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Culture and Art Attractions
Experience a cultural revolution
Art and culture have continued to be an important part of the Park’s story with a legacy of events, immersive experiences, and commissions working with the local creative community and world-class artists.
The Park is home to a unique collection of artworks, nestled between inspiring architecture, instilling a sense of local pride and cultural ambition through world-class art. Curated specially to be experienced in the landscape, the 29 artworks rival many of the works showcased in galleries across London. Some are large and striking while others are hidden gems, but they are all inspired by the community, history and visitors from near and far. Follow the Art on the Park Trail and discover them all!
Throughout the year, huge cultural events take place on-site, such as the annual Great Get Together, which brings together entertainers, artists and cuisines in a celebration of the local community. London Stadium continues to host international superstars to perform on their tours, drawing in crowds from all over London and beyond! ABBA Voyage too has become a phenomenon, using world-class technology to propel classic disco tunes into a new realm.
East Bank
East Bank
East Bank is the UK’s newest cultural quarter at the heart of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. East Bank is a unique collaboration between cultural institutions, world leading universities and the people of the Olympic boroughs.
Comprising of BBC Music Studios; London College of Fashion, UAL; Sadler’s Wells East; UCL (University College London) and V&A East, East Bank is the place where everything happens – entertainment, inspiration and discovery – and is open to everyone who visits, lives and works in east London.
Read more about East BankWaterfront art
Waterfront art
Plus look out for new artwork on the waterfront space in front of East Bank.
AA Murakami, In Mountains Shadow, 2023
Wind shaped the landscape of east London. Heavy industry settled here, taking advantage of the eastward winds pushing toxic fumes to the outskirts, sparing other parts of the city from heavier pollution. Today, much of the industry has left, but the winds persist.
To manage strong currents between V&A East Museum and London College of Fashion, UAL, AA Murakami designed two overlapping sets of mesh screens. Their dramatic mountain-shaped contours and pigmentation take inspiration from Chinese landscape painting.
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Michael Landy, Lemon Meringue, 2024
Michael Landy celebrates traditional and newly invented Cockney rhyming slang phrases, in a series of fluorescent signs positioned across East Bank. Unique to east London, this vernacular form of speech replaces common words with a rhyming expression with each rhyming phrase marking a place, object, or activity in the landscape in a playful take on signposting. The artwork reflects the area’s rich and creative past, while acknowledging the fluid ways that language can evolve. This project also includes a handful of new terms that speak to more recent diasporic influences on this area of London.
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Lubna Chowdhary, ‘Temporal Trace’, 2023
Set into the ground of Waterfront Square, this artwork is inspired by the South Indian decorative tradition of Kolam. As a sign of welcome, people use rice flour to draw geometric patterns at the entrances of their homes each morning.
Imagining the public space facing V&A East Museum and London College of Fashion as a threshold, Lubna Chowdhary draws from this tradition to invite people in. Scaled to a human stride, the artwork is meant to be played and interacted with as people move across it. The work also takes inspiration from pattern-making activities happening across the East Bank site, including musical notation, textile design, and dance choreography.
Find out moreOpen! Channel! Flow!
Open! Channel! Flow!
Polly Morgan (b. 1980)
Concrete, fibreglass, paint, iridescent foils and auto-body lacquer
Taken from the name given to any conduit with a free surface, OPEN! CHANNEL! FLOW! consists of two triangles of furrowed concrete connected by painted, iridescent fibreglass casts of snakes that spill from the crevices and connect the two.
Through the use of materials commonly used in boatbuilding and nail decoration, Morgan uses modern technology to mimic nature at its most dazzling and obfuscatory. The snakes are moulded into their concrete trenches, with their scales reflecting light as rainbows.
The sculpture represents how we are all shaped and constrained by our environment: the refracted light is the energy, ebb and flow of ideas, and the serpentine forms embody all life; at points intertwining, repelling and jostling for position.
The First Plinth: Public Art Award and OPEN! CHANNEL! FLOW! is generously supported by the Mirisch and Lebenheim Charitable Foundation.
To learn more about the artist, scan the QR code or visit:
UCL East Art
UCL East Art
Trēow of Time, 2023
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
For their first permanent artwork, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy engaged in conversations with UCL academics and responded to the landscape surrounding the new UCL East campus. They have created a hyper-real installation inspired by 3D video gaming and their time spent between the natural and virtual worlds.
The work was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic. It reflects on this time of collective re-discovery of nature as a source of healing and wellbeing, whilst simultaneously highlighting inequalities that exist in access to green spaces.
The film was shot on location in Epping Forest, which once stretched down to Romford Road. Local people helped save the forest from destruction in the 1870s, preserving it for future generations. In the film, we follow Achiampong’s son (an east London resident) as he marvels at a huge, ancient oak tree. His presence deliberately challenges racist ideas about who belongs in the English countryside, reclaiming it as a space for everyone.
The artwork is a meditation on our relationship to nature: vital to our wellbeing but inevitably reduced by urban development. Yet, with the oak at its centre and vines wrapping its walls, it also hints at a different reclaiming, through the possibilities of rewilding.
Here's a sneak peek...
We recommend... The Line
The Line is a free public art walk between Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and The O2, following the waterways and the line of the Greenwich Meridian. Featuring an evolving programme of art installations, projects and events, The Line illuminates an inspiring landscape where everyone can explore art, nature and heritage for free.
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