See The Great Fire Recreated...In Dominoes

Laura Reynolds
By Laura Reynolds Last edited 92 months ago

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See The Great Fire Recreated...In Dominoes
Dominoes, Marseille, Station House Opera. Produced by Arts Admin. Photo by Adrien Bargin. A similar installation here in London will follow the route the fire took through the City.

A six-hour underwater performance and a trail of dominoes are some of the events that will mark the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London.

London's Burning is a six-day family-friendly festival by Artichoke, the people behind January's Lumiere Festival. It takes place in August and September, and focuses on themes of resilience and the evolution of the City.

7 kilometres of giant dominoes — featuring 26,000 breezeblocks —  will snake through the city’s streets, tracing the multiple paths the fire took, and splitting into three main routes.

Dominoes, Mulhouse, Station House Opera. Produced by Arts Admin. Photograph by Elsa Levecot. A similar installation in London will trace the route of the Great Fire.

Elsewhere, the Inner Temple will be taken over by a pile of rice. The installation Of All The People In All The World, uses grains of rice to illustrate statistics — such as the number of people who were made homeless by the Great Fire. The grains of rice are weighed out by a group of performers to represent each data set.

Of All The People In All The World will be in display in the Inner Temple.

Over in Broadgate, a group of performers will be going about their day to day tasks over a six hour period — as water levels slowly rise around them. The performance, Holoscenes, keeps within the theme of catastrophe and aims to raise awareness of the threat of climate change and flooding.

A previous Holoscenes performance by Early Morning Opera. Photograph by Lars Jan
For those who want to get a little more information about the Great Fire, a series of talks and walks (and a pub crawl) will take place over the anniversary weekend, with speakers including London's highest-ranking female firefighter.

If all this is making you hungry, a fire food market will be serving up food cooked over open flame grills and wood-fired ovens, at Guildhall Yard (3-4 September), with plenty of fire-themed entertainment to amuse you while you tuck in.

London 1666, Work In Progress, designed by David Best in collaboration with Artichoke. Photograph by Oliver Rudkin

For the festival's grand finale, a 120-metre-long wooden sculpture of Restoration London will be set alight on the River Thames on Sunday 4 September. Schoolchildren from several London boroughs offered contributions for the wooden artwork by David Best, by sharing their hopes for London in the future.

London's Burning takes place 30 August-4 September.

See also: Fire! Fire! exhibition sees London destroyed ★★★★☆

Last Updated 28 July 2016