Sheila Scott’s many ways of giving

When the Stephenson children were small, they drew all over the walls of their house in Islington. “It was absolutely mad. The walls looked like Cy Twombly paintings,” says Mary Stephenson, 35, who with her twin sister, Anna, sits in the middle of the brood; they have two older sisters, Minnie, 39, and Lola, 37, and a little brother, Jimmy, 33. “The drawings were quite dense at the bottom and then, as they got higher, they got more fragmented,” she continues. “Because as we got older, we did less of it. It was this amazing ring of creativity, from the skirting board up.”

The children’s mother, Sheila Scott, and their late father Andrew Stephenson, an architect, encouraged this early expression. “It was a creative playhouse, with swings and hammocks,” says Anna, who became an artist, like Mary. “If music was playing in the house, you wouldn’t be dancing on the floor – you’d be dancing on the table.”

Sheila, now 70, a wiry, unstoppable, no-nonsense presence who works out with a personal trainer twice a week, resists such romanticism. “Lola asked me recently, ‘Did you really let us draw all over the walls when we were kids?’” she says. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ She just looked me up and down, and said: ‘God. You were slack.’”

The Stephensons have convened one bright November morning in Mary’s studio in Seven Sisters, north London, to celebrate. First, to mark her next show, an exhibition of paintings at White Cube Paris in January, which will confirm her as one of the most exciting young painters working in Britain today. All around are her bright, mysterious canvases – still, ominous landscapes that lure you in with their weird quiet. 

The exhibition will add to the siblings’ already impressive array of CVs. Minnie, a journalist, is currently the culture correspondent for Channel 4 News (she went viral during the pandemic for a robust interview with Dominic Cummings – “the doorstep of the decade”); Lola is a comedian and writer whose work has featured on Radio 4, the BBC and the Edinburgh Fringe; Anna is an artist, art director and a visiting lecturer at Parsons School of Design in New York; and Jimmy runs Hector’s, a De Beauvoir wine bar evangelical about natural wines. To their mother’s continuing despair, none chose to be a dentist. “Lola could have been a brain surgeon if she wanted to,” tuts Sheila. “Why did she go and be a bleeding comedian?”

Mostly, though, they are here to celebrate Sheila. Seventeen years ago, with fellow local Louie Salvoni, she co-founded Shelter From The Storm, a homeless shelter in Islington providing 36 beds for those in need. Funded entirely by private donations, it offers its residents food, English lessons and activities, as well as helping them to find long-term housing, legal aid and medical help. “It’s an incredibly tight ship,” says Sheila. “A very small staff, lots of volunteers, and we achieve lots of impressive outcomes, really, by anybody’s standards.” 

Sheila had had a few jobs before founding it – including working as an artist – but she had mostly been bringing up the children. Having lived in Islington since the age of 14 (“I lived opposite where Joe Orton was murdered by his boyfriend!”), she was well-placed to see how it, along with the rest of the city, had changed. She marched against the Vietnam war, against apartheid and for women’s lib; it took until she was 53, though, and the kids essentially grown up, for her to get involved in charity work. “She’s an all-or-nothing person,” says Minnie. “Every week, my mother will call me up at eight in the morning and talk to me about a great social injustice, and make me feel quite guilty. Especially when I was a celebrity reporter. She’d tell me about something awful, and I’d be off to review Kung Fu Panda 3.”

The family is very close. They communicate daily on a WhatsApp chat called The Kitten Forum 3.0 (Minnie keeps losing her phone so they have to keep rebooting it). “Everything goes through there,” says Lola. “We live by committee.” Adds Jimmy: “We probably shouldn’t say this, but we always check in with Mum and say: ‘So, who are we voting for this year?’ She is our guiding light.”

Sheila didn’t mean to have five children. But when it happened, she was smitten. “You know Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? I never expected to be so madly… Ah! Ah!” she cries. “The wonder of it. I absolutely adored them.”

She and Andrew met and married very quickly, and had the five kids in six years. Andrew was later diagnosed as being bipolar, and suffered from alcoholism. “It was a struggle,” says Sheila, who largely raised the children single-handed. “We didn’t have a lot of money. We had no money, actually. But, you know, we survived.” Anything free was seized upon – they spent most of their weekends in free museums, at free events. “Your job is just to keep their fingers out of the light sockets – which was very difficult in our house,” says Sheila of her parenting style. “It was a slum. It really was.”

The children were well-versed in her views from a young age. “She’s always given us a real grounding in the socio-political issues of the world,” says Lola. “You’d want to eat your Shreddies, and she’d be like, ‘Yes, and the reason it’s like this is that Thatcher sold the playing fields in 1981, and that has led to the degradation of the working class, and…’” It was “quite a chaotic childhood”, she reflects. “It was quite wild. And my dad…”

“I always knew he was unwell,” says Mary. “I understood that he was just a very, very vulnerable person. So, as a family, we protected him. There were certain dynamics to work in, to make sure he was OK. We wouldn’t necessarily be able to all spend Christmas with him, for example, because he would get overwhelmed.” 

Andrew moved out when Minnie was 12. Sheila worked hard to keep the joy going in the house. “She just really wanted us to be happy,” says Mary. “And when things were particularly tricky, she would put on a song – The Beach Boys or something – and make us dance in the kitchen before we went to school. It was just really sweet.”

He died from liver disease on New Year’s Day, 2012. The family were all with him. “Seeing somebody who was so talented but who was often in financial jeopardy made us really ambitious,” says Minnie. “I think there was always a sense in our childhood that our parents’ potential wasn’t being fulfilled. It made us all very driven.” 

“All my scripts are about somebody trying to be normal,” says Lola. “Because we didn’t feel normal, ever.”

Sheila’s maternal generosity is evident throughout the shelter. “Mum’s a big believer in music and art being a healer,” says Mary. “She has poetry readings, she has people coming in and playing music, and she’s very big on people sharing meals.” Sheila recently installed a ping-pong table. “There’s a lot of research about ping-pong,” she explains. “It improves the cognitive health of Parkinson’s sufferers. But also, anyone can play it. I can play it! Very badly, but I can play it. So I put out an edict saying, I want to see a bit of ping pong going on!”

She started the shelter in a church hall, putting out camp beds twice a week on a Wednesday and Sunday. “You could see there was huge demand.” Islington, she says, was “getting gentrified, but there were still huge pockets of deprivation”. The point, though, is to welcome whoever needs their help. “We’ve had lawyers, civil servants, midwives, doctors, accountants…. Our flatline is: whoever they are, wherever they come from.” 

From the church hall, the shelter set its sights on a former mirror factory. Having found out the owner was a cyclist, Sheila cycled directly into his offices to petition for the lease. Her methods are happily unorthodox. “When you’ve got no money and you’ve got no PR companies, you’ve got to have a bit of show, haven’t you?”

Later, the team found a former supermarket that they could buy on a mortgage. The money, as ever, was obtained via donations. (They have never asked for any government funding because “one, they wouldn’t give you much, and two, it often comes caveated with all sorts of loopholes or whatever”.) They turned the former supermarket into a lovely space; all the shelters have been “really beautiful”, says Sheila, “because why not?” The current home, which has a pretty pink-tiled communal kitchen, was highly commended for a RIBA award in 2020. Although, naturally, Sheila has a new plan in mind. 

“Do you want to hear the dream?” she asks of her latest project. Move On Up! is inspired by the title of the Curtis Mayfield song. They’d like to build a small socially rented housing development in the middle of a mixed community, with long tenancies and no right to buy – 11 apartments with one, two or three bedrooms. “It is a mad dream,” admits Sheila. “But it’s a good dream.”

The children have long been involved in the shelter in different ways (although, they want it to be made clear, nothing like the volunteers who work there every day); they have put out camp beds, taken portraits of residents, helped to develop the website… “We’d all go on Christmas Day and have lunch there,” says Minnie. “I remember getting various friends to dress up as elves.” There was a snow machine that they invariably failed to fill with snow, settling for bubbles instead. Mary, Anna and Jimmy would help wrap the presents. 

“One year, everyone got a bag of Golden Virginia and a £20 note,” says Anna. “Mum was like, ‘It’s freezing cold out there. All they want is a fag.’” (Sheila admits this is true. “You wouldn’t be allowed to do that any more.”)

They feel the effect of her work variously; certainly, the spirit of community is something that has been passed on. Jimmy launched Hector’s three and a half years ago. “It was instilled in us that a place should be welcoming – people can come through any time,” he says. “There’s this sense of neighbourliness. We grew up in this area: there should be this sense of waving and smiling at people in the street. Not in a weird, twee way, but as the world just gets darker, lonelier, colder…” Hector was his father’s middle name; it’s his, and now it’s the middle name of Lola’s baby boy too. “My sisters all wanted me to call the place Jimmy’s or Jim’s,” says the self-styled “runt of the litter”. “But I think that sounds like a dive bar.”

Minnie now tries to do more stories “with a social conscience”; Lola still writes about outsiders. Anna and Mary go back to their childhood in their individual work (the twins share a lot, including a home, but not their art). When their father died, Anna, who was studying fashion in New York, started draping her walls as though she was scrawling on the kitchen walls again. She photographs the results. “They serve as diary entries,” she says. “Finding peace in the chaos, all that kind of stuff.”

Mary feels too that her calm-seeming works are about “organised chaos”. Her Paris show (from 24 January to 22 February) will be her most personal yet. “One of the main paintings is of our old family home,” she says – Sheila sold the house, finally, 18 months ago. “It’s represented as a bouncy castle but it’s at sea.” 

The clan poses before another picture in the studio: a suite of panels floating in an expanse of blue. “It’s going to be titled Five Swings,” says Mary. “Because we used to have the swings that came down from the kitchen ceiling that our parents would put us in. For me, these paintings feel desperately sad because there’s a real intention to protect each other – but inevitably people get hurt.”

“He would have been massively proud of them,” says Sheila of Andrew. “I hope he’s feeling it somewhere.” She allows herself a rare pause. “It was difficult – incredibly difficult. But they weren’t difficult. I’m blessed to have a family who are an absolute scream.” She, like the rest of them, will go to Paris in January for Mary’s opening. “She’s a painter, in quite a wonderful way,’ says Sheila. “I don’t know how that happened.” Umm, what about the childhood murals? “Yes, yes, yes!,” she cries delightedly. “‘Slack!’” 

For more information or to donate to Shelter From The Storm, visit sfts.org.uk; @sftslondon