Alice Anokhina
Madness and Modernity at Wellcome Collection
The exhibition, coiling like a snake around rough wooden barriers and cardboard walls inside the Wellcome Collection, has the pretentious topical specificity of a university dissertation. Madness and Modernity explores topics of mental health and psychological treatment in 1900s Vienna.
The Macbeth in Hoxton
There are a number of ways to escape the real world. At the hard core end of the scale there’s acid and mushrooms. At the tepid, watered-down end there are odd, one-éclair-too-many dreams and getting lost in a sci-fi fiction series. Right in the middle of the spectrum is the door leading inside The Macbeth, [...]
Oliver Twist…With a Twist
Producing a low-budget, five-person-cast production of a Dickens classic in parallel to a massive West End show is a little bit like commercial suicide. It’s like doing a remake of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings using clay and in stop-motion animation. I was skeptical. Surprisingly though, to draw the analogy out further, the clay [...]
South Bank’s Slow Food Market
To get to last weekend’s Slow Food Market you had to pass a building that looked like a dinosaur. A conspicuous omen, surely. On entering the square itself you were greeted by a van devoted entirely to chocolate in all its shapes and forms. Yes, I knew it would be a good afternoon.
London Reclaims Love
I often complain about the 1960s. It seems unfair that due to a collision of luck and metaphysical forces outside my command, I reached my 20s not in a decade which celebrated peace, love and swing, but one ruled by emotional, faux-suicidal teenagers and men in tight jeans. This Valentine’s Day finally shut me up: [...]
Wam Bam Thank You Mam
First impressions of the Wam Bam club should be treated with caution. Situated in the heart (or, given the circumstances, probably some other less poetic body part) of Soho, there is a good chance you will see more naked breasts just trying to find it than you will once the show starts. Once you’ve made [...]
London Alt-Rockers After the Riots
After dodging puddles and potential muggers in a warehouse-cluttered area of east London, a friend and I finally arrive at a chilly recording studio. Guitars and pizza boxes are all over the floor, and cigarette butts are spilling from empty beer cans. Blaring bass chords from the mixing deck fill the air space, making it [...]
London’s Snow Day
Panic! Chaos! Disorientation! London is encased in an unidentified cold white substance!
Bowling With the Kids on Queensway
The entrance to the building is one of appropriate grandeur (massive plastic bowling pins) and panache (neon lights everywhere). A quick descent down a staircase later, my friends and I find ourselves in a sparkly tenth-birthday-party heaven. Seconds later, the full horror of the situation dawns on us: we decided to go to a bowling [...]
The Museum of Childhood
The Museum of Childhood is not somewhere you go voluntarily. It’s the kind of place your year five teacher thinks is ‘fun’ and ‘educational’ enough for a class trip, where the students mope about and break things, dreading the paragraph they will inevitably have to pull out of their hineys about it the next day.
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Journeys of a City Girl
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