West End LIVE

This Week in London – Young V&A marks 150 years; West End LIVE; and, Hackney’s Ayah’s Home commemorated…

by exploringlondon
Young V&A creative Story Telling session. PICTURE: Courtesy of Young V&A

• The V&A is celebrating 150 years since the opening of the Bethnal Green Museum (now known as the Young V&A) with the launch of a year long celebration on Friday. The museum, which opened in 1872 as the first ever museum in east London, is currently undergoing a major redevelopment and is scheduled to reopen in summer, 2023, as a new national museum dedicated to children to the age of 14. To mark the 150th – and a year until Young V&A’s opening – the museum has launched a year-long ‘Reinvent Festival’ with the first event – an online summit called Sparking Creative Futures headlined by children’s author, Ed Vere, and live-illustrated by Beano’s youngest ever artist, Zoom Rockman – on Friday. On Sunday, Young V&A will celebrate its birthday with families at Rich Mix’s ‘Everyone a Maker’ event with free, fun activities. Further events will be held over the year including pop ups at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’s Great Get Together on 23rd July featuring large-scale, creative construction and making sessions for children and families using playful building materials by Hackney-based architect Emilie Quene. For more (including the full programme of events), see www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/reinvent-festival-young-va-summer-family-events.

• Europe’s biggest free musical theatre festival – West End LIVE – will transform Trafalgar Square into an open-air theatre this weekend. A joint production by Westminster City Council and the Society of London Theatre, the event will feature hundreds of performers, creatives and production staff, showcasing the best the West End has to offer. No tickets are required for the free event. For more, head to www.westendlive.co.uk.

• An English Heritage Blue Plaque has been unveiled on a house in Hackney, commemorating the hundreds of stranded and sometimes abandoned South and East Asian nannies, known as ayahs, who sheltered there in the early 20th century. The Ayah’s Home at 26 King Edward’s Road housed around 100 women a year between 1900 and 1921 after which the home moved to another address nearby. The ayahs were women who served the British in India and other colonies as children’s nannies, nursemaids and ladies’ maids and who were sometimes required to care for babies, children and their sea-sick mothers on the long sea voyage from the colonies to England but who were generally not expected to serve the families once they arrived, instead either contracted to wait until needed for the return journey or take a passage home. The Hackney shelter, which also welcomed ‘amahs’ – nursemaids of East Asian origin, appears to have been the only one of its kind in Britain for almost the whole of its existence. For more, see www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/.

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This Week in London – NHM’s Our Broken Planet’s finale; West End LIVE at Trafalgar Square; and, Helen Frankenthaler at Dulwich…

by exploringlondon
Juvenile European bison © The Trustees of The Natural History Museum, London

• The third and final part of the free exhibition, Our Broken Planet: How We Got Here and Ways to Fix It, has opened at the Natural History Museum. Following on from sections exploring the food we eat and the products we use, the third phase of the display explores the energy humans consume and how we can we create a greener, cleaner future. Specimens in the display include a juvenile European bison, illustrating an experimental rewilding project in Kent which is investigating if bison feeding habits will improve the forest’s biodiversity and store more carbon in the soil, blue-green algae collected during Captain Scott’s famed RRS Discovery expedition which is being used in the study of climate change, and the recently extinct Chinese paddlefish, a casualty of the global boom in hydroelectric dams. Entry to the South Kensington museum is free but visitors are encouraged to book a time ticket in advance to ensure entry. For more, see www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/our-broken-planet.html.

• The West End comes to Trafalgar Square this weekend with a line-up of free performances from top shows taking to the stage. Forming part of Westminster City Council’s Inside Out Festival and the Society of London Theatre’s #BackOnStage campaign, the West End LIVE event will feature the first ever West End LIVE appearances from award-winning musicals Hamilton and The Book Of Mormon, as well as an exciting roster of new shows including The Prince Of Egypt, Dear Evan Hansen, Cinderella, Back To The Future: The Musical and Pretty Woman. More than 30 acts will be involved in the free and unticketed event. For the full programme, see www.westendlive.co.uk.

• The first major UK exhibition of woodcuts by the leading abstract expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler, opened at the Dulwich Picture Gallery this week. Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty brings together more than 30 works on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation which span the artist’s career from her first ever woodcut in 1973 to her last work published in 2009. Works include including Madame Butterfly (2000), East and Beyond (1973), Cameo (1980) and Freefall (1993). The display can be seen until 18th April. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk.

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