Parks in the sky, loo roll in galleries and art in hospital.
Plus pubs in museums and London's most expensive fixer upper.
With galleries and museums still largely closed and the weather getting better, we thought we’d bring a bit of a ‘public art’ theme to this week’s edition. First up though: something that you won’t be able to experience for another three years or so… if at all.
Loosely in the sky with Highline
Have you heard about the Camden Highline?
We wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t. Even if you had seen it mentioned it’s hard to summon up the effort to get beyond the headlines. We’re still counting the hours we lost reading about that bloody Garden Bridge.
But now the New Yorker has decided it’s worth spilling about 800 words worth of ink on the project we guess we’d better sit up and take a bit more notice.
The basics are this: It’s a £35 million project designed to “turn a disused stretch of railway viaduct into a new elevated park and walking route, connecting Camden Gardens in the west to York Way in the east.”
Don’t let all that ‘In the west... In the east’ PR fluff fool you. We’re talking about 1.2km of ‘park in the sky’ here; roughly half the length of New York’s High Line, or a brisk 10 minute stroll. The first phase is slated to open in 2024 (lol).
It’s being designed by James Corner Field Operations, the same landscape architects who worked on New York’s High Line (they were behind the Olympic Park too). And Sadiq Khan has said this about it:
“This is exactly the sort of innovative, environmentally sustainable and locally-driven project which could make an important contribution to London’s recovery from the pandemic. I really look forward to seeing these ambitious plans take shape.”
Meanwhile, Twitter has said this about it:
Steve there is a not just your everyday Twitter hater, he’s an urban planning and transport consultant who works with non-profits (we also appreciate anyone who uses the word ‘boondoggle’). So it’s worth looking at his thread from earlier in the year, in which he points out some of the, erm… challenges faced by the project .
It seems the big difference between New York’s High Line and Camden’s Highline isn’t that theirs is two words, but that the Camden version will “abut a still-active rail line.” And by ‘active’ they really do mean ‘active’. Right now there’s a train every few minutes. Although the designers have taken this into consideration and “integrated the appropriate fencing with windows for trainspotting.”
So, a fence with holes in it next to a railway line? It doesn’t sound very ‘park in the sky’, but we’re willing to keep an open mind.
By the way, if you’re getting a sense of déjà vu from all this, you’re probably thinking of the Peckham Coal Line, the community-led project for “a new linear park linking Queens Road Peckham and Rye Lane.” That project has been slowly gaining momentum for the past seven years or so, and it’s still going. You can read where they’ve got up to over on their site.
Supermarket art sweep
We’re sure you’re all caught up on the minutiae of reopening timelines, but just in case you need a reminder: museums and galleries can’t reopen until 17 May. However ‘commercial galleries’ count as non-essential shops so they’ve been able to reopen since last week.
Yep, it’s a bit daft, and a lot of galleries have kicked off about it already, while others have turned the loophole into an opportunity.
In our last edition we mentioned the Bourdon Street Chemist where you can buy a packet of felt Durex right off the shelf (and pay the artist herself).
Now the Design Museum have got in on the act by turning their shop into a supermarket that stocks only “essential items packaged in artworks created by a line-up of emerging artists.”
Starting today and for the next five days, you can pop into the Kensington High Street venue and pick up a £1.10 porridge oat jar by Amy Warrall, some toilet roll by Michaela Yearwood-Dan for 50p, or some washing-up liquid by Jess Warby for a whopping £2.
Hospital mood
Somewhere that’s definitely not a public gallery but is open right now is Chelsea and Westminster hospital. Why are we telling you this? Well, because as well as saving people’s lives, the hospital has just installed an interactive digital art piece.
The Immersive Healing Art System detects a person’s mood and emotions through facial scanning and sensors (slightly creepy, but we’re going with it because it’s a hospital), and then creates a “unique audio-visual art piece that calms, relaxes and improves mood”.
The hospital probably don’t want you wandering in, flat white in hand, to view their interactive art installation, but if you’re interested you can read more about what it does right here.
No art, but plenty of grub
The Museum of the Home over in Hoxton (what used to be called the Geffrye Museum before it changed its name for ‘transatlantic slavery’ reasons) had some big renovations planned before Covid made everything a lot trickier.
They are still planning to open sometime “in the Spring,” but in the meantime they are opening their new cafe (or its outdoor terrace at least) on 6 May.
To be honest calling it a ‘cafe’ is underplaying it a bit as it’s run by the pub grub legends behind Waterloo’s Anchor & Hope and Stoke Newington’s Clarence Tavern.
Their Hoxton outpost will be called Molly’s Cafe and is going to be on the site of the old Marquis of Landsdown pub which has been empty for well over a decade (this post on Spitalfields Life goes into some nerdy but amazing depth on the history of the pub). As well as a bar and a bistro there’s also going to be a ‘canteen’ serving up “merguez and chip baguettes … alongside trad sarnies and sausage rolls” (if museum cafes had been like this when we were kids then school trips would have been much more appealing).
And the rest
Lockdown statistic #1: 43% of Londoners worked from home at some point in 2020 says the Office for National Statistics. That’s more than any other region in the UK. No news yet on how many couples ended up wanting to strangle each other after a year of listening to each other on conference calls.
Lockdown statistic #2: Between April 6 and April 13 online orders in London dropped by 12%. Probably because we were sat outside all week, lost all the feeling in our hands and couldn’t type anymore.
Don’t you hate it when you find a place that you think is a bargain, and then you realise you’re going to have spend a load more money doing it up? Spare a thought then for Hong Kong billionaire Cheung Chung Kiu who paid just shy of £200 million for a 45-room mansion overlooking Hyde Park last year, and who has just submitted plans to Westminster council to spend that much again on "extensive refurbishment" as the property is “heavily dilapidated”. This is what happens when you accept the first builder’s quote you get.
And talking of extensive renovations, a 37-storey skyscraper in London Bridge has just become a 26-story skyscraper after Save Britain’s Heritage pointed out that the development would have an “impact on local listed buildings” and Guy’s Hospital complained “it would reduce daylight to student housing.” Is it lazy to make a joke here about students not even liking daylight?
Last bit of arty news: A “vibrant rainbow artwork” has appeared in Soho Square. Created by artist Graham McLoughlin and called #OHelloSunshine, the rainbow represents Soho’s place as “the historic centre of the LGBTQ+ community”. It kind of reminds us of that one bit of playground equipment that definitely hasn’t passed all the health and safety tests (i.e. the best kind).
The Guardian has a nice review of Josh Edgoose’s new book of London photography, Brilliant Parade: “a celebration of the fact that the longer you look the more colour you find and the sense that for all the black-and-white seriousness of life, there are plenty of times when the city simply requires you to smile.” Amen to that!