London

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16468336

Londoners spotted this ship on the Thames near Tower Bridge, playing the iconic Imperial March theme from the Star Wars trilogies, otherwise recognisable as the Darth Vader music.

But it wasn’t coming from a galaxy far, far away - it was a German Navy ship, in London for training and a supply stop.

A spokesperson from the German Navy told the BBC the music had "no deeper message" and "the commander can choose the music freely".

World-famous graffiti artist Banksy has concluded his animal trail, after nine days of pop-up artworks dotted around the capital ended with a piece on the shutters of London Zoo.

Although all the surprise pieces have now been unveiled, speculation over the inspiration behind them persists. What do they mean, and how have they been received by the art and graffiti worlds?

Banksy's final piece, outside London Zoo in Camden, north London, shows a gorilla lifting the shutter to release a sea lion and birds, while other animals appear to look on from the inside.

Baby beavers have been born in urban London for the first time in more than 400 years, a conservation project said.

A big cat by Banksy appeared briefly, -stretching in the morning sun, on a bare advertising hoarding on Edgware Road in Cricklewood, north-west London, on Saturday. A few hours later it had gone, removed by contractors who feared it would be ripped down.

The anonymous artist known as Banksy, who confirmed the image was his at lunchtime on Saturday, also promised a little more summer fun to come.

A seventh image may shortly materialise in another surprising location, the Observer has learned. London residents should then keep their eyes peeled, a spokesperson suggested, for a few days longer.

For a week now, the streets of the capital have been ­populated by a string of unusual animal ­sightings, courtesy of Banksy, ­including ­pelicans, a goat and a trio of monkeys.

The artist’s vision is ­simple: the latest street art has been designed to cheer up the public ­during a period when the news headlines have been bleak, and light has often been harder to spot than shade.

Banksy’s hope, it is understood, is that the uplifting works cheer ­people with a moment of unexpected ­amusement, as well as to ­gently underline the human capacity for ­creative play, rather than for destruction and negativity.

Some recent theorising about the deeper significance of each new image has been way too involved, Banksy’s support organisation, Pest Control Office, has indicated.

It began with the silhouette of a goat perched atop a narrow wall near Kew Bridge in London, with tumbling rocks signifying the animal’s perilous position.

Over the course of the week, more silhouettes began popping up around the capital: two elephants with their trunks reaching towards each other from blocked-out windows on the side of a house in Chelsea; three monkeys swinging across a bridge on Brick Lane; and a wolf howling towards the sky, painted on to the face of a satellite dish on Rye Lane in Peckham.

On Friday, a fifth silhouette, of two pelicans eating fish, appeared on the wall of a Walthamstow fish and chip shop.

The cryptic murals are the work of Banksy. The Bristol-based street artist, whose identity is unknown, confirmed the pieces as genuine on his Instagram but he did not caption any of them – fuelling fierce speculation over their meaning.

Gough, an artist himself who was the subject of Tik Tok rumours that he was Banksy, posited that he could be aiming to release an image a day with a grand reveal sometime around the weekend.

...

Gough, an artist himself who was the subject of Tik Tok rumours that he was Banksy, posited that he could be aiming to release an image a day with a grand reveal sometime around the weekend.

More than a dozen people have been detained after flares were thrown towards the gates of Downing Street at a protest in London following the Southport stabbings.

A few hundred protesters chanting "Rule Britannia", "save our kids" and "stop the boats" attempted to leave the pavement opposite Downing Street in defiance of strict Metropolitan Police conditions on the protest in Whitehall.

Protesters, many of whom were drinking alcohol, began marching towards Parliament Square after 7pm, where some threw flares onto a statue of Winston Churchill.

Protesters were reportedly attempting to break a police line on Whitehall to access Parliament Square, while bottles and cans were thrown at police in riot gear.

Some ran past police towards Trafalgar Square. Officers formed a new line outside the Cabinet Office.

Earlier officers put on riot gear as demonstrators chanting Tommy Robinson’s name surrounded The Cenotaph.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17936539

Genuinely excellent news.

“We are now set to get London’s air to within legal limits by 2025, 184 years earlier than previously projected.”

A hundred and eighty four years.

South by Southwest (SXSW) has become a major occassion on the global creative calendar. For almost 40 years, the festival in Austin, Texas has hosted huge figures from the worlds of tech, science and culture, including Michelle Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Billie Eilish and Steven Spielberg, and has hosted premieres of some of Hollywood’s biggest films, like Bridesmaids and 21 Jump Street.

Safe to say, SXSW is at the forefront of culture. And now it’s finally making it’s way over to the UK. The organisers recently announced the exciting launch of a London festival and now we can reveal exactly when it will take place. SXSW London will officially be taking place in Shoreditch from June 2 to June 7 2025.

bikerave.london on instagram

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/14360057

In an extract from her new book, A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season, Lara Maiklem describes the thrill of discovering a 16th century sword on a Bankside beach.

Thursday 2 February 2022

I hear from the Museum of London today about the 'sixteenth-century bladed object' I found last year. My Excalibur moment happened at the beginning of December on a murky Saturday afternoon. I don't usually mudlark on the weekend — the foreshore is often busier and I try to keep weekends for family time — but I was in London meeting friends for lunch that day, and as I made my way back to the station, I saw the tide was low. Actually, I knew the tide was low, which is why I took the longer route along the river to the station. How could I not? I only briefly considered my new brogues, which were entirely unsuitable, before unlatching the metal gate and taking the concrete stairs down onto the foreshore at Bankside. The light was fading, and I knew I didn't have long before I lost it altogether, so I headed straight for my favourite patch. People were already there, and I could see from the footprints that it had been well searched, so I walked a little further along and that's when I saw it.

...

The handle and hilt loomed out at me from a small area of gritty sand that thinly covered the mud into which the blade disappeared. What caught my eye was its regular shape and the two lines of twisted gold wire embedded in the dark brown material of the handle. The blade was only just beneath the surface, and I gently cleared away the sand until I felt the end of it with my fingers. Easing my hand carefully underneath, I lifted it free quite easily, leaving a perfect impression of where it had lain for the best part of 500 years in the dark grey mud. I held the sword aloft. Excalibur of the Thames! And looked around, but everyone had gone and there was nobody to share the moment with. The handle looked to be made of wood with a square pommel carved into the end, finished off by a four-petalled flower or quatrefoil in what I assumed was copper alloy. The blade was broken at about eight inches long and was encrusted in a thick layer of mud, pebbles and rust. When iron rusts, it often engulfs whatever is lying next to it in the mud and ends up looking like a giant caddisfly larva case. If it had been a Victorian padlock or an old horseshoe, I would have been tempted to knock the concretion off with a stone, but this was too precious.