Pack the scotch eggs and ginger beer - it's urban picnic time!
Gardening is one of the great barometers of civilisation. It was in the garden, not the field nor the forest, that Adam and Eve first entered the world. When his wife was sick, Nebuchadnezzar commissioned not some massive statue, house or portrait, but The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Marvell found solace from The Civil War in The Garden; Capability Brown shaped the attitudes of a nation with his gardens; and today Kew Gardens is one of London's most popular attractions, receiving millions of visitors every year.
It is in this illustrious context, that guerilla gardening has emerged in recent years as both a protest against a variety of issues and also simply as a way of improving otherwise neglected bits of land. Firmly in the second of these groups it seems is furniture designer Gareth Neal, who's announced that, this Bank Holiday Weekend, he'll be creating a couple of pop-up picnic sites in east London.
Admittedly they don't look like much in the picture, but we've been assured that they'll be “interactive and fantastical” areas reminiscent of the “quintessential British weekend”. That means ping pong, hula hooping, egg and spoon races, and – as you'd expect from a furniture designer – lots of lovely benches and logs and things to sit on.
On Saturday 28th August, Gareth Neal's Urban Picnics will be at Wallis Road over in Hackney Wick, and then on Sunday 29th he'll be in Elys Yard at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.
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