Bonington Gallery presents To Farse All Things by William English & Sandra Cross
Bonington Gallery presents To Farse All Things, a two-person exhibition by William English and Sandra Cross.
By Sarah McLeod | Published on 1 August 2025
Categories: Press office; NTU Arts;
This show marks the first time the pair’s film, photography, sculpture, sound, and archive collections - created independently and in collaboration over several decades - has been brought together in one exhibition.
To Farse All Things offers an opportunity to explore the intertwined lives and practices of these two artists. Their multidisciplinary practices resist easy categorisation. United by a shared ethos grounded in experimentation, social engagement, and hospitality, they have developed a radical and enduring body of work. Their ten-year restaurant project, The Dining Room (1980-1990), can be seen as a living piece of performance art—emblematic of their broader practice, which frequently blurs the lines between roles—artist and participant, host and guest, performer and observer.
William English, born in Leicester, moved to London in the early 1970s to study filmmaking. In 1975, he produced a now-iconic series of photographs of Vivienne Westwood in her and Malcolm McLaren’s seminal punk boutique, SEX. The series, Venus with Severed Leg, has become synonymous with the era, with writer Paul Gorman describing it as “the holy grail of punk photographs.”
Sandra Cross, originally from Northamptonshire, began her career as a copywriter before relocating to London in the mid-1970s, where she worked for several prominent literary agencies and publishers. Her professional life introduced her to London’s restaurants, sparking a lifelong interest in food as an intersection for connection, memory, and artistic expression.
English and Cross met in the late 1970s and soon embarked on a project that would become a defining period in their collaborative practice. Motivated by a shared passion for hospitality and organic food, the couple opened The Dining Room, a vegetarian restaurant near Borough Market, London. The Dining Room’s menu and programme of exhibitions, screenings, book launches and gigs attracted an eclectic array of visitors, including experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, actor and director Sam Wanamaker, choreographer Lea Anderson, writer Jon Savage, and pioneering lawyer Benedict Birnberg.
After The Dining Room closed in 1990, Cross continued to explore food through works such as What Did You Eat Today?, a series of film interviews investigating personal relationships with food. Other notable works include MMs Bar (Trunk Records, 2011), a vinyl record composed of train catering announcements recorded during weekly journeys between London and Leicester, and Limbo (2019), a film narrated from journals written during this period whilst Sandra’s mother’s health was in decline, layered over footage of those same train journeys.
English continued to make films and work as a rare book dealer. His acclaimed film Heated Gloves (2019) documents his friend and The Dining Room regular Captain Maurice Seddon, an eccentric inventor known for creating electrically heated clothing. The film features both intimate footage and clips from Seddon’s appearances on international talk shows including David Letterman and Johnny Carson. After Seddon’s death, English discovered a trove of recorded phone calls spanning 30 years, which he compiled into the vinyl release The Seddon Tapes, Volume 1 (2018). These recordings formed the basis of his approach to his long-running Resonance 104.4 FM radio show Wavelength.
In 2020, English published Perfect Binding, an alternative portrait of 1960s Leicester told through the lives of his family and childhood friends, including BOY boutique co-founder Stephane Raynor, artist Jim Mellors (aka Victoria Ashley), and the late fashion photographer David Parkinson. A new publication entitled To Farse All Things, will be published as a companion piece to the exhibition and includes photographs, interviews and archival material.
A selection of films by William English and Sandra Cross have been archived by LUX https://lux.org.uk
To Farse All Things
William English & Sandra Cross
Bonington Gallery
26 September – 13 December 2025
Launch: Thursday 25 September, 6-8pm
Notes for Editors
Press enquiries please contact Sarah McLeod, Corporate Communications Manager, on telephone +44 (0)115 848 8735, or via email.
William English is a Leicester-born filmmaker, broadcaster, bookseller and co-founder with Sandra Cross of the organic vegetarian restaurant, The Dining Room (1980-1990). He is curator of the Captain Maurice Seddon (Royal Signals) archive, audio selections from which have been released as The Seddon Tapes (Paradigm Discs). English's long-running radio series - Wavelength - is a programme of multiple agendas, showcasing under-the-radar experimental music, poetry and art, broadcasting on Resonance 104.4 FM. His films include: Ex Library (2009), Heated Gloves (2015), It's My Own Invention (2017) and City (1985). English is also the author of Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester (2019) - an experimental genre-defying documentary/counter-history/artist's book, loosely themed around vanity/inertia and celebrity/obscurity in 1960s Leicester.
About Sandra Cross:
Sandra Cross worked as a features editor and deputy editor for IPC Magazines, before developing The Dining Room (active between 1980-1990), a vegetarian organic restaurant in London’s Borough Market, with partner and co-founder William English. This early experience of collaboration on projects where life and art intersect, guides her joint and solo actions whether in written work, film or sound. There is a focus on the lived experience documented and memorialised to celebrate and preserve what might otherwise have been lost. The founding of the restaurant initiated a quest to explore identity through the series What Did You Eat Today? leading to an association with the Mass Observation Archive, and the activity of recording announcements on the London-Leicester train in the MMs Bar (2011). These were described by one reviewer in Mojo as "destined for intense cultdom”.
Contemporary with this project was Limbo - a ten year study of her mother’s "probable Alzheimer’s" in words, sound, images, collages, and film, the substantial parts of which are a 2,000 page journal, 96-hours' worth of recordings, and an hour-long film. Limbo (2019), the film, was presented at the British Library, and the recordings archived by Stephen Cleary, The British Library's Lead Curator for Literary and Creative Recordings, whose enthusiasm was expressed via a suggestion that the readings over the film in particular were reminiscent of the ethos and articulation of Mark E. Smith, lead singer in the post-punk band The Fall. Cross has suggested that a quote from La-Bas by Joris-Karl Huysmans best identifies her approach to life: "It is foolish to let my thoughts wander this way (...) but daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is uglier and empty”.
About Bonington Gallery
Founded in 1969, Bonington Gallery has been at the forefront of Nottingham’s rich and vibrant visual arts community for over fifty years, offering an innovative and dynamic programme of local, national, and international significance. Situated at the heart of Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art & Design, our ‘art school’ context is reflected throughout our multi-disciplinary programme of exhibitions and events – presenting and exploring practices related to visual art, fashion, film, music and design. Beyond our building, our connections with colleagues in academic subject areas help ground our programme and thinking within past, present and future cultural and societal discourse