East Bank is one of the world’s largest and most ambitious new culture and education districts, with construction already well underway in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
World-renowned universities UCL (University College London) and UAL’s London College of Fashion are joining the global cultural brands of the BBC, Sadler’s Wells and the V&A to form this new centre of innovation and ambition.
Spread across three sites, East Bank is at the heart of a growing cluster of commerce, technology, manufacture, retail, education and the creative arts delivering unprecedented new job opportunities in the digital age. It will bring an additional 1.5 million visitors to the Park and surrounding area each year, and more than 2,500 jobs will be created – generating an estimated £1.5 billion generation for the local economy.
Chelsea Fringe, the alternative festival of gardens and gardening, will return for its 11th year in 2022.
It’s eclectic mixture of public spectacles, horticultural happenings and community celebrations runs for nine days each May, with hundreds of events taking place across London, the UK, and worldwide.
The landmark documentary series Why Do We Dance? aired on Sky Arts across Europe in April 2019 - an in-depth and up-close exploration of the motivations, provocations and stimulations that make the human race dance.
Curated and presented by acclaimed British choreographer and dancer Akram Khan, the 5x60-minute series takes viewers on a global journey through the most dynamic, seductive and influential dance forms of our time, and profiles the artists redefining the artform for modern audiences. Crossing continents and decades, on dirt floors and dance floors, in public spaces and on the world’s great stages, Khan searches for answers to the question: Why do we dance?
Sky’s new virtual reality experience, Hold the World, launched in June 2018, offering the unique opportunity of a one-on-one with the world’s foremost natural history broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough. The ground-breaking interactive experience is the creation of immersive content production studio and creative agency, Factory 42.
Hold the World instantly transports the viewer from the comfort of their own home to London’s Natural History Museum, where they can get their hands on rare specimens from its world-famous collection as they go behind the scenes to explore areas usually closed to the public.
Commissioned by the Sky VR Studio, Hold the World was produced by immersive content studio Factory 42, in association with Dream Reality Interactive and Talesmith and through collaboration with the Natural History Museum’s digital team. Creature animation was produced by The Mill. The experience was directed by Dan Smith (Factory 42), and executive produced by John Cassy (Factory 42) and Neil Graham (Sky).
In February, BBC Radio 3, BBC Arts and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) announced 2018’s cohort of New Generation Thinkers; ten academics at the start of their careers who have a flair for communicating their research to the public. Over the coming year, those chosen will have the opportunity to make radio and television programmes for the BBC - in particular contributing to Radio 3's Free Thinking.
This year’s specialisms cover an eclectic spectrum of the arts and humanities; all with the potential to reach a broad public audience. Some academics are looking afresh at historical topics, with explorations into 18th-century masculinity and the medical history of George Orwell sitting alongside research into early 20th-century vegetarianism in Britain, and how the Ottoman Empire dealt with piracy.
Others in the new intake are exploring more contemporary issues, such as the way globalisation is impacting how films are made around the world, or how the ethics of commercial surrogacy in India can be understood.
The New Generation Thinkers were selected from hundreds of applications from academics at the start of their careers. Expect to see and hear lots from this talented gang in 2018!
Volker Bruch as Gereon Rath in Sky Atlantic's Babylon Berlin (Frédéric Batier/X Filme2017).
One of the most lavish and extensive TV dramas yet made in Germany, this adaptation of a series of crime novels by Volker Kutscher is attracting critical acclaim worldwide and with UK critics and audiences. It had the most successful launch of a non-English-language drama on Sky Atlantic to date.
★★★★★ 'wonderfully gripping' Financial Times
★★★★★ 'tense, engaging, and a serious marker that Germany is ready to carve its place in the television landscape' The Arts Desk
Light, strong, affordable and versatile, plywood was the unlikely material behind an array of groundbreaking designs celebrated in this world-first exhibition at the V&A. From the fastest and highest-flying aeroplane of WWII, the de Havilland Mosquito, to the downloadable self-assembly WikiHouse, more than 120 objects were brought together in this eclectic celebration of a much-overlooked product.
Plywood: Material of the Modern World ran from June to November 2017 #ispyply
Ice skating shelters, designed by Patkau Architects, Winnipeg, 2012 © Patkau Architects
Edward Ruscha's 1966 print Standard Station is one of 200 works that were brought together for the British Museum's major spring exhibition for 2017, The American Dream: from pop to present. It was the Museum's first headline show to focus exclusively on modern and contemporary art.
Edward Ruscha (b. 1937), Standard Station. Colour screenprint, 1966. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Ed Ruscha. Reproduced by permission of the artist.
The exhibition Queer Talk: Homosexuality In Britten’s Britain profiled the life and creative output of Benjamin Britten, one of the twentieth century’s great composers, during the period of social change that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality - 50 years ago in 2017.
It ran from February to October 2017 at The Red House, the home in Suffolk that the composer shared with the tenor Peter Pears - his muse, collaborator, recital partner and lover for 39 years.
Leviathan is an ambitious and challenging project from artist Shezad Dawood that will unfold and travel to multiple international locations.
Conceived as an episodic narrative, Leviathan consists of a ten-part film cycle and written fiction series. Set in a post-apocalyptic future inhabited by dystopian communities, the work bridges notions of borders, mental health and marine welfare, exploring specific and surprising links between them.
The first three episodes of the film were shown in the Palazzina Canonica as a special project during the Venice Biennale in 2017.
The BP exhibition Sunken cities: Egypt's lost worlds, at the British Museum from 19 May - 27 November, was one of the cultural highlights of 2016. The exhibition saw extraordinary objects recovered from beneath the seabed of Egypt's Abukir Bay brought together with pieces from the British Museum's excavations at Naukratis for an extended six-month run.
★★★★★
‘spectacular… a show to move you to tears of wonder’
The Times
★★★★★
‘marvellous… as well as elegantly beautiful’
The Evening Standard
★★★★
‘magnificent… a superb exhibition’
The Telegraph
Photo Christoph Gerigk © Frank Goddio/Hilti Foundation
The V&A's Europe 1600-1815 galleries reopened to the public in December 2015 after a four-year £12.5m renovation.
Luis Ignacio Rodriguez was a featured artist during 2015's edition of Deptford X, London's longest-running festival of contemporary visual art.
Vote by Jeremy Deller, as seen on billboards across the UK in 2015 as part of Vote Art - an ongoing campaign to engage the UK electorate.
Launched ahead of the UK general election in 2015, Vote Art saw artwork by four contemporary artists - Bob and Roberta Smith, Jeremy Deller, Fatima Begum and Janette Parris - placed on billboards around the UK. Emerging artist and first-time-voter Jordan Alex Smith was chosen to join them after winning a nationwide competition.
The project returned in 2016 ahead of the EU referendum.
The V&A East project will create two new purpose-built sites in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London – a brand-new museum at Stratford Waterfront, and a vast new collection and research centre at Here East.
Opening from 2023, both sites form part of East Bank, the powerhouse of culture, education, innovation and growth taking shape in the park as part of the Olympic legacy.
(Pictured: O’Donnell + Tuomey’s visualisation of the V&A museum at Stratford Waterfront)