Kofi Antubam’s Accra Mosaic: Tracing a Civic Surface through the Carter Archive by Dr Helen Shaw
Sometimes an archival photograph becomes much more significant when you discover that the building, and the surface pictured, still survives.
For my current book, Crafting the Civic Surface: Carter Tiles and the Making of Modern Britain (Bloomsbury, 2028), I have been working through the archive of Carter & Co., the Poole-based ceramic manufacturer whose tiles, mosaics and architectural ceramics appeared across hundreds of twentieth-century buildings.
Most of the architectural commissions I have encountered in the Carter archive are British: schools, hospitals, churches, shops, transport buildings and civic centres. Tucked within this much larger body of material, however, is a far smaller, predominantly photographic series with the rather prosaic title Foreign Product Applications.[1]
The series records Carter’s work on civic and state buildings, hospitals, commercial premises and other projects outside Britain, from West Africa to Australia and New Zealand. Small beside the mass of British material, these are among the most interesting files, showing what could happen when designer, manufacturer, architect, client and audience were separated by thousands of miles.
It was while working through this series that I came across two photographs catalogued simply as “a mosaic panel with African heads, Community Centre, Accra, Ghana”.[2] They show details of a much larger ceramic mosaic: profiled heads, figures and a woman carrying a vessel on her head.
Images: Details of Kofi Antubam’s ceramic mosaic for the Accra Community Centre, Ghana, designed 1951 and manufactured by Carter & Co. Photographs by John Harris, Bournemouth, c.1955–65. Dorset History Centre, Poole Pottery Archive, D-PPY/A/6/7/1/1/10.
The catalogue does not identify the designer, but further research led me to Lois Quartey and Julia Gallagher’s Architectural Review article, “Revisit: Accra Community Centre in Accra, Ghana by Fry, Drew & Partners”.[3] Comparing Carter’s photographs with images of the surviving building made it possible to identify the work as the mural designed by the Ghanaian artist Kofi Antubam.
Opened in 1951 and designed by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, with Theo Crosby as architect-in-charge, the Community Centre was funded by the United Africa Company in the aftermath of the Accra riots of 1948. Prominent on its façade, Antubam’s mosaic depicts four figures alongside a Ga inscription translated as “It is good we live together as friends and one people”.[4]
The Carter photographs help reconstruct how Antubam’s artwork was materially realised: a Carter & Co. advertisement published in the Architects’ Journal in July 1951 identifies Fry, Drew and Partners as architects, credits Antubam with the “mural decoration”, and describes the work as “ceramic mosaic by Carter”.[5]
That distinction is important. This was not a visual programme wholly devised in Poole and exported to Ghana. Antubam was the artist; Carter supplied specialist ceramic manufacture. Elsewhere within Foreign Product Applications, the relationship varied: sometimes Carter’s own designers produced the imagery, while other commissions involved translating externally authored designs into mosaic, glazed tile or faience. What connected them was not a shared visual language but the specialist manufacturing capacity of the Poole works.
This is why the Accra photographs matter to the wider argument of Crafting the Civic Surface. I use civic surface to describe the material interface between architecture and public life: the tiled hospital corridor, the decorated school entrance, or a mural or mosaic on a public building. Such surfaces can become secondary within architectural histories, yet they were often where image, colour, text and institutional identity were made visible.
Much of my book explores these surfaces through British public architecture. Accra extends the story in another direction. Here is a civic surface designed by a Ghanaian artist for a public building in Accra, with its ceramic manufacture passing through a company in Dorset. The Carter archive cannot explain the mural’s meaning or subsequent life in Ghana, but what it preserves is one part of its material biography; evidence of how Antubam’s design became ceramic architecture.
Carter’s photographs record the mosaic from the manufacturer’s perspective, but tell us little about what happened after it left Poole. More recent photographs reconnect that archival record with a mosaic that remains on the building for which it was created more than seventy years later.
That survival should not be taken for granted. The Transnational Architecture Group has repeatedly drawn attention to the condition and uncertain future of the Community Centre, including its vulnerability in relation to the wider Marine Drive redevelopment. In January 2026, TAG reported that the project had stalled and that the Community Centre had received “some reprieve”, but its longer-term conservation remains unresolved.[6]
The Carter archive cannot determine that future, but it can add another layer to our understanding of what survives. Hidden within a small group of overseas photographs in an overwhelmingly British manufacturing archive is evidence for the making of a significant work by Antubam. Bringing that evidence back into conversation with the surviving mosaic helps recover part of the network of art, craft and architecture through which it was produced, and reminds us that the significance of a building can reside in its surfaces and artworks as well as its overall form.
Dr Helen Shaw is Deputy Director at Westminster Abbey Institute and an art historian specialising in ceramics, craft and design in civic architecture and public spaces.
Notes
- Dorset History Centre, Poole Pottery Archive, Carter & Co., Foreign Product Applications, D-PPY/A/6/7. The series includes civic and state premises, commercial premises, health and religious buildings, domestic projects and other overseas applications.
- Dorset History Centre, Poole Pottery Archive, D-PPY/A/6/7/1/1/10, Community Centre, Accra, Ghana, photographs by John Harris, Bournemouth, catalogued c.1955–65.
- Lois Quartey and Julia Gallagher, “Revisit: Accra Community Centre in Accra, Ghana by Fry, Drew & Partners,” Architectural Review, July–August 2025.
- Iain Jackson, “‘In Trust for the People’: Community Centers in 1950s Ghana,” Design233, 7 August 2022.
- Carter & Co., advertisement, Architects’ Journal, 26 July 1951, p. xix.
- Iain Jackson, “Architectural Review revisits the Accra Community Centre,” Transnational Architecture Group, 22 August 2025; and Jackson, “Accra: updates January 2026,” Transnational Architecture Group, 13 January 2026.
