Charlotte Mensah, the Salon Chair and 40 Years of Making Hair History 💇🏿♀️🪮
The Ladbroke Hall exhibition follows Charlotte Mensah from her early training to her place among Britain’s most influential hairdressers. Across four decades, it is the people around her who hold the story together.
A pair of hair tongs bought near the beginning of Charlotte Mensah’s career appears in her new exhibition at Ladbroke Hall. She kept them through the years that took her from training in London to running Hairlounge, developing her own product range and entering the British Hairdressing Hall of Fame. They are an ordinary working tool with a long memory attached.
Community Matters marks 40 years since Mensah entered hairdressing. Photography and film sit alongside sound, installation, archival material and personal objects, tracing a life shaped by childhood in Ghana and formative years in North West London.
Mensah trained at the London College of Fashion in the late 1980s under the late Winston Isaacs, known across the industry as the Godfather of British Afro Hairdressing. Hairlounge followed, first opening in Kilburn in 1999 before later moving to Portobello Road, which became the permanent base for her work. The salon built its reputation on expertise in Afro and curly hair, although regulars will know the appointment comes with another draw: Charlotte’s much loved pound cake (if you know, you know). People came back, conversations carried on and some clients became friends. That continuity runs through the exhibition.
It also matters that Mensah was building her career in a British hair industry where textured hair was routinely treated as a separate specialism. Her answer was the work itself: learning the structure and needs of Afro, mixed and curly hair, then delivering that care to a consistently high standard. In 2018, after winning Afro Hairdresser of the Year for the third time at the British Hairdressing Awards, she became the first Black woman inducted into the British Hairdressing Hall of Fame.
The salon remains central, though Mensah’s knowledge now reaches well beyond Portobello Road. She founded the Charlotte Mensah Manketti Oil range and, in 2020, published Good Hair: The Essential Guide to Afro, Textured and Curly Hair with Penguin. The book brings practical care advice into conversation with the cultural history of Black hair and her own route from apprentice to business owner. It reads as the extension of a practice developed over years with real clients, real questions and hair that requires understanding rather than guesswork.
Ladbroke Hall places the exhibition within the community that helped shape it. Mensah has worked in the area for more than two decades, building her business and raising her family there, so this is familiar ground rather than a convenient London address.
Curator Madeleine Haddon, Senior Curator at V&A East, has brought the exhibition together with creative director Jacqueline Douglas and producer Bashiru Lawal-Shardow. Their approach keeps the public milestones in view without allowing them to flatten the story. A career spanning 40 years is made up of quieter things as well: techniques repeated until they become instinctive, knowledge passed on and appointments kept week after week. Community Matters gives those things their proper place.
Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters is at The Studio, Ladbroke Hall, London, until Sunday 13 September 2026. The exhibition is open from 10am to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday, with full visitor information available from Ladbroke Hall.
