There's art for all in London this spring
By Kate Simon
Did you know, Claridges has opened an art gallery? It’s in its new ArtSpace Café, which you can enter without having to stay at the posh hotel in London’s Mayfair, where rooms start at – well if you have to ask, you really can’t afford it.
The doors on Brook’s Mews (round the back) opened on Tuesday, presenting visitors with a toothsome menu (croissant £5, ouch) and rotating exhibitions. On show until 17 April, ‘New Frontiers: Movements in Contemporary Art’ is a collaboration with neighbouring gallery Ben Brown Fine Arts featuring work by Miquel Barceló, José Parlá and Ron Arad.
I prefer a (vegetable) kebab with my art, which is possible across town as the excellent Turkish restaurant Mangal 2 in Dalston (don’t just take my word for it, Rick Stein’s a fan). Here, around 8pm each evening, you’re likely to catch the artists Gilbert & George eating their dinner.
They don’t consult the menu. “We order the same thing night after night until we’re nearly vomiting, and then we change,” they told an interviewer from the Royal Academy website in 2018. Interpret it as performance art, if you will, by these purveyors of ‘the humanism of the individual’, but you’ll get a better idea of their artistic output at The Gilbert & George Centre (Gilbert, right, and George pictured outside the gates), just down the road in Spitalfields.
The gallery opens on 1 April behind the Pride of Spitalfields in the former premises of the Turner & Sons brewery. Not to be confused with Turner’s Brewery at Ringmer in East Sussex, Turner & Sons was a venture that didn’t survive the Victorian era – there’s an interesting little article about it in The Londonist. The new centre – which will be free to enter, in line with their mantra Art For All – will show Gilbert & George’s own collection and work by other artists.
You might want to help make a new piece of art for the city by contributing to the crowdfunding campaign for a memorial for the peace campaigner Brian Haw. The fundraisers need to find £50,000 and are asking the public to donate £1 each. As I write, about £13,000 has been donated with 18 days to go.
Haw became a familiar sight camped in his tent outside the Houses of Parliament from 2001 until his death in 2011. A thorn in the side of politicians arriving and departing the Palace of Westminster for a decade, he issued his thoughts about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through his megaphone, despite endless attempts by rattled parliamentarians to remove him.
The actor Sir Mark Rylance, a patron of the Stop The War campaign, is championing efforts to fund a 72cm-high bronze maquette of Haw by the artist Amanda Ward. It’s a shame it hasn’t proved possible to erect this permanent reminder of Haw’s anti-war message in Parliament Square, as was first hoped by Rylance.
However, the memorial will be placed on a plinth opposite the Imperial War Museum, just across the bridge in Lambeth, in the grounds of the School of Historical Dress, part of which was the Bethlem psychiatric hospital, where soldiers from the First World War suffering from shellshock were treated. Perhaps a more poignant location.
Phil’s Beer Notes
I always like to pop into the Pride of Spitalfields when I’m around Brick Lane. It’s a pub like pubs used to be – except the beer’s better now! Alongside the Fuller’s, you’ll usually find an interesting guest or two on the pumps. (Can’t give you a link as they don’t do that interweb nonsense.)
While back on Aldgate you’ll find the Hoop & Grapes, the oldest pub within the borders of the City of London. Built in 1593, it narrowly escaped the Great Fire. It’s now part of the Nicholson’s chain, so expect a varying range of well-kept cask ales on the bar.
Within striking distance of Claridges there’s another of my old haunts, the Ain’t Nothing But the Blues bar, which does what it says on the tin, really – and the live music is accompanied by a range of Adnams’ beers. If you’re getting off the Tube at Oxford Circus, it’s worth looking into the Argyll Arms, something of a Victorian museum piece with multiple bars sparkling with etched glass. It’s another Nicholson’s, so beer as above.
Conveniently located a few hundred yards from Mangal 2 in Dalston is the 40ft Brewery and its award-winning tap room. You’re bound to find the right aperitif among the 10 freshly-brewed beers on offer. While a short march from the Imperial War Museum, the other side of South Bank Uni, there’s the German Kraft brewery and its tap room pouring a choice of tank beers in the Franconian style. Brewery tours are also available.
Photo © The Gilbert & George Centre