This Week in London – Jock McFadyen’s large-scale Tube paintings revisited; Rose Wylie at the RA; new galleon arrives at Kensington Gardens; and, IWM Duxford’s new rooms…

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• Jock McFadyen’s large-scale Tube paintings have come together in a new exhibition opening at the Guildhall Art Gallery on Friday. Jock McFadyen with Jem Finer: Underground (and Surface) revisits McFadyen’s Underground series from the late 1990s and also features a layered soundscape by The Pogues’ Jem Finer which were composed from field recordings on the Northern and Central lines. Admission is by Pay What You Can. Runs until 20th September, 2026. For more, see www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/events/underground-and-surface-exhibition.

Rose Wylie, ‘Study for Red Twink’ (2002) Graphite and coloured pencil on paper, 31 × 42.5 cm (overall) Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Jack Hems

• The largest survey to date of celebrated British artist and Royal Academician Rose Wylie opens at the Royal Academy on Saturday. Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First features more than 90 works, including Wylie’s most iconic, alongside new paintings and drawings. Works on show include those depicting memories of
family life and bombing raids in London during World War II such as Wing Tips and Blue Doodlebugs (2022/23), Room Project (2002-3) – Wylie’s first major series to receive significant critical acclaim, works on paper such as Bottom Teeth, Self-Portrait (2016), and works from the series Film Notes. It concludes with four large monochromatic paintings of animals in ginger, black, blue and red made directly by the artist onto the canvas using her hands. Runs in the Main Galleries until 19th April. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/rose-wylie.

• A life-sized wooden galleon has arrived in Kensington Gardens where it will become the centrepiece of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground when it reopens this summer. The ship has been manufactured in Frasdorf, Germany, and is predominately made from mountain larch wood drawn from sustainably managed forests in the Bavarian Alps. It’s part of a £3 million renewal of the free-to-enter playground, which is inspired by the adventures of Peter Pan. For more, see www.royalparks.org.uk/visit/parks/kensington-gardens/diana-memorial-playground.

• Further Afield – Historic Duxford: Air Crew Room, Pilot’s Briefing Room and Pilots Locker Room. Three newly transformed historic rooms opened at IWM Duxford just south of Cambridge late last year, each of which contains newly acquired objects and interactive elements. The air crew room, located beside the Battle of Britain Hangar, tells the stories of the US 8th Air Force and RAF Bomber Command through personal objects belonging to former pilots and crew. They include false identity papers and the diary of American fighter pilot Lonnie Moseley of Duxford’s 78th Fighter Group who was forced to bail out of his P-47 Thunderbolt over France in 1944 and took shelter with a local French farmer’s family until returning to England. Nearby in the pilot’s briefing room, meanwhile, visitors can enjoy an audio-visual recreation of a real-life briefing given on D-Day in which they can sit among their ‘fellow pilots’. And in the pilot’s locker room, the everyday life of pilots who were stationed at Duxford in 1940 is explored including with interactive elements such as the opportunity to try on replica uniforms and see lockers containing recreated details of some of the pilots such as a conversation between 19 Squadron’s George ‘Grumpy’ Unwin and 302 (Polish) Squadron’s Julian Kowalski. The rooms can be visited with standard admission. For more, see www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-duxford.

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10 London bishop’s palaces, past and present – 9. Croydon Palace…

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A former summer residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury for centuries, Croydon Palace has in more recent times been used as a school.

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LondonLife – Glass towers…

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PICTURE: João Rodrigues/Unsplash

This Week in London – Lunar New Year celebrations; Aardman at the Young V&A; and, the women in Dickens’ life…

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PICTURE: Sandra Tan/Unsplash

• Lunar New Year festivities will be held in Chinatown in central London this weekend including lion dances and the Chinese New Year Parade. Lion dances will be held throughout Chinatown on Saturday and Sunday while the parade kicks off at 10am on Sunday just east of Trafalgar Square reaching the square at 12 where an afternoon of festivities will be held. For more, see www.london.gov.uk/events/lunar-new-year-festival-spring-2026. Meanwhile, Lunar New Year celebrations will also be held in Greenwich on Saturday. The celebrations include lion dances, musical and dance performances, a martial arts demonstration, workshops including one on Tibetan dance and another on lantern making and the chance to sample Asian food. For more, see www.rmg.co.uk/lunarnewyear.

• A new exhibition at the Young V&A in Bethnal Green takes a look behind the scenes of stop-motion classics such as Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep. Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends, created primarily for children and families and marking Aardman’s 50th annversary, features some 150 objects including never-seen-before models, sets and storyboards from Aardman’s archives as well as interactive activities ranging from designing characters and experimenting with lighting through to creating live action videos. Among the items on show are early sketches of Wallace & Gromit, a hand-drawn storyboard from The Wrong Trousers (1993) train chase, Wallace & Gromit’s motorbike and sidecar from Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), and the airship model from The Pirates! (2012). Admission charge applies. Runs until 15th November. For more, see vam.ac.uk/young.

• The women who influenced Charles Dickens are at the centre of a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum. Extra/Ordinary Women features a portrait of Dickens’ daughters, Katey and Mamie, on display for the first time, Catherine Dickens’s cookbook, and a draft preface to an 1857 manual for educating working class children written by penned by Angela Burdett Coutts and including edits by Dickens in blue ink as well as items owned by Ellen Ternan, best known for her 12-year extra-marital relationship with Dickens. Admission charge applies. Runs until 6th September. For more, see https://dickensmuseum.com/blogs/all-events/extra-ordinary-women.

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10 London bishop’s palaces, past and present – 8. Bishop of Ely’s palace…

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Once a significant estate on the northern outskirts of London, the palace of the Bishops of Ely was used for some 500 years as their London residence.

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LondonLife – Geometry under the Shard…

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PICTURE: Adrien Olichon/Unsplash

London Explained – Chinatown…

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As London prepares to celebrate the Lunar New Year, all eyes naturally turn to London’s Chinatown, centred on Gerrard Street in Soho.

Gerrard Street. PICTURE: Bruno Martins/Unsplash

While the street dates back to the 17th century, by the first half of the 20th century it had become known for its nightlife, initially for nightclubs and then for a seedier side as striptease clubs opened.

The city’s first Chinatown had been established in Limehouse in the 18th century as Chinese immigrants and sailors frequented the area.

But after World War II, the damage in the Limehouse area and the comparatively cheap leases available around Gerrard Street, saw Chinese moved in during the 1950s and began opening restaurants and grocery shops.

Growing numbers of Chinese arrived from Hong Kong and by 1970, Gerrard Street has become a hub for the Chinese community in London. The London Chinese Chinatown Association formed in 1978.

It was in the late 1980s that Chinese gateways, a pagoda and street furniture were added. Gerrard Street and parts of Newport Place and Macclesfield Street became pedestrianised.

The first organised Chinese New Year celebrations took place in Gerrard Street in 1985.

This year’s Chinese New Year Parade – celebrating the Year of the Horse – will take place on Sunday, 22nd February. For more, see www.london.gov.uk/events/lunar-new-year-festival-spring-2026.

This Week in London – Lucian Freud’s etching plates and prints; The Jolly Postman at the Postal Museum; and, Beano at the Tower…

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• Newly acquired etching plates and prints of Lucian Freud’s go on display for the first time in a new exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting, the UK’s first museum exhibition to focus on the artist’s works on paper, features rarely-seen drawings and preparatory studies alongside iconic paintings and is said to offer “unprecedented insight” into Freud’s creative process and working methods. The display features some 170 drawings, etchings and paintings and includes a look at the childhood drawings, sketchbooks, letters and unfinished paintings as well as a number of drawings and etchings that have a relationship with specific paintings. Runs until 4th May. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.npg.org.uk.

• An interactive exhibition celebrating 40 years of the much-loved children’s book The Jolly Postman opens at the Postal Museum on Saturday. Visitors are invited to follow Janet and Allan Ahlberg character on his postal rounds, from the Three Bears’ cottage, to Cinderella at the palace, and the Wicked Witch’s gingerbread bungalow with magical surprises at every stop and a treasure trove of original artwork, much of which is on display for the first time. The display shows how the Ahlbergs drew inspiration from the everyday magic of the post arriving through the letterbox to create their classic book. Admission charge applies (includes a ride on Mail Rail, and access to all the museum’s exhibitions, including The Jolly Postman for one year after the date of first visit). Runs until January 2027. For more, see www.postalmuseum.org/event/the-jolly-postman/.

• Beano arrives at the Tower of London for the February half-term with a twisting outdoor trail. With pieces of the Beano crews’ go-cart scattered across history, visitors are charged with helping track them down, repair the tangled timeline and transport Dennis and his pals back to Beanotown. Beano Mischief at the Tower of London runs from 14th until 22nd February. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/whats-on/beano-mischief-at-the-tower-of-london/.

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10 London bishop’s palaces, past and present – 7. Archbishop’s House, Westminster…

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Archbishop’s House, located next to the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, is the official residence of the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster.

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LondonLife – Rayners Lane…

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PICTURE: Brett Jordan/Unsplash

What’s in a name?…Rood Lane…

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Looking northward up Rood Lane with St Margaret Pattens to the right. PICTURE: Google Maps.

This name of this short City of London laneway which runs between Eastcheap and Fenchurch Street in the City of London has nothing to do with rudeness or lewdness (as you have no doubt guessed).

Rather it’s an ancient term for a crucifix, known in days past as a ‘rood’ or ‘rood cross’.

The laneway was originally known as St Margaret Pattens Lane, a church which, dating back as far as the 12th century, still stands on the corner of the laneway and Eastcheap.

It’s a crucifix which once stood in the churchyard gave the laneway its new name.

Historian John Stow wrote that on 23rd May, 1538, the crucifix was found smashed into pieces “by people unknown”.

This Week in London – Love letters at the National Archives; photographs of the Pantanal; and, the Foundling Hospital Boys’ Band…

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PICTURE: Aaron Burden/Unsplash

• Love letters from some of the most famous – and infamous – love affairs have gone on show at the National Archives in Kew in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day. Love Letters features a note sent by Henry VIII’s fifth wife Catherine Howard to courtier Thomas Culpeper in 1541 – later used to prove they were having a treasonous affair, a never-before-seen love letter from the Cambridge Five spy ring’s “fifth man” John Cairncross to his 27-year-old girlfriend Gloria Barraclough, and, a letter Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas wrote to Queen Victoria on 25th June, 1895, begging her to exercise her “power of pardon” as Wilde began a two year sentence for gross indecency. Also included is a letter from Charles Kray in 1956, written to the courts on behalf of his son Ronnie, one of the notorious Kray twins, who was facing sentence for assault. The free display can be seen until 12th April. For more, see www.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

• More than 60 striking images showcasing the biodiversity of the Pantanal, a South American wetland, have gone on show at the Science Museum. Water Pantanal Fire features images by two of Brazil’s leading documentary photographers – Lala de Almeida and Luciano Candisani – which were taken between 2007 and 2024 and reveal a stark distinction between the teeming life seen in the region before fires and droughts ravaged the area, leaving a transformed barren landscape. The exhibition, which runs until the 31st May, is free to see. For more, see www.sciencemuseum.org.

• On Now: The Foundling Hospital Boys’ Band. This small display at The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury looks at the history of the band from its founding in 1847 and explores how it shaped the boys’ lives with many of them graduating into professional military bands (in fact, by World War I, more than 80 per cent of the boys leaving the home went into military music. Admission charge applies. For more, see https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/event/the-foundling-hospital-boys-band/.

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10 London bishop’s palaces, past and present – 6. Fulham Palace…

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The former residence of the Bishops of London for more than 1,300 years, Fulham Palace is today a museum surrounded by 13 acres of gardens on the north bank of the Thames. 

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LondonLife – Garden view…

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View of Jubilee Gardens on South Bank from the London Eye. PICTURE: Leticia Golubov/Unsplash

A Moment in London’s History – John Logie Baird demonstrates television…

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It was 100 years ago last month that on a wet Tuesday evening in Soho, Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated an experimental prototype that provided live moving pictures – the precursor to what we now know as television.

PICTURE: Spudgun67/Wikipedia (licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The successful, albeit rather low key, demonstration took place before some 40 members of the Royal Institution, all reportedly attired in evening dress, in an upper room which served as his laboratory at 22 Frith Street on 26th January, 1926.

According to a report in The Times on 28th January, the “transmitting machine” consisted of a “large wooden revolving disc containing lenses, behind which was a revolving shutter and a light sensitive cell”.

The first image to be transmitted was that of the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy but the image of a human face was transmitted later, “first on a receiver in the same room as the transmitter and then on a portable receiver in another room”.

“The image as transmitted was faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim that through the ‘Televisor’, as Mr Baird has named his apparatus, it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face,” The Times reported.

Present at the demonstration was  William Edward Taynton, a 20-year-old office boy whose face Baird had transmitted in an experiment at the property the previous October.

Baird continued to refine his invention in the following months with the picture becoming clearer and was recognised in the years following for being the first to show television in colour,

In 1928 he completed a demonstration in which live images sent by radio from London were received in New York and the same year he demonstrated colour television. In 1929, the first television programmes were officially transmitted by the BBC using Baird’s system.

An English Heritage Blue Plaque todays marks the property where the demonstration took place (there’s also one at Baird’s former home at 3 Crescent Wood Road in Sydenham, where he lived from 1933 until 1945).

This Week in London – ‘Samurai’ at the British Museum; V&A East’s first exhibition; and, Jane Austen and the Royal Navy…

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Domenico Tintoretto, Portrait of Itō Mancio, Oil on canvas, Italy (1585), Property of Fondazione Trivulzio, Milan

• The evolution of the samurai over the past 1,000 years is the subject of a new exhibition at The British Museum. Samurai brings together around 280 objects and digital media as it explores the role of samurai as warrior as well as the later roles they fulfilled, during a prolonged peace after 1615, as government officials, scholars and patrons of the arts with women making up half of the samurai class. On display will be a suit of samurai armour, complete with helmet and golden standard, which was recently acquired by the museum as well as a vermillion red woman’s firefighting jacket, a rare portrait of Itō Mancio, a 13-year-old samurai who led an embassy to the Vatican in 1582, by Domenico Tintoretto (pictured), and a portrait of Henry, Count of Bourbon, which portrays him as a samurai warrior and which was commissioned by him while visiting Japan in 1889. The exhibition, which opens on 3rd February, runs until 4th May in The Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/samurai.

• Tickets are now on sale for the V&E East Museum’s first exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story. The multi-sensory exhibition features more than 200 objects ranging from musical instruments to soundtracks,
artworks, fashion, and personal belongings of world-famed artists including Winifred Atwell’s piano, the Nintendo Jme used for early music experiments, fashion worn by Little Simz, Seal, Dame Shirley Bassey and Skin and newly acquired photographs of Kemistry and Storm, Mis-Teeq, and Skepta. The exhibition opens on 18th April. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/the-music-is-black-a-british-story

An etching print of the Canopus signed by artist Richard Henry Nibbs (c1849). PICTURE: ©National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

• On Now: Jane Austen and the Royal Navy. This display at the National Maritime Museum marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth and features manuscripts relating to her youngest brothers Francis and Charles Austen, both of whom had naval careers, and explores Jane’s connections to the Royal Navy and the influence her brothers had in her works. Francis – known as Frank (born in 1774) – entered the Royal Navy at the age of 12 and rose through the ranks to eventually captain the HMS Canopus during the Napoleonic Wars while Charles (born in 1779) also entered the Navy at age 12, was on board the Endymion when it captured the French ship Le Scipio, was captain of the Phoenix when it was wrecked at sea and ended his career as commander-in-chief of the East Indies and China Station. The display in the Caird Library can be seen until March. Admission is free. For more, see www.rmg.co.uk/national-maritime-museum.

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10 London bishop’s palaces, past and present – 5. Durham House…

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Now long gone, this central London property was once the residence of the, you guessed it, bishops of Durham.

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LondonLife – City of London stairway…

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PICTURE: Kevin Grieve/Unsplash

10 London bishop’s palaces, past and present – 4. Bromley Palace…

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This building, which dates from 1775, is the former palace of the Bishops of Rochester and the latest incarnation of the palace which the bishops used for centuries.

The north face of Bromley Palace. PICTURE: Doyle of London (licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The land, which came to be known as the Manor of Bromley, was initially granted to the bishops of Rochester by Saxon kings of Kent over a couple of centuries. Following the Norman Conquest, an attempt by Odo, the Earl of Kent, to claim it failed thanks to the efforts of Bishop Gundulf (1075-1108) and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc.

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LondonLife – Folgate Street…

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Looking down Folgate Street, Spitalfields. PICTURE: Tanya Barrow/Unsplash