About

There’s a quiet hum beneath the vaulted iron ribs of Brixton’s old fruit and vegetable market—an energy less raucous than its Victorian past, but no less vibrant. Follow it, and you’ll find Circus: a carefully composed emporium of art, objects, and sensory delight that feels both completely current and gently out of time. Owner-operated and deeply local, Circus honours its Brixton roots while bringing a distinctly elevated, almost continental sensibility to the neighbourhood.

Housed within the bones of an 1870s trading hall, Circus is part gallery, part gift shop, and entirely a world unto itself.  A performance of aesthetics where the main acts are painterly prints, impossibly chic stationery, and gifts that walk the line between art object and emotional telegram. Every shelf is staged, every item considered: a silk-screened notebook here, a candle with a scent like first-edition pages there. It’s the kind of place where you come for a card and leave feeling like you’ve been somewhere—a pocket of calm curated for those fluent in visual nuance.
It’s a space that celebrates the beautiful and the useful in equal measure, with every surface a study in thoughtful curation. The shelves hum with painterly energy, showcasing the works of artists like Hormazd Narielwalla, Kibland Atelier, HeraldBack, and even the legendary Keith Haring and Marc Chagall. Each print is a conversation starter, a portal, a piece of wall poetry.

On a nearby plinth, Peter Slight’s ceramics sit like tactile punctuation marks—earthy, sculptural, unexpectedly witty. A table nearby carries Meagan’s tableware, all muted glaze and quiet elegance, waiting to turn the act of dining into ritual.
The air inside Circus is scented—subtly, but unmistakably—with orange blossom oil, their bestselling fragrance, grounding the space in warmth and memory. Candles by Oh James! and Solei Studios flicker quietly in corners, lending a touch of theatre to the act of browsing. For those attuned to mood as much as scent, the Mood Waters by Collins offer emotional top notes in bottled form.

There are no gimmicks here, no fast trends or filler. Just good design, timeless craftsmanship, and a lingering scent of printmaking ink and warm cedar. It feels as much like a gallery as it does a gift shop—if the gallery served tea and remembered your birthday.

There’s stationery too—elevated, crisp, sometimes playful—and gifts for every design lover who’s ever frowned at mass production, who doesn’t love a fresh notebook or getting a handwritten card in the post—elevated, crisp, sometimes playful—and gifts for every design lover who’s ever frowned at mass production. This is a place where wrapping paper feels like fabric, and cards read like short fiction.

At Circus, you don’t shop—you collect. You discover. You find something you didn’t know you were looking for, and wonder how you ever lived without it. And when you leave, bag in hand, the market’s century-old rafters seem to whisper that they’ve seen many things—but nothing quite like this.