London Life: Spring Edition
In London, there are plenty of things to do in all seasons, but the city in spring is very special, especially as magnolia, blossom trees and climbing wisteria line the streets.
The Hayward Gallery on the Southbank is a gem of a museum, one slightly less famous but always host to incredible exhibitions. Currently showing is When Forms Come Alive, a celebration of playful contemporary sculpture. It highlights the way in which artists draw on familiar experiences of movement, flux, and organic growth, including the breaking of a wave, molten metal, a dancer’s gestures, the oozing goodness of honey and the architectural quality of seed pods.
One of our favourite pieces included Studio Drifts’s Shylight which is an installation of dancing lights. It is inspired by certain flowers evolved natural mechanism to close at night to conserve their resources, known as nyctinasty. The moving sculpture unfolds and retreats to its original state to make a fascinating choreography, mirroring the nyctinasty of real flowers. They put a smile on every gallery-goer’s face. We also loved Bouquet Final by Michel Blazy, an installation where foam cascades down in all directions from scaffolding. Thick, soapy white foam slowly trickles down the metal structure and a new show begins every morning. At the end of the day, the foam is mopped up ready for the next day’s frothy performance. Tara Donova’s Untitled (Mylar) is another sensory experience. The installation fills one whole room with shiny molecular looking spheres. Metallic mylar tape has been repeatedly folded and shaped into clusters, transforming the space into an abstract environment. Before leaving the gallery, do not forget to see Eva Fàbregas’s juicy, undulating installation: Pumping. Large, inflatable pink and purple membrane-like bulbous tubes fill the room, enveloping the viewer. It is a very sensory exhibition, with each piece inviting a response from the view.
Whilst we do love a museum or a gallery, one of our favourite things to do if we’re in London on a Sunday is the Columbia Road Flower Market. Situated in Bethnal Green, the market is only open on Sundays from 8am to 2pm. You can buy all sorts of seasonal floral goodness from houseplants, bedding plants, shrubs, bulbs and freshly cut flowers. The prices are very good too.
In the nineteenth century, the flower market began as a Saturday trading fair. However, in order to accommodate the needs of local Jewish traders, the market was moved to Sunday in an act of parliament. This also provided an opportunity for traders in Covent Garden and Spitalfields to sell any leftover stock from Saturday’s trading. The East End’s love for freshly cut flowers stemmed from Huguenot immigrants from France in the seventeenth century. Today, the market is a very popular, full of contemporary fresh cut flower enthusiasts. Every Sunday, rain or shine, this quaint East London street comes to life. You’ll hear lively vendors call out their competitive prices; you’ll admire floral and fauna in every colour under the sun displayed ever so temptingly at each stall; you’ll watch locals buying the most glorious bouquets of seasonal flower, and you’ll see potted plants and shrubs sitting at bus stops waiting to board with their new owners.
There are some fabulous independent cafés and coffee shops along the route too. We recommend coffee and cake at the Cake Hole, which is a darling café nestled at the rear of Vintage Heaven, an antique shop. Teas are served in vintage teapots and handmade cakes are served on charming, mismatched plates. Another scrumptious place for cake is Lily Vanilli, located in the courtyard of Ezra Street, just off Columbia Road. Their fanciful decorated cakes, and generously proportioned slices are the perfect pick-me-up after wandering the market.
Another great place is the Barbican Centre. The Barbican is an icon of Britain’s Brutalist architecture scene. It is situated in an area which was badly bombed during World War Two and it’s a complex, multi-level building home to theatres, concert halls, cinemas, a gallery, a glasshouse, eating spaces and a terrace overlooking a lake. It’s been dubbed London’s ‘ugliest building’, but its presence is undeniable as a titan of Brutalist design.
The Centre’s art gallery was showing a superb exhibition on the power and significance of textiles as a medium to convey political struggle, power, gender identity, grief, tradition, history, heritage, and home. Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art shines light on artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive properties and potential of textiles. Traversing both time and geography, the exhibition presents six themes – ‘Subversive Stitch’, ‘Fabric of Everyday Life’, ‘Borderlands’, ‘Bearing Witness’, ‘Wound and Repair’ and ‘Ancestral Threads’ – which together explore important themes. Most striking was Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Austral. Vicuña draws on the history of textiles in South America. Quipu was an ancient writing system which used knotted woven cords to communicate information. The work also unites the themes of the oppression of pre-colonial cultures and the devastation of the earth’s natural resources. She does this through billowing fabric ribbons in natural tones hanging from the ceiling.
Our favourite part of the Barbican is its Conservatory. A verdant, glass-encased rainforest in the heart of the City. During our visit, the Indian artist Ranjani Shettar had a beautiful exhibition on, Cloud Songs on the Horizon. Five, large-scale suspended sculptures were interspersed across the conservatory, complementing the space perfectly and sitting harmoniously within the greenery. The sculptures are inspired by the complexity of nature and the different structures one might find in the natural world. The conservatory was originally designed to mask the building’s overbearing fly tower, which is used to lower scenery and props in the Barbican Theatre. The conservatory began as a small collection of pot plants and has developed into a collection of around 1,500 species of plants. On the east side of the conservatory is the Arid House where you’ll find cacti, succulents, and orchids. It’s free to visit and is the perfect place to spend an hour or two.
London is a surprisingly green city, with around 3,000 parks and a quirky network of canals and riversides to wander along. One of the most beautiful parks is Regent’s Park. It is one of the capital’s Royal Parks and occupies 410 acres. The Crown came to possess the parkland after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1500s but it was not until the early nineteenth century that John Nash, the famous Regency architect, transformed it into a pleasure garden. Today the park boasts a boating lake, avenues of trees and elegant ornamental gardens.
Some of the most beautiful areas include St John’s Lodge Garden, a tranquil space with fountains, statues, and stone urns brimming with beautifully curated spring flowers, including narcissi, daffodils, tulips and summer snowflakes, as well as Queen Mary’s Rose Garden whose beds, in spring months, are full of hyacinths in shades of red wine, lavender, blue and deep purple complementing bright yellow daffodils. Borders are full of sensitively designed arrangements of bedding plants like begonias and petunias. Cherry blossom trees in shades of cream and pink line walkways and shower you with petal confetti in the gentle breeze. In all seasons Regent’s Park is something special but after several long winter months, the sights and sounds of spring are most welcome.
You will most certainly meet London’s resident parakeets. Their high-pitched squawk and chartreuse feathers are unmistakable. They are Britain’s only naturalised parrot having escaped from domestic captivity during the twentieth century. During our visit they were sat perched in the blossom trees, pulling off berries and dropping petals onto those watching them from below.
After a special spring, we’re looking forward to summer in the city.