South London Art Map: Bermondsey Tour

This Friday sees the return of a regular favourite: South London Art Map’s Last Friday walking tour. Taking place on the final Friday of each month, the tours require fair bit of legwork from their participants but the effort is well worth it. Every tour is conducted by an artist or curator with close connections and real insights into south London’s art scene, and it’s is a unique chance not just to discover new galleries, but to meet face-to-face with many of the artists, curators and gallery directors behind the exhibitions. Better still, the entire evenings’ events run on a “pay what you like” basis.

This month’s tour is concentrated around Bermondsey where, away from the behemoth Tate Modern and the White Cube’s massive new outpost, a host of small, exciting, independent galleries is waiting to be discovered. Stops en route include Alter/Shift/Control (the supercool contemporary futuristic-technological show at the Bermondsey Project Space), The Drawing Room’s acclaimed Marking Language exhibition and a sneak peek at installationist Tim Ellis’s brand new show at Horatio Jr. The tour will be synchronised with a live radio broadcast on Resonance FM featuring invited guest speakers from several of the galleries on the route (including George Lionel Barker of the George and Jorgen Gallery) – a special evening’s events which also marks the launch of the new South London Art App.

There have been hotspots of artistic activity around Peckham, New Cross and Bermondsey for many years now. Each of these areas has, at one time or another, been talked about as The Next Hoxton, or The Next Shoreditch, but somehow each of these places has remained a little out-of-touch with London’s mainstream art scene. Recently, however, South London Art Map has contributed greatly to giving south London’s artistic community a real sense of cohesion. Thankfully all those “Peckham is the new Shoreditch” predictions have never come to pass, and south London’s community of galleries and artists has developed and retained its own distinctive character.

South London Art Map’s Last Friday Tour will be setting off from White Cube Bermondsey at 6pm on Friday 22 November.