The Guildhall Art Gallery’s temporary exhibition space is currently filled with kaleidoscope-inspired art, which is a bit marmite — you’ll either love it or be indifferent to it. It’s quite an interesting collection, but I was left feeling a bit unaffected – it’s all nice, and interesting and very technically appealing, but somehow that is all I felt. It’s a nice exhibition. The exhibition sees the artist, Anne Desmet RA, slicing into prints focused on London from her earlier wood-engravings, linocuts and hand-drawn lithographs to make a new series of digital collages, inspired by looking at ..read more

A partially restored Spitfire plane will be displayed in central London next month as part of a two-day display of sports vehicles on Savile Row. The only known photograph of Spitfire PR.IV AA810 taken as it taxies in at RAF Wick on the 29th January 1942 with Robert Tomlinson at the controls – source: Concours on Savile Row The street, more famous for tailors than planes, will be taken over by the Concours on Savile Row, an event that will feature a variety of historic and interesting vehicles. One of the more unusual vehicles will be a partially restored Submarine Spitfire — and the only su ..read more

This is a weekly round-up of London’s rail transport news… The image is from an April 2023 article: Find a work of art inside King’s Cross tube station London Underground Colindale Northern line closure: TfL reviews bus replacement Kilburn Times There may be intermittent and short notice tube station closures on Friday and Saturday, as station managers who are members of the TSSA union walk out in a dispute over working conditions. ianVisits Londoners are split over TfL’s announcement that the Piccadilly Line is set for major upgrades – with some suggesting that other Underground lines shoul ..read more

Transport for London (TfL) has seen a drop in the sale of paper tickets after it made a small change to the ticket machines in London Underground stations. The change took place last September during a routine fares update to the ticket machines, and the sales of paper tickets dropped overnight by around a third compared to how many were being sold before. However, that was entirely intentional. The change was deliberate, intended to reduce the sale of paper tickets by encouraging people to use contactless payments instead. These are cheaper for the customer and mean fewer magnetic stripe pap ..read more

When a gallery decided to put on an exhibition about one of Britain’s earliest female portrait painters, they had no idea that their galley sits on the same spot where many of the portraits were originally painted. The painter is Mary Beale, born in a Suffolk village in 1633 to parents who had an interest in art, which they clearly passed onto their daughter, who was later to forge a career as a full-time portrait painter at a time when a woman painter was almost unheard of. The father probably taught art to his daughter as he had connections with the City of London’s artists and knew painter ..read more

A large nostalgia filled space in the Science Museum will be closing soon, giving you just a few weeks to sigh with oh so many wistful memories The gallery, in the museum’s basement, is all about household appliances — and it’s marvellous. Who would have thought that toasters, irons, kettles, televisions and washing machines could be so fascinating to look at? Yet, these domestic appliances are at once familiar — for a radio is, after all, a radio, and a washing machine has only ever had one function — and yet they are a strange world of unfamiliarity. The world of the familiar we see around ..read more

Research England has awarded the cluster of museums based at University College London (UCL) a five-year £2.4 million grant to support their work. The four museums are the Grant Museum, the Petrie Museum, the UCL Art Museum and UCL’s Pathology Museum. The UCL museums and collections comprise over 200,000 objects, which are both used for academic study and also as part of the free museums for the public to visit. The Grant and Petrie museums are open Tuesday through Saturday in the afternoons, and the Art Museum is open Tuesday through Friday, also in the afternoons. The funding boost comes sh ..read more

If you wander around the centre of Hyde Park you might occasionally catch a whiff of chips and the ocean as if you’re visiting the seaside — an unexpected side effect of an organic nursery in the centre of the park. This is the huge Royal Parks plant nursery, where over a quarter of a million plants are grown every year. The nursery has also seen a lot of changes in recent years, including bringing the staffing in-house, moving to organic horticulture, and opening the nursery to apprentices and volunteers. It’s the switch to organics that causes the occasional smells—as they use seaweed-deriv ..read more

Outside London, the rarified airs of Eton College are opening their doors to ordinary folk this summer for a series of tours. The tours take in the main courtyard, the history of the college, a number of important rooms and dining rooms, lots of old graffiti left by former pupils, and a number of chapels. Photography is allowed in about half the rooms but not in the impressive chapels. I visited in 2018 – review here. Tours run from 3rd May to 20th September 2024, always on Friday afternoons at 2pm and 4pm and last around 90 minutes. The tours cost £16.96 for adults. To book a tour, go here ..read more

The Royal School of Needlework, founded in 1872, has started putting some of its archives online, with an initial launch of the first 100 items to start the collection. Cushion Cover made late 19th century; Men’s embroidered waistcoat fronts c:1740s; Embroidered mirror frame from late 19th century – early 20th century The first hundred pieces offer an initial glimpse of the breadth and depth of the RSN’s treasure trove, which amounts to some 10,000 objects. These include textiles from the 7th to the 21st centuries, spanning from Guatemala to Egypt to the UK and everywhere in between, as well ..read more