The games room at Purley was always a bit of an afterthought. Without windows, it was a somehow a little lacking in life and interest.
To give it some personality our Manager Rachel decided to commission a well-known mural artist Nathan Parker (tag N4T4) to undertake a mural which covered all of the walls and described a spiritual landscape as the Purley mural is an expression of the ideas Swedenborg had about the spiritual world.
The mural has been designed to appeal to visitors of all ages, as there are small details hidden in the overall imagery for young people to search out, included in the images covering spiritual themes are ladybirds, a frog, a muntjac deer and an owl.
The mural ‘story’ starts on the left as you come into the games room with the image of a window looking out onto a new landscape, Swedenborg’s symbolic message of taking a fresh view of things.
The concepts broadly covered are the seasons, night and day and things changing from one state to another. This connects to Swedenborg’s love of the natural world and his ideas of nature as the mirror of the heavens.
Very important ideas in the mural are change and regeneration and the relationship between the physical world and the heavenly planes.
There is also reference to William Blake as the mural features a version of Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder image. 
Nathan was also able to recreate the painting ‘Celestial Bodies’ by surrealist artist Octavio Ocampo which depicts male and female angels as one angelic being – the perfected combination of opposites.
As the imagery sparks lots of questions, we have already found the mural to be a great talking point and a way of illustrating Swedenborg’s ideas to people who come to visit Purley.
