Celebrating the healing waters of Camberwell begins with a wall you can stand beneath and a story that feels alive. A planned three-storey mural at 144 Coldharbour Lane, facing Eastlake Road, will draw on Camberwell’s historic healing springs and reimagine them through the eyes of its young people and its many cultures. Tony Coleman finds out more
Muralist Shauna Anseo did not arrive with a fixed design. She built it in the room with students. Working with Year 11 pupils at Sacred Heart Catholic School, she opened with stories of water deities and healing traditions, then set the students to work. They sketched, questioned, challenged, and brought back their own research. They did not just learn the material. They reshaped it.
“The students are very diverse, as is Camberwell,” she says, “so it felt right to take a comparative approach.” In practice, that meant Yoruba stories sitting alongside Greek myth, Hindu symbolism next to Celtic ritual.
The classroom filled with images and ideas from across the world. The students traced connections, then pushed further, adding their own references and their own sense of what healing means now.
By the second session, the energy had shifted. The pupils had done their research and were generating ideas – drawing feathers, birds, and flowing lines of water. They discovered water’s connection with health and pregnancy. Water goddesses were often fertility goddesses as well, because of how dangerous childbirth was.
In the third session, they brought meanings and found patterns; water heals, protects and connects. One thread ran through almost everything they made: transformation. Water glowed. It moved through hands. It carried memory. It became a place where offerings are made and wishes formed. From that came the idea of a multicultural wishing well. Not a single tradition, but many held together.
The mural draws on older practices too like the Celtic clootie well, where a person would bring a rag to the sacred spring, dip the rag in the water, wrap it around an injured part of the body, offer a prayer to the deity, and then tie it to a tree.
In Camberwell, where healing wells once gave the area its name and where hospitals still stand, the idea lands with force. The past does not sit quietly. It flows into the present.
Shauna describes her wider practice as exploring “comparative or syncretic mythology”. Here, that approach becomes something more grounded. The students’ work anchors it. Their research, their symbols, their excitement shape what will appear on the wall.
Outside the classroom, the project widened again. A public consultation at Loughborough Junction drew in more voices.
People stopped, talked, offered their own stories. Somecontributed ideas that will now find their way into the final piece. The mural grows, layer by layer, through participation.
Visually, the design centres on water pouring through open hands into a well. As it falls, it glows. Within it, figures and symbols appear and dissolve. Goddesses, patterns, fragments of story. A local wall carrying a global
conversation.
The mural will be painted from 13 to 21 June during Camberwell Arts Week on the wall at 144 Coldharbour Lane, facing Eastlake Road. Do come along, watch it take shape, and meet Shauna as she works. She welcomes conversation, stories, and the occasional cup of tea. If you have your own reflections on water, healing or local history, she would love to hear them.
Shauna Anseo is an Irish muralist and street artist based in London. Her large-scale figurative works explore light, storytelling and belonging, sitting between portraiture and mythmaking. She is also a tutor at the London School of Muralism, an independent programme supported by Arts Council England. The school trains a new generation of muralists, combining artistic practice with community engagement and participatory design, and has already supported dozens of artists to develop careers in public art.
