art, up close and personal

J is wrapped in art. It’s a long, intestinal thing, made out of the stretchy flesh-coloured material used to pad actor’s bodies. The plaque on the wall tells us to play with it.

“How does it feel?” I ask.

“I think it’s trying to get to second base.”


This is the type of place that encourages this sort of thing. This is no conventional art gallery. This is SHUNT, an arts space in the arched underbelly of the London Bridge tube station. It’s dark and smells musty – the website says it used to be a wine vault. It could just have easily been home to Oliver-style street urchins.

We are somewhere along the long hallway, past the “Gothic Circus” mechanical/light/sound installation, but before the bar. In the alcoves to our right and left are the silhouettes of a man and a woman sitting in, swirling around, suspended from hula hoops. “Are we allowed to talk to the art?” J whispers furtively. Someone has gotten prohibitively close and seems, indeed, to be chatting with the SHUNT urchins.

This is the type of place this is. The beer is cheap, the air is dank and some chairs are covered in Astroturf. Girls in silver hotpants and bubblewrap helmets walk past – and you can’t be sure they are in costume until later, when they sail over your head in a weirdly poetic slow-motion trapeze act.

You can be sure there will be a line. We arrived for opening at 6 pm on a Wednesday and waited around the block. The line was just as long when we left several hours later.

Weird, wonderful, wildly popular.

Appropriate for a girl's first night out in London, wouldn't you say?