Wednesday October 11was a mainly cloudy day with a bit of rain in the evening. First rain in London! High of 21C.
Our destination was the Design Museum on Kensington High Street. On the way to the Tube, we walked by the street vendors a few minutes away having a busy lunch hour.
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| Salad guy |
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| More food booths- we counted around a dozen |
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| Tables for eating too |
We decided it was easier to walk across London Bridge and take a direct route on the Circle Line to the Kensington High Street stop.
We arrived at the Design Museum which is located right beside Holland Park.
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| Outside a separate small building with a gift shop and part of one of the exhibits. |
There was an interesting exhibit called Anti Furniture by performance artist Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich (b. 1976, Moscow, presently lives between São Paulo and London). Nine pieces of the performative sculptures were placed around the museum's atrium, mezzanine and grounds. We first encountered two pieces on the grounds. Each sculpture represents one or more phobias and a strategy for overcoming them. Alongside each object was written and drawn instructions on how to interact with the piece. Staff was there to show how to use each piece.
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| Poster for the exhibit |
The first piece was entitled: Push-Me-Pull-You. It listed the phobias it was trying to address: pistanthrophobia (fear of trusting others) and fear of frustrated expectations. In this work, Pavlov-Andreevich "warns of the dangers of miscommunication, comparing it to disputes between neighbouring countries that lead to geopolitical crises."
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| Engaging with someone without looking at them and cooperating without visual communication. |
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| Interacting with the first piece- Push-Me-Pull-You |
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| On the Centipede |
We then approached the main building of the Design Museum. The museum was founded in 1989 by Sir Terence Conran, with Stephen Bayley as inaugural CEO. It was originally housed in a former 1940s banana warehouse on the south bank of the River Thames. In 2011, Conran donated £17.5 to enable the museum to move in 2016 to a larger site which formerly housed the Commonwealth Institute in west London. It had been vacant for over a decade. The new location of the Design Museum opened in November 2016.
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| Design Museum |
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| Amazing roof |
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| Another view of the top floor |
The top-floor space under the roof houses a permanent display, Designer Maker User, with key objects from the museum's collection. There is also a beautiful restaurant, a members' lounge and a gallery space. On the first floor (second floor in Canada), there is a reference library and learning facilities.
On the ground floor, the largest gallery showcases a programme of temporary exhibitions. In 2018, the Museum won the European Museum of the Year award.
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Climate Clock, 2021. The Climate Clock is designed to communicate what must be done to tackle the climate crisis and by when. This version was from around COP26 in Glasgow. At the top of the screen, in red, the clock displays the time remaining to prevent planetary global warming rising above 1.5º C. At the bottom of the screen, three different lifelines, or actions that are being taken to slow down the clock. One is the % of energy from renewables; another is the amount of money committed to the Green Climate Fund. The third shown above, is the amount of land protected by Indigenous people worldwide.
There was a small exhibit on the top floor ironically entitled: email is dead (with the dead crossed through). It set out the history of email, some famous emails, and some thoughts on its future. |
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| Poster for exhibit |
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| 4.37 billion uses of emails in 2023 |
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| Key dates |
In the last room, one could have your photo taken and send it in an email.
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| Lots of fun |
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| Another photo |
The Permanent Display alternated between the titles of Designer, Maker, User.
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| Maker... |
One wall had some icons of design in London, including the Underground Tube signs.
There was a history of design outlining some of the larger movements from the 1800s to the present.
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| William Morris from the 1860s |
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| Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna WorkshopI 1903 |
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| Art Deco 1925 |
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| Mary Quant and the miniskirt 1966 |
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| From the Spoon to the City featured lots of artefacts from the Museum's collection |
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| London Underground graphics- designed in the 20s by Harry Beck |
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| Manhattan subway graphics- Lella Vignelli (b. 1934) and Massino Vignelli (1931-2014)- from the 1970s |
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| Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Architect (1897-2000), The Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926-27. She was one of the first women to graduate as an architect in Vienna. |
There was a section on good and bad design. AK-47 assault rifle, designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov, 1947, and Leg splint, 1942, designed by Charles and Ray Eames.
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| Good and bad |
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| 'Highlighting the moral responsibilities of designers and the people who use their work' |
Prior to seeing the main exhibit, we took a late lunch break at the Design Museum's restaurant, which overlooks Holland Park.
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View from restaurant of Holland Park
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| Beautifully designed restaurant - the booths have a great view of Holland Park |
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We shared a sweet potato salad, with pomegranates, figs and greens.
Very calm place with jazz music playing in the background. Allan's TIFF tshirt matched the food! |
The main exhibit was entitled: Rebel: 30 Years of London Fashion.
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| Poster for the exhibit |
The exhibit dealt with the past 30 years of London fashion which 'exploded into the international stage fuelled through the fearless creativity of its young designers'. Since 1993, the NEWGEN (New Generation) scheme was founded by the British Fashion Council to support designers on the basis of outstanding talent and financial need. It launched during a time of deep recession. Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) was part of the first cohort and more than 300 designers have participated in NEWGEN during the last 30 years.
Everything in the exhibit was made by young designers at the beginning of their careers when they were receiving NEWGEN support. The exhibit had a number of rooms dealing with 'Art School', Backstage Pass' and 'Runway'. The first room was called 'Colour Explosion'.
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| Colour----Feben, Red Twist dress, Spring/Summer 2023 Feben is an Ethiopian designer who grew up in Sweden and studied fashion at Central Saint Martins. |
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| Suzanne Clements and Inacio Riveiro. Rainbow tank and Mrs Simpson skirt, Spring/Summer 1997 |
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Mary Katrantzou, Archway Lampshade skirt and Pocket Parade jacket, Spring/Summer 2011. "Digital was taboo at college. I taught myself Photoshop. I use my mouse as my paint brush."
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Ashish Gupta, Ensemble with hand-embroidered sequins, Spring/Summer 2005. Anish Gupta came to London from New Delhi in 1997 to study fashion. His embroideries are hand-sewn in the workshop he founded in New Delhi to make his first NEWGEN collection in 2004.
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| Björk at the Oscars in 2001 wearing NEWGEN designer Marjan Pejoski's Swan dress. |
There was a small room with some pieces by Lee Alexander McQueen who was the outstanding talent to emerge from the first cohort of NEWGEN. His first collection was called
Taxi Driver. |
| Portrait of Lee Alexander McQueen, 1993 |
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| Erdem Moralioğlu, Embroidered dress, Autumn/Winter 2008. |
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| Matty Bovan, Composite ensemble, Spring/Summer 2019 |
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| Simone Rocha, Ensemble, Autumn/Winter, 2021 |
There was a fun area in the exhibit, where if one sat in front of an interactive mirror screen, various "looks" by designers would be superimposed on the person looking into the screen.
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| Gift shop area for the Exhibit |
We really enjoyed our visit to the Design Museum. Fantastic space, light and airy and lots of room to view the exhibits. All the exhibits except for the Rebel Fashion exhibit were free to the public. We wandered a bit on Kensington High Street, but it started to drizzle and the temperature began to cool off.
We took the tube back to Monument, walked over London Bridge and then decided to go for fish and chips at Fish!, a restaurant right beside Borough Market. It was established in 1999, and has won a National Fish & Chip Award for their beer battered fish & chips.
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| Quite a large restaurant. We got there at about 6:30 p.m. just as it started to fill up. |
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| Meantime Greenwich Lager |
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| Fish and chips with mushy peas and beer |
It was a perfect meal to end our London adventure. It is now Thursday October 12 and it just stopped raining. We have a 6:00 p.m. flight from Heathrow so will be leaving our flat by around 2:30 p.m. We are due in Toronto at 9:00 p.m., Toronto time.
We have had a wonderful trip. Our Nordic adventure was superb. Modern Oslo is a real eye-opener. Truly an art and architecture delight, with lots of green space, a very walkable city with a great transport system. Definitely exceeded our expectations. A real gem. Stockholm was a very beautiful city with so many different neighbourhoods on the many different islands. We, of course, got addicted to the cinnamon and cardamon buns in each city, the great fish and the excellent coffee.
Then on to London--- a city under construction with so many new buildings. The theatre scene is still the best and there are so many galleries and museums to choose from. We really enjoyed staying near Borough Market on the South bank of the Thames. Easy walking distance from the Tate Modern, National Theatre and neighbourhoods just across the river. It was a real bonus to have a week of beautiful sunny warm days in London in October. We are amazed at the speed in which London is becoming a cashless society, joining Norway and Sweden which were already ahead of the pack. We're down to around £10 each, and have no intention of buying any more British money as we would have done in the past. Museums won't even let one pay in cash for a postcard!
We have also learned about one fall-out from Brexit. There are no VAT refunds in Britain. The fashion industry has launched a campaign to do something about this. One store showed us a press release they had just received about this issue. Apparently a flagship store in London of a well-known designer had to close, as clients were going to Europe to make their purchases of the same items, as they could get a VAT refund. Ah Brexit! Another unintended consequence.
At the wonderful design store Svenskt Tenn in Stockholm, the original owner Estrid Ericson's favourite quote was on the wall. It emphasized the importance of travel, exploring the world and finding inspiration in different cultures. The World is a Book and he/she who stays at home reads only one page. We agree wholeheartedly!
This will be my last post of the trip. Thank you for joining our adventure and hope to see many of you in person soon!
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