A north London newsroom is about to be reborn in the middle of Regent’s Park. A life-sized recreation of the Ham & High newspaper office will be unveiled at Frieze London this month, as artist Marcus Jefferson presents his debut solo booth with the gallery Harlesden High Street.
The installation, called Ham & High, rebuilds the daily bustle of a local-press office at full scale — and invites visitors to step inside the story. Works arranged around the replica office take their cue from the Hampstead and Highgate headlines the newspaper is known for, reimagining them with a satirical edge. Rather than fixed type, several of the text pieces are built with movable magnets, so anyone wandering through can shuffle the letters and compose their own headlines in response to the room around them.
For Jefferson, the project starts close to home. The work parodies the class and cultural divides of the neighbourhoods he grew up in, using the language of the local paper to hold a mirror up to the people who read it. The reworked headlines play on the idea that “everything is for sale, including sensationalism itself” — a wry nod to the churn of the modern news cycle and a clickbait culture that rewards outrage over nuance.
It is the details that sell the illusion. The floor of the exhibition space will be laid with green carpet rescued from the former Ham & High newsroom — the genuine article, dating from the 1990s to the early 2000s — so the history of the paper is quite literally under visitors’ feet. Beneath the satire, there is real affection here for the world of local journalism: the clutter, the camaraderie and the quietly heroic business of chronicling a neighbourhood.
That affection matters, because the Ham & High office at Frieze London arrives at a moment when the local press is fighting for its future. The Ham & High — formally the Hampstead & Highgate Express — is one of north London’s most storied local titles, reporting on everything from planning rows and school places to the social life of some of London’s wealthiest postcodes for the best part of two centuries. To see its newsroom elevated into the setting of a major international art fair is a strange and rather wonderful tribute — a reminder that, even in an age of infinite scroll, the local paper still shapes how a neighbourhood sees itself.
A solo booth at Frieze is no small stage for that message. The fair’s solo presentations have a habit of launching artists into the international spotlight, and Jefferson’s debut arrives with a concept that is both deeply local and instantly legible to anyone who has ever skimmed a headline and winced.
Frieze London 2026 runs from 14 to 18 October at The Regent’s Park, alongside Frieze Masters, with the two fairs forming the centrepiece of Frieze Week — the biggest week on the capital’s art calendar. The fair’s pavilions will once again fill the park with galleries from around the world, and Jefferson’s newsroom promises to be among the homegrown highlights. Full visitor information and tickets are available on the fair’s official website.
It lands in a packed season for London culture. The capital’s autumn arts diary is already overflowing — from the first-ever TW2 Film Festival giving independent filmmakers their moment in Twickenham, to a live music scene in rude health, with KWN adding a second Eventim Apollo date after selling out the first. And the festive season is already peeking over the horizon, with Carnaby Street’s famous Christmas lights getting a 90s-inspired makeover for 2026.
For now, though, all eyes are on Regent’s Park — and on a newsroom where, for once, the readers get to write the headlines.
