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A pie and mash caff. A haberdashery, ironmongers and fabric wholesalers. A sari maker. A pawn shop and a scattering of pubs. Such was the humble range of traders on Bethnal Green Road at the turn of the 1990s. Many of the proprietors of these stores lived in the same neighbourhood as the then-overwhelmingly working-class residents. The store interiors, for the most part, had barely changed since the Kray twins had been patrolling the area in their Ford Zodiacs three decades earlier.
The shopfront at number 103 marked the entrance to a closed-down doctor’s surgery. In January 1992, the dormant frontage was altered into something that looked like it belonged to the costume shop in the Mr Benn cartoon.
“There was a recession,” Tracey Emin would later recall. “As Sarah [Lucas] and I were cycling around, I said something like: ‘It’d be good to have a shop.’ We both said, together, ‘a shop shop’ and we knew exactly what we meant.”
Lucas had just turned 30. Emin was six months younger. Lucas had been one of the exhibitors at the groundbreaking 1988 Freeze exhibition in Surrey Docks, alongside fellow art school graduate Damien Hirst. While Lucas was already fairly well known on the London art scene, Emin was a relative unknown, mainly writing rather than making art.
In 1992, the acronym YBA (Young British Artists) had yet to be coined and, although Charles Saatchi had begun taking an interest in some of the work of the new contemporary artists, the majority of creative talents gaining attention, and commissions, were overwhelmingly male. It was a point of contention made emphatically clear via one of the first pieces sold at Emin and Lucas’ ‘The Shop’.
“Damien Hirst came in and saw our ashtrays that had his face in them – you put your cigarette out on him,” Emin said in a later interview. “They weren’t nasty, though: he was making work about cigarettes then, so it was a homage,” said Emin. “The way we priced everything was totally arbitrary, too. It started at 50p and went up to £500 for Sarah’s proper work. God knows how much it would all be worth today.”
Emin and Lucas may have disliked the patriarchal nature of the contemporary art scene, but their shop only came into being thanks to the benevolence of Saatchi, a man regarded as a Svengali figure in the London art world during the 90s.
“I had no money, not a penny, and Sarah had this money from Saatchi,” said Emin in an interview. “For the rent and the lease, Sarah signed all of that money over to the estate agent and we got the keys. That to me is important, because everyone slags off Saatchi, but he gave us a financial leg-up. We decorated The Shop with cheap magnolia paint. Everyone else was painting everything white as white and using polished steel and Perspex.”
Relaxed local trading laws, in place due to the close proximity of the shop to Brick Lane market, meant that Emin and Lucas could open their shop all night. They hosted a slew of parties which, quite rightly, almost nobody seemed to have any clear recollection of. Revellers found themselves drinking, smoking, dancing and flirting around works including Lucas’ Octopus – a pair of lady’s tights stuffed with newspaper – T-shirts with ‘She’s Kebab’ emblazoned on them, and miniature knitted blankets.
In the early hours, Emin and Lucas would often retire to attempt to get some shut-eye in sleeping bags on the upper floors of the building, a barren space home to a burgeoning population of rats.
Keeping regular shop hours from Tuesday to Saturday, Emin and Lucas would make pieces in the basement when the store was devoid of customers, using the then-still thriving local fabric wholesalers to get materials at rock bottom prices, as well as using more unconventional materials:
“I used to make rabbits out of cigarette packets,” said Emin. “We would chain smoke and, when we’d finished smoking a packet of fags, I’d make a rabbit and we’d sign it, put it in the window and sell it for the price of a packet of cigarettes. On Brick Lane, you could buy loads of fabric for £2, orange plastic sheets for 10p each – you could buy all of these odd, fucked-up materials. We’d buy whatever we saw and just make things out of it, anything we could think of.”
Clients included the filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson OBE (née Taylor-Wood), White Cube gallery founder Jay Jopling, and an increasing number of American art dealers for whom word had travelled across the Atlantic that something new and unusual was gathering pace in London. Not that there was any sort of VIP treatment; everyone was expected to dance to Emin and Lucas’ Steely Dan and Beatles cassettes. And it became all but compulsory to make a wish after throwing a coin into a hexagonal indoor pond that was home to four goldfish, all called ‘Ken’ after then-Brent East MP Ken Livingstone and the figurative artist Ken Kiff.
As successful as they proved to be at getting other people to pay for the shop’s running costs, while selling works of their own, Emin and Lucas had read their art history. Perhaps inspired by the brevity of art scenes such as Andy Warhol’s’ Exploding Plastic Inevitable events series, The Shop opened and closed in the space of just six months. The final night of trading, 3 July 1993, was Tracey’s 30th birthday. The theme of the party was ‘Fucking Fantastic and Just About Old Enough to Do Whatever She Wants’.
“We wanted to go out like rockstars,” said Emin. “So, we left the door open all night, the idea being that everything would get trashed or stolen…. In the morning, [neighbouring] Redchurch Street looked like a bomb had hit it. But the shop remained intact. People had even left money and notes everywhere thanking us for a great party and telling us what they had bought.”
The Shop may have been short lived, but its impact was seismic. Within months of its closure, Lucas had created and exhibited Au Naturel – a mattress sculpture featuring a sexually suggestive assortment of objects, including a bucket, melons, a cucumber and oranges. In 1995, Tracey had her first solo exhibition at Hoxton’s White Cube gallery, named with heroic mock grandiosity My Major Retrospective. Four years later came Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1863-1995; a tent featuring the names of everyone Emin had ever shared a bed with, the piece laid the path to international fame and recognition.
Upon the closure of The Shop, the connection between Emin and Lucas would wane. As Emin later recalled:
“After – this is really important – Sarah didn’t want anything to do with The Shop. Nothing. She didn’t give a f**k. I had all of the stuff and I was thinking: ‘What am I going to do with it all?’ It was a moment, The Shop. It was exciting and wild and different, and there’ll never be anything like it again. It wasn’t about people’s work – it was about the happenings and the ideas. It couldn’t be re-created. So, I burned everything. I made a massive bonfire in [gallerist] Carl Freedman’s garden. I exhibited the ashes.”
Those ashes were displayed at Emin’s My Major Retrospective and were later bought by an anonymous private collector. Last seen in London in 2011 at the Hayward Gallery’s Love is What You Want show, it was not known if the remnants of The Shop would be displayed at Emin’s current Tate Modern retrospective. What is certain is that Emin won’t have to collect her remuneration in the same way she and Lucas were often forced to do at their East London enterprise.
“Yeah, we made money from The Shop, but we spent it all every day. Some days we’d make £2.50… and so on occasions we’d have to rob from the fish.”
Tracey Emin: A Second Life is at the Tate Modern from 27 February 2026 until 31 August 2026. Visit tate.org.uk.
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