London Pleasure Gardens transforms docklands wasteland into arts and culture oasis

An ambitious project to convert a 20-acre stretch of east London wasteland into a 35,000 capacity arts and culture destination will be completed on 30 June.

The London Pleasure Gardens, located at Pontoon Dock, will feature a 27,000 capacity open-air space for live concerts, a 2,800 capacity sound proofed indoor space with late license, a floating cocktail lounge with a 24-hour licence, large-scale sculpture gardens and a dome building with an events capacity for 1,000.

Events already confirmed for the site include, UK electronic music festival Bloc, featuring Snoop Dogg and Orbital on 6 and 7 July, plus the Africa stage for BT’s River of Music, taking place over the weekend before the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony.

Part of the London 2012 Festival, the BT River of Music will feature performances by musicians representing all the Olympic and Paralympic nations.

Musicians from the world’s major continents will be represented across six stages: Battersea Park (Asia stage); Trafalgar Square (Europe stage); Somerset House (Europe stage); Tower of London (Americas stage); Greenwich Old Royal Naval College (Oceania stage) and London Pleasure Gardens (Africa stage).

During the Olympic Games, the London Pleasure Gardens will provide a waterfront location for live art, film screenings, promenade performances and community projects.

On 30 July, a pyrotechnic show will animate the concrete architecture that surrounds the site.

The show will be inspired by a traumatic event that happened on the site in 1917, when a TNT factory exploded, tragically killing 73 people and filling the sky with burning grain. The performance will fuse music, pyrotechnics, projection and theatre.

Between the 17th and 19th Centuries in Britain, Pleasure Gardens were communal spaces where people from all walks of life, converged to listen to music, admire paintings, stroll, drink and immerse themselves in the culture that made their city great.

The most famous Pleasure Gardens were in Vauxhall. Mozart played there aged nine and Charles Dickens wrote about them. Between 1851 and 1884, the Royal Docks had its very own Pleasure Gardens, named The Royal Victoria Gardens.

The modern day scheme is supported by Newham Council, the Mayor of London and the London Development Agency to kick-start regeneration initiatives planned for the Royal Docks in the London borough of Newham.

As winners of a Mayoral competition to find ‘Meanwhile’ uses for prominent brownfield sites in the Olympic borough, the team behind the Pleasure Gardens will stage events, concerts and cultural collaborations on the site until 2014.

The London Pleasure Gardens team includes Debs Armstrong, who is the Creative Director and Co-producer of the Shangri-La area at Glastonbury Festival, and was also the co-Founder and Producer of The Lost Vagueness area which preceded it, as well as the designer of bespoke events and live music tours by bands such as Groove Armada, and Ed Harcourt.

Also involved are Robin Collings who organised Stoke Newington Festival and Bassline Circus at Glastonbury, and Garfield Hackett who produced Mutate Britain, and Cordy House.

London 2012 Festival will be largest cultural celebration in our lifetime

The full programme for the London 2012 Festival was launched today (26 April). It contains some 12,000 events and performances from over 25,000 artists from all 205 participating Olympic nations.

Kicking off across the UK on 21 June and running until 9 September, there will be 137 world firsts and 85 UK premiers, featuring well-known names from the arts, music, comedy, dance and culture. 

Billed as the ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Festival and taking place at 900 venues, the London 2012 Festival  begins with four opening day events. 

Lake Windermere in the Lake District will stage a free outdoor event featuring French pyrotechnic wizards Les Commandos Percu to celebrate the Olympic Flame’s arrival to the region, whilst in the heart of Derry/Londonderry’s new cultural quarter, a Peace One Day Global Truce Countdown Concert will take place. 

Also, on 21 June, the children of Raploch in Stirling will perform in The Big Concert, conducted by world renowned conductor Gustavo Dudamel, and Edward Gardner and Simon Halsey will raise their batons together for the UK premier of Weltethos at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham. 

London highlights during the Festival will include the floating children’s opera The Owl and the Pussycat written by Monty Python star Terry Jones and Oscar winning composer Anne Dudley, which will travel through London’s canal network, plus pop-up Shakespeare performances around the city, with a cast led by actor and director Mark Rylance. 

A barge manned by a group of well-known British comedians will set sail from London and attempt to reach Edinburgh’s celebrated Fringe venue, The Pleasance, staging pop-up comedy gigs along the way. Whilst, The BT River of Music will showcase performances from five continents across six stages located in iconic locations around the capital. The six stages will represent the continents - Asia in Battersea Park, Africa in Jubilee Gardens, Europe in Trafalgar Square and Somerset House, the Americas at the Tower of London, and Oceania in the Greenwich Old Royal Naval College. 

Some 160,000 free tickets are available for confirmed acts including the Noisettes and the Scissor Sisters. 

Major London events which form part of the Festival include BBC Radio 1’s Hackney Weekend (23-24 June), the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, the World Shakespeare Festival and Urban Classic - a mash-up between the BBC Symphony Orchestra and urban acts including Ms Dynamite planned for Waltham Forest Town Hall on 5 July. 

Other much anticipated activity from across the country includes the world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, which features a string quartet streamed live from helicopters flying over Birmingham, plus an ‘Unlimited’ programme of events involving deaf and disabled artists. 

Ruth MacKenzie, Director of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival said: “It will be the largest cultural celebration in our lifetime. With new work from the best musicians, comics, artists, film makers and more, there will be arts events taking place in unusual places all over the UK that will showcase the best in international culture when the eyes of the world are on us this summer.”

Principal funders of the London 2012 Festival are Arts Council England, Legacy Trust UK and the Olympic Lottery Distributor. BP and BT are Premier Partners.