Art Tours - London on Foot

Art Tours - London on Foot

14 September, 2010
by: Tom Jeffreys

Left, right, left, right... Wanna see London properly? It's time to get walking.

There's really only one way to truly discover a city: on foot. It's on foot that a city makes sense, it's on foot that you discover a city's rhythms and smells, hidden little galleries and bars, playgrounds, corners, cobbles, crannies.

Of course, walking is mankind's oldest method of travel (apart from crawling I suppose, or slithering) but these days a host of artists and organisations are re-examining the idea of the humble walk. Right now, I'm in Soho, sitting in the wonderful Coach and Horses – where Jeffrey Bernard famously drank himself to death – and it's all in the name of art. Contemporary artist Lucy Steggals has hung several little works on the wall near the back of the pub – they blend in so well that you hardly notice them. Only a tell-tale red frock coat gives the secret game away. 

These small images are part of the Mr Bulldog Soho walking tour, commissioned by the Photographers' Gallery. Steggals has hidden various bits of half-invented, half-discovered narrative in and around the streets of Soho. For newcomers to the area it's a delightfully quirky introduction; for me it reopens my eyes – to both the present and the past.

While Steggals' work is nostalgic and subtle, Hackney-based artist Laura Oldfield Ford is driven more by a sense of outrage. I attended one of her psychogeographic 'drift walks' round the 2012 Olympic site back in 2009, during which Robin Bale performed a bile- and Special Brew-filled ritual against the impact of 'development'. Such dérives – in psychogeographic/Situationist parlance – are becoming increasingly relevant in London. Oldfield Ford describes the process like this: "Sometimes I go out on walks with people using obsolete maps to show how much public space has been enclosed, eroded or gated off. I think it is important to coax out the hidden histories in an area, to allow the repressed voices of the city to reverberate and to say that this is not the only way."



Stewart Home – one of the UK's earliest exponents of psychogeography – worries that it is simply "a term taken on by columnists at The Independent, and has become rather meaningless now". "There's fine line between psychogeography and tourism," he adds.

But then there's nothing intrinsically wrong with tourism. And London now offers many options for those who wish to tread this fine line. There's Claire Flannery's brilliant Artfeelers tours (which I'm always raving about) round the galleries of Bethnal Green and Hackney; there's the Deptford Art Map, to guide visitors through the burgeoning Deptford art scene; while Art Licks promise to introduce you to all the fascinating artists and curators in places like Hackney Wick, Peckham and Dalston.

For those of you more historically-minded, there's inmidtown's varied tours round Holborn, Bloomsbury and St Giles, whilst the Wellcome Collection has even launched an iPhone app consisting of an interactive virtual tour guide that takes you around Bloomsbury and its unusual medical past – from the Royal College of Surgeons to the London School of Medicine for Women, from orphanages to graveyards and George III's private madhouses.

We're pretty excited about Mikey Tomkins' cool-sounding project You Are Hungry. Billed as “an edible map of Hackney”, the project is designed to help participants envisage how much of their daily diet might be able to be made up of locally grown food. It's an intriguing idea, and certainly makes for a fun afternoon pottering round Hackney.

But if you're in the mood for something on a completely different scale, then this October the Big Issue is organising a mass 25km night walk around some of London's coolest venues. 400 people will join 12 Big Issue vendors to walk the route, which takes in places like the BFI, House of St Barnabas, Roundhouse and Foundling Museum. Seeing London anew whilst also raising money for those the city so often overlooks – that's the power of walking.

Mr Bulldog – A Walking Tour is on until 19th September 2010. Maps available at the Photographers' Gallery

Click here to register for the Big Issue Night Walk.

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Click here for things to do in London.

Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.

Tom Jeffreys