Lisson Grove's galleries collaborate to promote London's unsung art district – The Art Newspaper

27 May 2026

New initiative led by Lisson, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, Palmer Gallery, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art and The Showroom will launch during London Gallery Weekend in June.

One night in London in 1967, a 19-year-old Nicholas Logsdail missed his train home and ended up sleeping on a bench in Marylebone station.

When he woke, Logsdail “wandered around the area and saw an ad in Bell Street for somewhere that needed doing up”. Logsdail, a student at the Slade at the time, had been looking for somewhere to show his fellow student’s work and that doer-upper in Lisson Grove ended up becoming the Lisson Gallery. “I spent so much time and effort putting on that first show that I was expelled from art school,” he says. “Derek Jarman [also a student at the Slade] commiserated but said I had better get on with running the gallery I had just opened”.

In the decades since, the surrounding area has become unrecognisable, Logsdail says, “from fashionable Chiltern Street to the south and the next-door skyscrapers of Paddington Basin, but our little patch off Edgware Road remains relatively untouched,” with studios, galleries and creative businesses giving the district a unique feel.

This has contributed to Lisson Grove becoming a gallery destination “almost despite its best efforts,” says Andrew Renton, the professor of curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, who lives locally and is a trustee of The Showroom, a not-for-profit gallery just off the Edgware Road.

Lisson Gallery and The Showroom have now joined forces with the artist-led charity The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, and the commercial galleries Patrick Heide Contemporary Art and Palmer Gallery to form the Lisson Grove Galleries initiative, with the aim of promoting the area’s artistic activity. The collaboration will launch officially during London Gallery Weekend (LGW, 5-7 June) with a series of talks and events on Friday 5 June. The initiative will then run events such as artist talks, breakfast tours, late openings and BBQs throughout the year.

The LGW events on 5 June will begin at 12pm at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation with a talk about the exhibition Collectivism, which brings together artist collectives, before moving to The Showroom for a 1pm tour of Mandy El-Sayegh's mural This is a Sign: Notes on Assembly with the director Gabriela Salgado and Renton’s introduction to Slits are Girls by Ângela Ferreira. At 2pm, Carolina Aguirre will give a musical/spoken word performance at Palmer Gallery, followed by Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska in conversation with Rosie Cooper, the director of Wysing Arts Centre, at Lisson at 3pm, finishing with private view of Thomas Müller’s exhibition Metaxy and BBQ at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art from 5-9pm.

Read the full article by Anna Brady for The Art Newspaper here.

Image: Ângela Ferreira's Slits are Girls installation at The Showroom, Photo: Cesare De Giglio