A Bank Holiday anti-listicle
God save us from bottomless immersive kidulting
If you want to feel depressed then just Google something like ‘Things to do over the Bank Holiday in London’.
The results you’ll get back from the algorithmically fine-tuned likes of Design My Night, Time Out and Visit London paint a picture of a London populated almost exclusively by twenty-something white people, who love nothing more than to pose for selfies under displays of fake flowers as they gulp down the last drops of their bottomless Prosecco1 brunch before heading off to a spot of immersive fun that will likely end with someone vomiting in the kidult ball pool.
Their London looks like this:
That is not a place we recognise, or one we especially want to spend our long weekend in.
At the other extreme, there are also plenty of places telling you that Notting Hill Carnival is happening over the Bank Holiday as well as how you should ‘do it’ (we even read one article this week that promised to show you ‘how to dodge the crowds’).
We can save you a bit of time here: Leave the house, head towards Notting Hill, make sure you have some cash on you, deliberately seek out the crowds and have fun.
With all that said, we wanted to pull a few things together that (while being resolutely Google-unfriendly and containing zero ‘keywords’) hopefully go some way to reflecting the sheer diversity and beautiful weirdness London thrives on.
This is not presented as a comprehensive list, it’s just supposed to demonstrate that the cultural lifeblood of this city has not yet been completely drained by bland, soulless forced fun merchants.
Organise your own Open House tour
As we mentioned in Saturday’s Roundup, tickets for Open House 2022 go on sale on Wednesday, but if you can’t wait until next month then there are other ways of (legally) gaining access to some of London’s coolest buildings for a bit of a snoop round.
Just last week the small batch clothing manufacturer Paynter collaborated with Modern House to create a guide to some ‘inspiring living spaces’ that are open to explore this summer, and four places on the list are in London. There’s Walmer Yard in Notting Hill, the gallery at the Isokon Building in Belsize Park, 2 Willow Road in Hampstead and the brilliantly-named Cosmic House in Holland Park.
Or you could put together your own itinerary using Helen Barret’s recommendations of great Modernist architecture from our interview with her last year. Or you could buy one of Stefi Orazi’s gorgeous ‘parambulation guides’ (especially as 50p from every purchase goes to Shelter).
If all that sound too much like hard work, then the Barbican’s 90 minute architecture tours are running every day through the Bank Holiday, and cost just £15 (and if you do go to the Barbican don’t forget to pop in to the impressive conservatory while you’re there), or past LiB interviewee Jack Chesher is running his Covent Garden: Behind The Scenes tour on the Monday (tickets are £16).
Get ready for Carnival with Black-Owned Hackney
BlackEatsLDN is an organisation that was put together a couple of years ago to try and break down some of the barriers that Black-owned businesses in London still face and to try and increase the number of Black-owned restaurants in mainstream media (and listings sites).
Their Black-Owned Hackney events are a collaboration with Bohemia Place Market, designed to show off London’s best Black-owned street food, traders and other business. On Friday 26th (6-10pm) and Saturday 27th (12-8pm) they’re putting on a ‘Carnival Warm Up’ weekender that will include steel pans, face-painting and carnival dancers.
P.S. If you’re in South London then Peckham levels are hosting two floors of “Caribbean flavours and a cast of London’s best DJs and international guests” for their Pon De Floor Carnival Jam on Friday 26th.
Retreat into the dark at Frightfest
The UK’s best horror-themed film festival begins on Thursday and runs through until the Bank Holiday Monday. This year there’s seventy films playing across five screens, including the world premier of Neil Marshall’s new one, the return of Dario Argento and the European premiere of Fall.
There are full festival passes available, or day passes, or you can just buy tickets for specific screenings (more details here). If you get a pass it will even get you in to the fantastic Phoenix Arts Club every night for the duration of the festival.
Pretend you’re in New Orleans with a shrimp boil (and muffulettas!)
If we had to pick one, then Decatur was our favourite meal kit of lockdown. Their spicy shrimp boil is simple, messy and absolutely delicious. Since lockdown they’ve been popping up at various events across the country (including last weekend’s Craft Beer Festival) and in March they opened up a prep kitchen (not a fully-fledged restaurant…. yet) in a railway arch in Leyton.
On Saturday they are opening up that railway arch to serve shrimp and grits and muffuletta sandwiches on a first come, first served basis (although you can email them if there’s a gang of you going and you want to reserve a few seats).
Coming up on Wednesday 🎫
We speak to Mark Davyd, the founder and CEO of the Music Venue Trust, about the precarious nature of London’s grassroots music venues, why they’re disappearing at such a rate and what can be done to save them.
Sign up for a free trial today and that will be in your inbox first thing on Wednesday morning:
Climb up a medieval clock tower
It’s not a house (well, ‘house of God’ maybe) but St Augustine’s Tower is Hackney’s oldest building and is also a Grade 1 listed building (putting it in same bracket as St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace).
On the last Sunday of every month the church opens up to allow people to climb to the top of the clock tower and live out their Dan Brown fantasies (the original church was established by the Knights Templar) as they ascend the very narrow spiral staircase, stop to wonder at the beautiful 400-year-old clock and pause for breath at the bell room, until they reach very top where they can take in a view “of a part of London that is so rarely seen from this height” (to quote Ian Visits’ review of the tour).
Gross yourself out in a Victorian operating theatre
While we’re being historical and talking about places that can only be reached by narrow spiral staircases, we have to mention the Old Operating Theatre Museum. Europe’s oldest surviving operating theatre could also claim to be London’s most atmospheric building, as it’s hidden away in the attic of the early eighteenth-century church of the old St Thomas’ Hospital.
But if imagining what it was like to have your leg amputated before the arrival of anaesthetic isn’t visceral enough for you, then on Saturday you can pay £12 to listen to someone from the museum’s team “delve into the horrors” of the surgical procedures that used to go on there, while you try not to regret eating that meatball sub for your lunch.
(If you want to carry on the Victorian theme, the Victorian funfair is taking over the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens on Saturday, with various old fashioned circus acts, performers and games.)
See an East London artist’s studio in Mayfair
Earlier this year the Japanese-born artist Hiraki Sawa (along with other artists and friends) was evicted from his studio complex on Ridley Road. When he did so he had to leave the ‘shed-like studio-within-a-studio’ that he’d created there.
For his exhibition at the Parafin gallery just off Regent Street, Sawa has used materials salvaged from that studio to created a group of sculptural ‘surrogate studios’ in which you can view some new work films and drawings.
FAD magazine recently called this exhibition “the most intimately absorbing show in London” but it ends on 10 September, so this is a great time to catch it.
5 little bits
As part of its ongoing crusade to completely trash its own reputation, the Met is using tax payer’s money to sue a former chief superintendent for £60,000 for discussing the sexist and racist discrimination she says she suffered. Parm Sandhu settled an employment tribunal claim in 2020 and won £120,000 from the force, but now the Met are saying that the book she wrote afterwards “broke an agreement meant to gag her from speaking out”.
If you’re trying to rent somewhere in London right now then you’ll know it’s a complete horror show out there, and according to Bloomberg it’s not going to change anytime soon. The ‘rent frenzy’ which is seeing “as many as 50 applicants competing for each apartment that becomes available,” is expected to continue until the end of 2023.
In related news, the Independent has an article on the “small number of the capital’s female property owners” who are turning to AirBnB to make ends meet, “even subletting their own rooms while they sleep in the lounge.”
The NY Times is doing some excellent London-based journalism right now. We’re not sure how many Manhatannites are that interested in reading an interview with Elijah Quashie of The Pengest Munch, in which he bemoans the ‘reckless’ prices of a post-pandemic chicken burger meal; but we loved it (and the portraits, as always with the Times, are great too).
The first play to be staged at the brand new @sohoplace theatre in the West End has been announced. Marvellous (which tells the life story of Neil Baldwin - you might have seen the TV movie starring Toby Jones) was on the Old Vic earlier this year, where it picked up some pretty good reviews, and now it’s going to @sohoplace for six weeks from 15 October.
Secret London’s guide to ‘36 Wicked Ways To Enjoy The August Bank Holiday In London’ uses the prefix ‘bottomless’ no fewer than 19 times.
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