Butch Attai is an artist who does his homework. When we commissioned him to paint a series of murals on our Deptford studio building, he went digging into the local history and found more than enough to fill every surface.

The Golden Hind, Francis Drake’s galleon, was dry-docked just a few hundred metres away after his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580, with Drake’s knighthood by Queen Elizabeth I taking place on the ship’s deck right here in Deptford. A century later, Tsar Peter the Great was lodging nearby to study shipbuilding, got drunk, trashed John Evelyn’s garden at Sayes Court, and planted a mulberry tree in the park by way of apology. The skull and crossbones on the gateposts of nearby St Nicholas Church are rumoured to have inspired the Jolly Roger. And in 1842, a young fin whale was caught in the Thames right outside and put on display in a local pub.

All of it ended up on the wall. Across three ground floor shutters you will find Drake and his Elizabethan entourage, dockside cranes and spilling cargo, Peter the Great’s twisting mulberry tree, and a deer, a nod to the hind in the ship’s name. The skull and crossbones are there too, reimagined as slowly sinking islands with bones drifting off into the river.

The highlight is on the roof. Butch painted an anamorphic whale on the rooftop plant box, a fin whale that only appears to float freely above the building when you stand in exactly the right spot on the street below. It is very much worth finding that spot.