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A Pound of Flesh for 50p by Alex Chinneck, London, UK

Alex Chinneck’s wax house on Southwark Street on 8 November 2014, half melted: red wax hangs in long drips down the brick walls and pools on the ground beside a green front door, under a grey roof, with railway arches behind.
Artwork FileSouthwark · London
Gone2014

A pound of flesh
for 50p

Alex Chinneck · A Pound of Flesh for 50p (The Melting House), 2014 · 40 Southwark Street

Photo: Aurelien Guichard / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0; taken 8 November 2014

  • #AlexChinneck
  • #MeltingHouse
  • #MERGEFestival
  • #Southwark
  • #WaxBricks
  • #RoofOnLifts

For the 2014 MERGE Festival, Alex Chinneck built a full-size brick house on Southwark Street out of wax, then melted it by hand from the top down while its roof was lowered on lifts.

4 things to know

  1. Built roof firstThe house went up in reverse. The roof, only about 1 t, was lifted 5 m into the air and propped at the corners while Laing O’Rourke bricklayers laid the wax walls underneath. It then sat on six manually operated Genie SuperLift telescopic platforms and came down in 200 mm stages as the walls melted. Its “slates” were plastic, hand-painted by scenic artists; the Evening Standard’s reviewer took it for a “genuine slate roof”. New Civil Engineer · Evening Standard
  2. A leg-wax maker and a new mortarThe wax came from Darent Wax, whose main product is pellets for leg waxing. With them Chinneck developed a blend of paraffin wax and EVA polymer that could be cast in beds of terracotta sand; the bricks were made at 200 a day, with the moulds rushed into a mobile cold room to be reused. The windows were Darent’s DW450 “Glass Wax”, and the door was cast in one piece. Wax draws no water out of mortar, so ordinary mortar was reluctant to stick: the bricklayers used a much stiffer, high-cement mix. New Civil Engineer · Darent Wax
  3. When the heat came onOn 28 October 2014 the Evening Standard reported that Chinneck had “fired up heaters over the weekend” (25–26 October), not trusting London’s Indian summer to do the job; a blog on the last day wrote instead that it had been “melted by hand since late September”. The melting took three hours every morning, with “industrial blowers running off generators” heating the top course of bricks so the house melted from the top down. Evening Standard · theartblog · Tired of London
  4. A title and a tributeThe Evening Standard says the title refers, via The Merchant of Venice, to the house halving in size and the “gory, fleshy redness” of its bricks; theartblog read it as a comment on “mortgages and lending”. The house itself honoured a candle-making factory that stood in Bankside a couple of centuries earlier. Evening Standard · theartblog · MERGE

Where it stood

📍
No. 40 Southwark Street, near London Bridge: “an industrial piece of ground between the road and the railway arches” (Inspiring City), which the producers call “a meanwhile public space” (Illuminate Productions).
🏢
Nothing is left to see. OpenStreetMap now maps 38–40 Southwark Street as a six-storey office building; whether it stands on the 2014 lot is not confirmed.
👷
About 75 people made it, across wax fabrication, carpentry, steelwork, painting and brick-laying (CNN). Some visitors came back more than 10 times (Illuminate).
🎥
The time-lapse above runs backwards, from the puddle to the new house; it was uploaded by Illuminate Productions on 8 January 2015 (video by Chris Tubbs and Rachel Barber, music by Sonjay Prabhakar, as credited on the MERGE page). A behind-the-scenes film by Angie Dixon follows how the wax house was made.
Open in MapsArtist’s page

Sightings

  1. 201425 Sep

    Photo taken (PA): intact

  2. 201426 Sep

    On show (MERGE)

  3. 201428 Oct

    Review: heaters on

  4. 20148 Nov

    Photo taken (top of page)

  5. 201415 Nov

    Photo taken: “a couple of days left”

  6. 201418 Nov

    Blog: “the final day”

  7. 201425 Nov

    Being scraped off (CNN)

Every stamp links to the dated source.

On the record

The Guardian2 October 2014

Property boom: Alex Chinneck’s brain-spinning trick in Covent Garden

“Last week he unveiled a house in Southwark made of 10 tonnes of wax bricks, which will be heated each morning over the coming month”

Oliver Wainwright, in a piece mostly about Chinneck’s floating building in Covent Garden.

Read

Evening Standard28 October 2014

A Pound of Flesh for 50p (The Melting House), 40 Southwark Street – exhibition review

“With the obvious artificiality of a doll’s house, the window frames are too clumsily made, the house’s details too crude for the illusion to work.”

Robert Bevan, who also called Chinneck’s recent projects “essentially content-free one-liners”.

Read · Archived copy

theartblogNovember 2014

Alex Chinneck’s A Pound of Flesh for 50p – Planning permission for the unexpected

“The melting house has been granted a few more weeks in which to liquefy”

On the extended run, which it saw as a punchline: “what large-scale construction project ever delivers quite on time?”

Read · Archived copy

CNN25 November 2014

Alex Chinneck’s mind-bending buildings

“With the melting house now a pile of hardened goo being scraped off a pebbled lot (the installation finished Sunday)”

Allyssia Alleyne, two days after Sunday 23 November.

Read · Archived copy

The facts

Made by
Alex Chinneck, with structural engineer Simon Smith of Smith and Wallwork, after a 12-month collaboration that also took in wax producers and chemists (NCE) Checked
Commission
Commissioned and produced by Illuminate Productions for MERGE Festival 2014, in partnership with Better Bankside and Tate Modern (Illuminate); the three part-funded it (NCE). Southwark Council and Network Rail are listed only among the supporters Checked
Address
40 Southwark Street, London SE1 9HP (MERGE) Checked
Size
Two storeys on a 9.4 × 4.7 m footprint; walls more than 5 m high and 75 mm thick (NCE) Checked
Bricks
About 8,000 wax bricks (MERGE; “nearly 8,000”, says NCE), each 65 × 75 × 215 mm Checked
Weight
“10 tonnes of wax bricks”, says The Guardian; “8t of wax”, says NCE Conflicting
On show
From 26 September 2014 (MERGE), billed to melt over 30 days; Inspiring City gave the end as 26 October. The run was then extended (theartblog, above) Checked
Closed
18 November 2014, say It’s Nice That, NCE and a same-day blog post calling it “the final day” (Tired of London). 23 November, says the MERGE listing, and on 25 November CNN wrote that it “finished Sunday”, that is, 23 November Conflicting
The wax after
On 31 October NCE wrote that most of it “will go for recycling as firelighters”; no later report found Unconfirmed
Status
Gone: melted, then scraped off the lot in late November 2014 (CNN) Checked

Related

  • On Street Art Utopia: Alex Chinneck’s Architectural Illusions (8 Photos) (2026), where the photo above appeared.
  • Take my Lightning but Don’t Steal my Thunder: Chinneck’s floating market building in Covent Garden, on show at the same time. The Guardian
  • Under the Weather but Over the Moon (2013): his upside-down façade on Blackfriars Road, for the same producers, who list it as “Miner on the Moon”; the building has since been demolished. Illuminate Productions · CNN
  • Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), which CNN names as one of his inspirations. CNN
All sources (23)

Press, 2014

Organisers and makers

Films

Photos and maps

Artwork File · Last checked 29 September 2026 · Certainty labels follow How We Verify Art · All Artwork Files