Ivo Dawnay's London cultural diary

Head of London National Trust London Ivo Dawnay reveals his arts and culture highlights of the coming months in London. 

Former journalist and political advisor Ivo Dawnay is now head of the National Trust in London, a job, as his Twitter feed puts it, which involves ‘attempting to match-make a love affair between the two’. He is married to editor and novelist Rachel Johnson and they live in West London with their children. 

‘In general,' he tells Culture Whisper, 'my role is to make the National Trust more interesting to Londoners between 25 and 40 – people who are generally considered to be outside our constituency. The London audience is very demanding and younger people especially want to be entertained as well as simply visit one of our properties.

‘To have the  Big Brother House open to public visitors for a weekend was just the beginning. We’ve also been running singles nights and collaborating with brightclub.org , which brings together comedians and academics to create what they call ‘The Thinking Person’s Variety Night’. And we now have a programme of partnerships with other notable London houses and museums (including Leighton House , the Freud Museum , Keats House , Handel House and Bevis Marks Synagogue ) giving NT members half-price entry.’ 

Dawnay’s latest wheeze is to invite four opinionated Londoners to lead tours of their respective quarters of the capital aboard a fleet of magnificent green Routemasters. The first tour, of South London, takes place this Saturday 7 June and is led by Stephen Bayley, with Tanya Gold, Peter York and Dan Cruikshank entrusted with north, west and east respectively on subsequent weekends. ‘The idea is to stir up thoroughly chauvinistic, partisan rivalry between them,’ says Dawnay.

The Trust owns 12 properties in London – Dawnay’s favourite, he says, is  Sutton House , Hackney, ‘which was built by one of Henry VIII’s henchman and is very much how I imagine Wolf Hall to be.’ [Watch out for  Breaker’s Yard , an educational art installation featuring an edible garden, Daniel Lobb’s multi-story caravan sculpture and Deborah Curtis and Gavin Turk’s House of Fairy Tales, which opens at Sutton House on 12 August 14.]

Next on his hit list, however, is a building that couldn’t be more different – Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, Brutalist block West Londoners love to hate. The Trust plan to open one of Trellick’s flats to the public later this year. Can Trellick ever deliver retro nostalgia or will it remain grittily urban? Watch this space... 

Theatre: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , Aldwych Theatre, May 1 –September 6, 2014

‘I must be the only person in the country who actually found Hilary Mantell’s books quite difficult to get through. But the RSC are very good so this is definitely on my list.’

Art: Alexander Calder: Gouaches, Gagosian Gallery, June 10–July 26, 2014 

‘Calder is a giant of 20th-century American art best known for his mobiles. This exhibition of gouache paintings date from a year he spent in Aix-en-Provence in 1953.’

Art: White Cube, Bermondsey

‘I’ve never been to this outpost of White Cube, a huge new art gallery space which opened in 2011. They’re currently showing work by the German photographic artist Andreas Gursky which I’m interested to see.’

Musical: The Pajama Game , the Shaftsbury Theatre, May 13 –September 13, 2014

‘I first heard the soundtrack to this London musical when I was a child. It’s a very witty, wonderful story about the rag trade and trade unions, with really good songs.’

Book: This Boy, Alan Johnson

‘This memoir by politician Alan Johnson describes how he and his older sister grew up in poverty in West London not far from Trellick Tower, where we’ll soon be able to open a flat to the public.’

Film: Archive documentary from the British Council

‘The BC has just digitised 25 more films from its archives and loaded them onto its website. They date from the 1940s and are called things like "Song of the Clyde" (1942) and "These Children Are Safe" (1940). Fascinating stuff.’