Lisson Grove’s galleries are making a coordinated bid for attention
A new alliance of five London art spaces is trying to do something deceptively simple: make Lisson Grove impossible to overlook. Lisson Gallery, The Showroom, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, and Palmer Gallery have formed the Lisson Grove Galleries initiative, a year-round program designed to highlight the district’s artistic activity and the institutions that have long operated there.
The initiative will officially launch during London Gallery Weekend, which runs June 5-7, with a slate of events on Friday, June 5. The day begins at noon at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation with a talk tied to the exhibition “Collectivism,” which brings together artist collectives. At 1 p.m., visitors can join a tour of Mandy El-Sayegh’s mural “This is a Sign: Notes on Assembly” at The Showroom, followed by Andrew Renton’s introduction to “Slits are Girls” by Ângela Ferreira. Later in the afternoon, Carolina Aguirre will present a musical and spoken-word performance at Palmer Gallery, before Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska appear in conversation with Rosie Cooper, director of Wysing Arts Centre, at Lisson Gallery. The day concludes with a private view of Thomas Müller’s exhibition.
The collaboration is rooted in a district with a layered art history. Nicholas Logsdail founded Lisson Gallery in 1967 after finding a space in Bell Street, and The Showroom relocated to Lisson Grove from East London in 2009. Logsdail says the neighborhood has changed dramatically around it, from Chiltern Street to the south to the towers of Paddington Basin, while its own streets have remained comparatively intact.
That relative continuity has helped shape the area’s identity. Andrew Renton, professor of curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a local resident, describes Lisson Grove as a place that became a gallery destination almost in spite of itself. He argues that its slower pace of gentrification has given galleries a kind of conceptual freedom that would be harder to find farther west in central London.
Palmer Gallery, founded in 2024 by Lucas Palmer and Will Hainsworth in the former Palmer Tyre Company factory on Lisson Grove, adds another layer to that story. Palmer describes the area as a “higgledy-piggledy mix of people” and points to the concentration of studios, the Cockpit Theatre, and Alfie’s Antiques Market as evidence of a neighborhood with deep cultural density but limited visibility beyond its immediate community.
The new initiative is meant to change that, not by reinventing Lisson Grove, but by making its existing network more legible. If the launch succeeds, it may offer a model for how local institutions can build public recognition without losing the particular character that made the district matter in the first place.
