From time to time, a visiting friend will want to spend a weekend basting in Art. It starts some low-stakes hand-wringing. What can’t be missed? How long is a piece of string? Et cetera. Even now, I’m jumpy about the omissions. For instance, the stiff, ensorcelling Tutors at the National Portrait Gallery, followed by the café on the ground floor, with its academic panelling and rocky road slice; the Dulwich Picture Gallery, surrounded by a lawn where you can spread out a blanket for lunch; the Garden Museum, which has a Cecil Beaton painting of nasturtiums that I always go to see first. In this itinerary, I chose to focus on looking at art, rather than buying it, which ruled out the vintage dealers on Pimlico Road as well as the Partnership Editions showroom near Hackney Downs. Anyway, it’s a nice thing to be idiotically spoilt for choice, buffeted by new talents and exhibitions. Here’s what I would do this weekend.
Friday
Arrive at Victoria Station after lunch and wheel your suitcase down Ebury Street to the Lime Tree Hotel. I wouldn’t bother with a taxi unless you’re coming from further afield—it’s a five minute rattle. Since you’ll be spending the weekend out, there’s no need to overegg the hotel: the Lime Tree is a cheerfully-run, centrally-located place with sash windows and decent rates. We live in the area and have been funnelling out-of-towners there for years.
Put your toothbrush in a mug and set out on foot for the Royal Academy of Arts, about half an hour’s walk away, past Buckingham Palace and through Green Park with its sudden thatches of daffodils, then out onto Piccadilly. The RA’s tentpole exhibition for the spring is Entangled Pasts, a ground-shifting account of the Royal Academy’s connections with colonialism and slavery. If you go to one exhibition in 2024, this should be it.
Leave the RA by the back exit onto Burlington Gardens and walk up Regent Street to the Oxford Circus tube stop. Catch the Central Line east to Liverpool Street and walk to Dennis Severs’ House, a theatrical, early 18th century home designed as a three-dimensional still life. On Fridays it’s open at night, and the self-guided tours are candle-lit and conducted in silence. Starting in the basement kitchen, guests move through five narrow floors of half-eaten food, letters, rumpled bedsheets and other signs that someone has just left the room. If it doesn’t give you gooseflesh you aren’t alive.
Make a reservation for dinner at Sessions Art Club in Clerkenwell, folded into a corner of what was, in 1782, Britain’s largest courthouse. The restaurant sits in the former judge’s dining room, a balconied space lit by Palladian windows, one of the most dazzling settings in London. The food is simple, modestly portioned, and intended to be shared. Get one more risotto than you think you’ll need. If it isn’t raining, take a nightcap onto one of the small terraces after dinner, which feel hidden and in-the-know.
Saturday
Set an alarm. The Regency Café in Pimlico is a 20 minute walk and they start frying at 7am. The café has a retro ambiance and is thrillingly cheap, but everybody knows about it, so the faster you can get over there, the better. My order: eggs, hash browns, beans, toast, and two cups of tea right off the bat, which are exactly the right colour (an orangey-brown) despite lingering, pre-brewed, in a samovar.
From the Regency, the Tate Britain is ten minutes away on foot. The John Singer Sargent exhibition, which travelled to London via the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is on until July. It’s a galloping, joyful show, and packed. My neighbour Trudi Ballard has been four times already. Portraits of on-the-make sitters are interspersed with clothes (Sargent was fixated on clothes, according to the curators) in display cases. “There is now a class who dress after pictures,” says a placard of commentary, quoting a critic of the time, “and when they buy a gown ask ‘will it paint?’”
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Walk along the Thames footpath, past Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. Two ideas for lunch: for something substantial, keep to the river until you see the Temple tube stop, then go up Surrey Street to Toklas, in a lumpen 1970s building with a spectacular terrace south of the Strand. Toklas is owned by the founders of the Frieze Art Fair and diners are seated beneath a chromogenic print by Wolfgang Tillmans, of poolside tomatoes and aubergines. A lot of the food here falls into my ideal category: Stuff that Can Be Mopped Up with Bread. Ragus; fresh soft cheeses with herbs; pastas in browned butter; little salads of broad beans and leaves in spicy olive oil, and so on. It’s exuberant eating.
For a quicker feed, veer off the Thames path and walk up Whitehall, through Trafalgar square and past the wraparound queues at the British Museum to Fortitude Bakehouse, in a mews behind the Russell Square tube station. Get a coffee and the Sandwich of the Day, and take them to a bench in Russell Square, a public garden in shouting distance of the bakery.
From Russell Square, it’s a ten minute walk to the Foundling Museum, across from the football pitches in Coram’s Fields. The Foundling Museum holds historical artifacts from Britain’s first children’s charity, The Foundling Hospital (now called Coram) which was established to care for abandoned infants in the 18th century. Artists donated their work in support of the charity, seeding the first public art gallery in the country, and today the permanent collection includes paintings by Hogarth and Gainsborough alongside contemporary work by Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin.
15 minutes south through Bloomsbury, Sir John Soane’s Museum is another stronghold of Hogarth masterpieces, as well as a hodgepodge of other treasures (look for the pictures of Venice by Canaletto) collected and curated by Soane, a Regency architect. The house overlooking Lincoln's Inn Fields was preserved and left to the nation following Soane’s death in 1837.
Make your way to Soho and the thickly-carpeted, leather-boothed Bebe Bob, where at the end of a busy day, the menu is soothingly limited: roast chicken or fancier roast chicken. For sides, get the French fries, salad, and cauliflower cheese. The wine list is heavy on white Burgundy and the proprietors are known for their modest mark-ups. Terrific people watching.
Sunday
Sleep late, then go to Colbert, an all-day restaurant next to the blazing Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square, for a bacon roll. The Saatchi Gallery, a 70,000 square foot temple to contemporary art, is a five minute walk along the King’s Road, set back from the street in Duke of York Square. There are free exhibitions on the ground floor and a ticketed one upstairs—until the beginning of May, the upstairs exhibition has nearly a hundred pieces from the photographic artist Edward Burtynsky, known for his large-scale works that document, with wonder and worry, humanity’s presence on earth.
Taxi up to the Wallace Collection, another private hoard left to the public, this one by Sir Richard and Lady Wallace at the end of the nineteenth century. The permanent collection, free to visit, is spread throughout their mansion on Manchester Square, and includes The Swing, a sensation in 18th-century France and still an object of pilgrimage, in which a pink-frocked woman sails between her husband and her lover, by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
Walk south into Mayfair for lunch at Mount Street Restaurant, owned by Artfarm, a business run by the gallerists Manuela and Iwan Wirth (the Hauser & Wirth Gallery is also in the neighbourhood, but closed on Sundays). The art hanging over the tables includes work by Warhol, Picasso, Matisse, and a charismatic picture of prawns by Lucian Freud. Keith Tyson’s photograph-like painting Still Life with White Carbs anchors one side of the dining room, and draws a steady trickle of people budging in for a closer look. The food is marvellous and grown-up: lobster pie for two; duck with morels; Dover sole.
Turn east into Hyde Park and walk past the paddle boats and the roped-off Lido in the Serpentine (stop into the Serpentine Gallery, a free contemporary art space, if you’re making good time), then plunge south out of the park onto Exhibition Road, and into the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Sometimes I imagine we live in a ye olde time where the thing we talk about is The New Exhibition, and at least once a year the V&A will mount a blockbuster show that conjures that illusion. In 2023 the exhibition was Divas, an examination of how our most revered, primarily female performers are dressed, and if you sprint you can still see it (it’s on until this Wednesday the 10th). Regardless, the sprawling permanent collection, as well as many other smaller-scale exhibitions, are free, and so variable and bewitching that, like a casino or hay bale maze, it is genuinely difficult to find your way out.
When you do, walk to dinner at Kutir, an Indian restaurant in a townhouse on a residential street in Chelsea. It’s a place where you should live a little: have the aloo tikki with honey yoghurt, the crispy cauliflower samosas, the black lentil dahl with a just-melted pat of butter on top and the guinea fowl biryani. The chicken tikka masala is livened up with Kashmiri chilli, and the saag makkai comes studded with sweetcorn. Bring a friend. Bring me.
Monday
Check out of the Lime Tree, leave your luggage at the hotel, collect a flat white across the street at Tomtom Coffee House and tube to Temple station. The Courtauld Gallery is within the North Wing at Somerset House, a Regency pile overlooking the Thames, and includes the country’s largest body of work by Cézanne, as well as a roomful of twentieth century pieces by the Bloomsbury Group. Spend the morning at the museum, then make your way down the hall to the New Wing for lunch at Spring, the light-filled, pared-back seasonal restaurant that never seems to miss. Whatever else you order, get a side of the crispy potatoes with black garlic and sour cream. You could just get that, really. Plus a glass of wine. A high note to end on.
