In June 2013, scores of Londoners walking by the beach near the Cutty Sark in Greenwich must've gasped in shock — at the sight of a beached 17-metre-long sperm whale.
However, it was all a stunt.
The idea of whales in the Thames by this time was not so far-fetched; in 2006, a female northern bottlenose whale, which had apparently lost its way, and got as far up as the Albert Bridge, later sadly dying of convulsions.
And in 2010, the skeleton of a 12-metre-long whale was uncovered after 200 years under the river mud at Greenwich; the area was, after all, a centre of the 18th century whaling industry.
But the whale in this case was part of the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, the work of the artistic Belgian Captain Boomer Collective. It took four of their artists two-and-a-half months to construct the stranded cetacean out of fibreglass. Members of the public were left to believe what they saw was real, with artists dressing up as marine scientists, further adding to the illusion. "If it's not real then it's a very good artificial whale," said one person interviewed by the BBC. Indeed it was. Captain Boomer Collective themselves described the instalment as "a game between fiction and reality."
The whale was later hauled up onto the Royal Naval College lawns, where Lemn Sissay performed a poem, Whale Translation, 'written by' the whale, part of which ran:
Do not be distressed at the sight of me
I did not want to be saved. I am not lost
I am a Messenger sent by I-pod The Ruling Council of Whales
And the Ministry of Oceans and Seas to the people of landmass
of Greenwich of London of Britain… Of the Landmass
We have been trying to communicate with you for so long
The top image is taken from the new book, Above and Beyond: 30 Years of Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, published 26 August 2025. You can see more images of the whale on the Captain Boomer Collective website.
