Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores
- Type
- Touring exhibition
- Venues
- Lever House, Port Sunlight, 2024
Jamestown Café and Gallery, Accra, from 15 January 2026 - With
- Claire Tunstall and the Unilever Archives
Allotey Bruce-Konuah, street banners, Accra - Fabrication
- James Galliford and the Liverpool School of Architecture technical team
- Acknowledgements
- Stephen Bretland, Gage Prescott-Egan, Tom Eddy and James Galliford
- Catalogue
- Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores
- More
- The exhibition on TAG
- More
- Setting up in Accra
Kingsway was the department-store chain of the United Africa Company. From the mid-twentieth century its stores were among the most modern buildings, and the most modern places to shop, in the cities of West Africa.
This touring exhibition explores the architecture of the stores and the culture of shopping they created, drawing on the research behind Architecture, Empire and Trade and on images from the Unilever Archives. Its two pavilions, light boxes and panels were first shown at Lever House, Port Sunlight, in 2024.
In January 2026 the exhibition travelled to Jamestown Café and Gallery in Accra, where it was extended through a collaboration with Allotey Bruce-Konuah: a series of vinyl street banners for the gallery’s outside walls and for the ruined portico of the old Kingsway Stores next door.
