This spring, I wandered through my east London neighbourhood for some afternoon distraction. It was one of those days when work had started crushing against the brain and I needed some quick stimulus away from the desk. I saw a bunch of downcast sixth formers sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Rough Trade record store, heads bowed in solemnity. When I asked one, sporting very large trousers and lilac hair, what was going on, they mentioned a playback of the forthcoming Boygenius album. That figured.
Cutting off Brick Lane, I noticed a crowd gathered behind an ornate green gate next to The Pride of Spitalfields, a favourite pub. Peering into the cobbled courtyard, I spotted trays of canapés, glasses of champagne, hushed dignitaries with thick framed glasses whispering gravely to women in statement print frocks and wooden jewellery. An art event. My social arithmetic calculated this was the opening of The Gilbert and George Centre, a free-for-all gallery to house the couple’s art they’ve charitably gifted locals.
It felt entirely in the spirit of the artists, whose guiding, egalitarian principle is Art For All, to gatecrash the event. I slipped past a well-shod doorman. When asked my name, I said, “I’m a friend of Gilbert’s” (I’m not) and waltzed through. Ever since, the Gilbert and George Centre has become a favourite new base for meeting friends and showing off to visitors. It’s become a special place for quiet moments you never imagine you’ll treasure as a young man, until one day you wake up older, wider, busier, slower. A church for the secular, with meaningful provocation stained into the glass on its walls. Free London is my second favourite London, after the incredibly pricey, borderline unreachable London. Park Lane showrooms, plastic surgeons, all that lark. Ridiculous London has been fully sequestered away now, on account of the obvious fact that I, like all other Londoners not being filmed by Emerald Fennell or amused by Nicky Haslam’s comedy tea-towels, have less money than I used to.
All the impossible towers forming that phallic corridor down Bishopsgate in fact have public viewing decks
Starter-pack Free London is parks and churches. Once you grow in sophistication, Free London starts to energise and ennoble, taking more convoluted tangents. The regulation church snoop turns into finding the murals of Jean Cocteau frescoed into the crypt of Notre Dame de France, at Leicester Place, or slipping into the vestry to hear choir rehearsal at the Brompton Oratory. Park visits to the monoliths — Hyde, Regents, Battersea, Victoria — derail to the wild, crumbling, gothic decadence nestling in the overgrowth of Tower Hamlets cemetery. Being surrounded by so much extravagantly unkempt greenery makes me feel oddly tidy. Likewise, the Barbican Conservatory. Also free.
When you are alert to Free London, a liberating new aspect to the city appears. You realise that all the imposing towers forming that phallic metropolitan corridor down Bishopsgate into the City are obliged to factor into their planning permission public viewing decks at the top. These free stairways to heaven constitute the perfect vantage points to hover and linger briefly above the rest of London. Price tag: zero. Fifteen minutes’ brisk walk from the latest to open up another epic vista are the intricate, architectural models of central and east London housed in the Guildhall, a breathtakingly specific (and free) permanent exhibit explaining how and why the city is being erected around us.
Free London isn’t the same as bargain London. The reason these things are free is for the betterment of Londoners. They are for us. The funny thing? They work. Free London is not just a glimpse into fiscal utopia, it’s about freedom itself. Free London promotes a kind of aimlessness the city implores you to seek out without ever quite actively encouraging. Through that dreamy mind-drift, you can find purpose, then perhaps even apply it. Free London doesn’t select its membership by race, gender, class, sexuality or status. It does it by curiosity, inviting everybody along, forming a gorgeous spider’s web of silvery democratic patterns connecting a routinely divided city. Squaring the glaring differentials between rich and poor in London can otherwise often feel impossible.
Last week I attended a screening of a brilliant forthcoming documentary, The Pilgrimage of Gilbert and George, a deep delve into their philosophical thinking. It struck me not just that they have opened one of the most vital new art resources for Free London in 2023, but that our city’s stalwart partnership have constructed themselves into the structure of London itself, a distinguished living monument to radical free thought you can spot walking to dinner each evening. For the cost of exactly nothing.
Paul Flynn is a columnist
