Art Review: Artist’s Laboratory — Hughie O’Donoghue @ Royal Academy
O’Donoghue steps outside his comfort zone when ‘remembering’ his father’s wartime experiences.
World War II
Review: The Blitz Party @ Village Underground
Girls! Dying to draw a line up the back of your legs in eyeliner? Fancy putting your hair in curlers? Book a ticket for the next Blitz party and you’ll have a simply spiffing excuse. A fancy dress night for people who haven’t grown out …
Park On the Plinth?
There’s a Spitfire in Trafalgar Square today. Not a Banksy Spitfire, amusingly positioned so it looks like it is crashed into the steps leading from the National Gallery. It’s not propped up between the lions by a protest group and it’s not there as a …
Battleship Loses Oscar
No, Helen Mirren’s academy award hasn’t been thrown overboard, but London’s favourite battleship, HMS Belfast, has lost Oscar – one of its two cats. We’re keeping our hopes alive that the ginger moggy hasn’t drowned as he apparently tried in vain to find the other …
The Saturday Strangeness
6. Animal Apparitions: Chickens Yes, chickens. Prepare yourself for a fowl tale. The strangest of all London’s animal spirits has to be the spectral chicken of Highgate’s Pond Square. This quirky enigma originates from 1626 when philosopher Sir Francis Bacon was travelling with Dr Witherborne, …
Watch Out For Wilton’s
Nestled somewhere between the Novae Archaelogical Site, Bulgaria, the Darbush Tomb, Eritrea, the Capitanes Generales Palace, Guatemala and 96 other gravely endangered world monument sites sits an unassuming East End Music Hall. Wilton’s Music Hall was included today on the World Monument Watchlist of 100 …
Underground Art & Ads
The tube loves throwing money at art almost as much as it loves making money from big corporate advertising. Platform for Art is TFL’s public art programme and its latest commission sees Turner Prize winner Liam Gillick’s work on the new cover for the tube …
Letters from Iwo Jima
There’s a throwaway line in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers that underlines the weakness in that film but promised that there was much more to come in his companion piece, Letters from Iwo Jima: This was the fifth day, sir. The battle went on …
Stops Doors (and the odd tank)
Our favourite story from yesterday: AN unexploded World War II shell which was used as a doorstop for 60 years has been removed by bomb disposal experts from a New Malden house. The old dear who inherited the piece of ordnance from the previous owner …
Christmas Tree Comes To Town
The most beloved Christmas tree in the UK, perhaps the biggest, certainly the one with the most royalty hanging off the boughs, is returning to Trafalgar Square this evening at 5.45pm. As traditional and eagerly anticipated as the lucky loose change embedded in grandma’s Christmas …
Sofa Surfer
Sincerest apologies, dear readers. The author of this column (Column? Post?) has had a particularly trying week, what with almost getting fired from his high-pressure media sales job and also being asked to vacate the sofa near Highbury Corner he had been staying on since …
