Amazing Artisans – The Mysterious Sweetington

If you search the Internet for images of Victorian or Edwardian dollhouses, you will be offered links to Sweetington on “Flickr,” a photo streaming website. Click on any of them and thumbnail pictures gorgeous images of apparent miniatures fill the screen.  Click on any one to expand it, and the odds are you will be led to a Pinterest board or someone's blog. Click on the image again and you are usually transported back to Flickr, not the website of the artisan named Sweetington.

 My confusion continued when I chose to option on my browser
, “Search the Internet for this image” and got the message, “Best guess of this image: brighton pavilion interior”

Then a friend sent me an email with a photo of the real hand placing the chair in the supposed Regency Chinoiserie room box. The subject line of the email was, Great Photoshop Work.

That did it. I marked Sweetington off as a talented architectural / interiors photographer, until one day I  stumbled upon the blog, All Things Jane Austen. It caught my eye because a few years before, Patrick had a business trip to London. Over a weekend, we were guests at Godmersham Park in Kent, a former stately manor house that his client had turned into a conference center. (It's now the home of the Association of British Dispensing Opticians College).


Wow! Maybe Sweetington is miniaturist! I got serious about tracking down the elusive Tim Sidford, who turned out to be not so elusive after all. If I had read more carefully, I would have noticed that at lest a few of the Pinterest boards mentioned his name.

Tom Sidford is a classical musician, painter, interior designer, piano teacher, who also happens to make wonderful miniatures. “My most popular items,” Tim explains, “are quirky miniature dollhouses designed to sit on a shelf or side table.”

This very Renaissance man goes on to explain, “My bonkers hobby is creating miniature interiors. I love the drama of many historic interiors. Creating these models allows me to indulge my ‘inner designer’! The rooms are constructed from wood and card and wooden moulded decorative trim, as well as bits of old cereal packets, drinking straws, balsa wood, beads, plastic food packaging etc. The most enjoyable bit is painting the floors, walls and ceilings. Most of the furniture is by playmobil, although I will often customize it.”


Miniature enthusiasts applaud Tim Sidford's work, but his reach goes beyond our universe. There is this mention on the BookPatrol blog. “We all know good things come in small packages, but British artist Tim Sidford takes the cake with his meticulous miniature interiors. Bordering on unbelievable, Sidford recreates the stuff that dreams are made of within the smallest of structures.”

And from TheInFill: “They are all [Tim's miniatures] so mind-blowing beautiful and precise, I think they’ve filled me up for the day.”

So there it is. My search for the artisan behind the pseudonym Sweetington is over. Now I can just enjoy Tim Sidford's work.


Susan Downing