Tag Archives: trafalgar square

The National Gallery gets hit by someones rage. And their spray paint.

Posted on October 22, 2010 by | 3 Comments

I walk through Trafalgar Square every morning and tend to notice any new or interesting street art because of my familiarity with the place.

However today, in a zombified state of tiredness, I managed to walk straight past about 8 police officers and two squad cars before noticing this.

Someone has rather distastefully scribbled “Each morning I wake from slumber shouting I’m the fastest thing alive – ALPE” on the front of the National Gallery.

I love street art but don’t like to see stuff put on historic building like this. It’s a stunning place and has been there for donkeys years.

Despite this, I really love it. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s the balls that it must have taken to do it or maybe it the poetic desperation that it’s screaming.

Since posting this, someone sent me a picture of the Bank of England after it had been sprayed with the same sentence. Check it out. I also heard from the National Gallery that the Tate Britain had been sprayed with it too but I didn’t manage to get a photo of it so if you have any please e-mail them to me, cheers.

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Awesome street art from Public Spirit around London

Posted on August 16, 2010 by | 9 Comments

Trafalgar Square, London.

I walk from London Waterloo to work in central Soho everyday. As I’ve said before, this is an awesome way to see interesting things and to spot arty bits and bobs. I personally think that everyone should try to ditch all, or most, of the tube and replace it with a short walk.

Brewer Street, Soho, London.

Recently, I’ve been noticing some awesome paste-ups by a street artist I’ve never seen before. They’re all cut into the shape of a drop, whether it’s supposed to be a tear or rain drop I’m not sure but they all have a bit of a story or message.

Leicester Square, London.

My favourite is the one with the naked woman, presumably supposed to be a prostitute, with a chain tethering her to the desk of a filthy rich businessman (or pimp) counting his cash. I guess the drop could represent a teardrop in this case.

Waterloo Station, London.

I’ve spotted 3 of these so far, one outside Waterloo station, one in Trafalgar square (that’s since been removed) and one next to Carphone Warehouse on Wardour Street at the Brewer Street junction. Looking forward to seeing more.

Anyone know the name of the artist? Seen any? Let me know where and I’ll add them to this post.

UPDATE (SEPT 2010): More ‘Public Spirit’ finds around London, see below…

Just off Hoxton Square, East London

Another ‘Public Spirit’ piece spotted on some shop shutters on Tottenham Court Road


Along with the 1st one in this post, this is another favourite of mine. You can find it round the back of the McDonalds in Leicester Square

UPDATE (OCT 2010): We have a name!!

Thanks to Isaac’s comment below, we have a name for this street artist. It’s Public Spirit and the post above has been amended with this name.

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London West End’s aMAZEing PR stunt in Trafalgar Square

Posted on August 2, 2010 by | 1 Comment

On my way to work this morning I walked through Trafalgar Square to find an awesomely cool looking maze in the center. Upon a closer look I found that it’s been put there by the London West End and is supposedly filled with lots of exciting tips about off the tourist trail places to visit around the West End.

I wasn’t allowed to go in because it’s not open until 11am this morning but I’ll go back at lunch or this evening and update this post below. What I do know is that it’s going to be there until the end of the week and each day there’ll be a special guest each day in the centre.

UPDATE:

So I’ve now been to the maze and checked it out close up and found out some more information from the guys behind at Cake Group it too…

On first glance, the maze looks pretty small and shitty and my ego instinctively led me to believe that there’d be no way I could ever get lost in it. However, I was proven wrong when I got completely and utterly confused and couldn’t find my way out!

All I could do was just walk around reading all the signs until they’d all been read and I stumbled across the exit. I guess that this is ultimately what the stunt was aiming to achieve in the first place!

I hope that all the signs with quirky bits of information will be available online at some point as there was some really interesting things that would be good to read up on in slightly more detail through their Facebook or Twitter pages. In fact, I REALLY want to get the Carnaby Street sign from above to stick in my office just off Carnaby Street.

Picture via World Global Times (with my girlfriend wearing the red coat inside the maze!)

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Congrats to The Elephant Family for raising £4,000,000!

Posted on July 30, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Elephant - Trafalgar Square

I have FINALLY got round to sharing my photo’s of the truly awesome Elephant Parade in London. If you missed it, or haven’t heard about it, the Elephant Parade was set up to raise money for the Elephant Family charity.

Elephant - China town

The aim was to create hundreds of white elephant shaped ‘canvases’ and let a whole load of artists and celebrities loose on them with only their minds to limit their creativity. The finished results were then placed in herds around London in places like Southbank, Trafalgar Square, Carnaby Street, Soho, Covent Garden, Hamleys and even Glastonbury festival!

Elephant - Trafalgar Square

Check out some of my favourites embedded into this post or click on any of the links here to see the elephants in that area.

Elephant - Trafalgar Square

At the end of the parade, which took place over several weeks, the elephants were all auctioned off (unless they hadn’t been vandalised already) with the goal of raising 2 million quid. Well played to everyone involved in this for beating that record and in fact raising over £4,000,000 for the Elephant Family – a great cause.

Elephant - Covent Garden

I’d now really like to see some fun fundraising ideas like this for charities trying to eliminate poverty, like Water Aid, Oxfam, British Red Cross, etc, etc.

Check out my full Flickr set of photo’s from The Elephant Parade and follow The Elephant Family on Twitter too.

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Ship in a bottle – The fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square

Posted on July 12, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Just been looking through draft blog posts that I started ages ago and then completely forgot about and found this one. I’m kicking myself for forgetting about it because I was there on the day they opened the fourth plinth and wanted to blog about it straight away.

All I really wanted to say about it is that I think it’s brilliant. In fact, I think it’s considerably better than One & Other by Anthony Gormley, where people were given an hour slot to stand upon it doing whatever they so pleased.

The work is called Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle and consists of an enormous (in relation to most ships in bottles) ship made from wood and African printed textiles – to reflect London’s multiculturalism. The fabric has Indonesian inspirations and history shows that the Dutch sold such designed fabrics onto colonies in West Africa – all made possible through the freedom of the seas, achieved by Admiral Lord Nelson (pictured in the background at the top of Nelson’s Column) and his victory in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

A really great piece from Yinka Shonibare that combines fascinating history with London’s amazingly broad multicultural society. Although touristy, Trafalgar Square is an amazing place to chill out and watch the world go by. I’ve written about it a few times before, check out the posts here.

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Picked up a couple of FAB Awards. Yeah we did.

Posted on June 7, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Fab Award

I don’t usually write about work-related stuff on my blogggy blog. To be the bloggiest of bloggy blogs I feel that work and play should be kept separate and dissociated from each other. However as this is something I’m particularly proud of, and a little (very) keen to show off, I’ve decided to blog about it anyway*….

So, since getting my job at We Are Social 9 months ago I’ve been working on a few different campaigns but the one I’ve been most heavily involved in is the Marmarati Campaign for Unilever. You can check out the case study for the full low down on what’s been going on but in brief, we launched a new extra strong variant of Marmite called Marmite XO using Facebook, Twitter, a victorian themed website, events and even more events.

Last week, all the hard work put in by the team I’ve worked with on this has paid off and we received a Food And Beverage (FAB) Award for best use of Social Media! We also managed to pick up a Fabulous Award for the best work in Digital & Interactive so we were all very happy.

That’s one of the FAB Awards there in the piccy taken in Trafalgar Square, my head doesn’t actually look like that (well, unless I’m really hungover… like I was after the FAB Awards)

*This does not affect the bloggyness of my bloggy blog and it’s still bloggier than any others.

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Do not feed the pigeons… they’re mine!

Posted on April 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

The worst thing about working in London is having to go into the filthy underground to get the tube on your commute. Seeing as the weather is getting nicer and the days are getting longer my girlfriend and I have been getting into the routine of skipping out the tube section of the journey and walking instead.

From London Waterloo (A) we can walk to our places of work (B) in central Soho in 30 minutes or less and a bit longer for the return walk to the station (C) in the evening because of a nice detour through the park. Check out the map below, or here.

As well as walking 1.6miles in the morning and 2miles in the evening we’re managing to take in the scenery of the riverside in the morning light and St James’ park towards sunset. You also begin to notice all the little things about London that you’ll inevitably miss if you’re squished into a grubby tube gasping for air beneath the arm pit of a sweaty fat man.

As a creative, it’s the people I see, things I notice and places I go that inspire the best ideas for new campaigns. Being stuck in an office all day is completely uninspiring and since walking to and from work I’ve actually noticed a significant increase in my concentration levels at work, not to mention a vast improvement in idea generation.

You can forget about the tourists too, before 9.30am they just don’t exist. You can stroll past the London Eye, Big Ben or Leicester Square without a slow walking tourist in sight.

So if you’re a creative, or even just a commuter, I urge you to ditch the train, tube or bus a few stops early and discover the brighter side of London. Oh, and bring a camera because you never know what you might see… it was only last week when I snapped this eagle perched ironically on this sign in Trafalgar Square.

Eagle in Trafalgar Square

If this all looks like too much work for you then you are a fat bastard and you should read my post about commutersize that’s fit for even the laziest of commuters.

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