhibition titled 'Come As You Really Are'. The show features contributions from over 250 hobbyists alongside Patel's own works, including Ford Fiestas and Escorts turned into Transformer-like robots, a carpeted car mimicking his grandmother's living room rug, and handmade Spiderman suits. The space is filled with cabinets of curiosities displaying K-pop merchandise, fortune-telling school rubbers, and painted pebbles. Patel's approach echoes earlier projects like Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's 'Folk Archive' (2005) but avoids the romanticism and class critique typical of British artists from William Morris to Grayson Perry. Instead, Patel foregrounds tactile pleasure and cultural memory, rehabilitating mass-produced objects through manual craft techniques. The exhibition runs through 20 October.