Are running clubs the new art galleries?

Running clubs are the new dating apps, they’re the new night clubs, they’re the new clickbait content stream for digital media platforms. But could they also be the new art galleries? Think about it: a chance to flex your adductors and your aesthetics…

I thought I’d test this idea out by running The Line, London’s first dedicated public art trail. Founded in 2015, the eight-kilometre route runs north to south, roughly following the Greenwich meridian, through the boroughs of Newham, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich, snaking through the waterways of this area of former docklands and canals, connecting the Olympic Park to the O2 arena on the Greenwich Peninsula. Along the way are 24 public artworks, a mixture of loans and commissions ranging from sculpture to sound installations.

One problem: I’m not a runner. I’m only on week 4 of my Couch to 5K, plus, I promised my editors that I’d publish my Strava stats. So, no pressure…

It’s an overcast July morning when I arrive at the start point in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford. Before 2012, this was an area of railway yards. Now, its a kind of no man’s land of eerily quiet car parks and countless security bollards, overlooked by the ArcelorMittal Orbit, AKA Boris’ Erection. This supersized sculpture and observation tower is the first artwork on The Line. It was designed by Anish Kapoor in 2009, it’s an ugly tangle of steel, a monument to Olympian hubris. I’m reminded of the French author Guy de Maupassant who said he dined at the Eiffel Tower every day, as it was the only place in Paris where he couldn’t see the damn thing. Snaking down the tower is a Carsten Höller slide. I was hoping to have a go on it, but it’s closed until 2025. So far, so good.

I pick up the pace and pass the first of five installations featuring the work of Madge Gill, a self-taught artist who lived in Newham in the early Twentieth Century, and Somang Lee’s “site specific” nature illustrations.

I cross Stratford High Street and join the path that follows the Three Mills Wall River. Along the path it’s all brick walls, overgrown buddleias and houseboats. Over the water it’s post-industrial, post-GFC businesses: bars, creative studios and… oh dear, Ron Haselden’s LED light installation Diver (2012), isn’t even switched on. Instead, I admire the local graffiti.

A few minutes later, I reach the former gin distillery on Three Mills Island where there’s a second Madge Gill as well as a weathervane by Virginia Overton. It’s shaped like a juniper tree. Get it? It’s a four-way reference to juniper being the main flavouring of gin, the red juniper’s Latin name, Juniperus virginiana, the artist’s name Virginia, and the tree’s prevalence around the American artist’s family home in Tennessee.

I stop briefly on the thin strip of land that separates the Lee Navigation and Three Mills River. There’s a cluster of thin steel poles topped with life-size bronze birds. It’s Tracey Emin’s A Moment Without You (2017). I don’t usually go in for Emins, but I really appreciate this work: it’s a little industrial and a little whimsical. I like to think of the birds as shitting on tradition.

Under low steel bridges, between houseboats. I take a hairpin turn, climb the stairs to Twelvetrees Crescent and drop back down to the path by Bow Creek, the tidal estuary of the River Lea. The water’s low, exposing the thick mud. The air’s full of the noise of demolition and construction and the whine of insects. There’s a rapid succession of works on this stretch: at the end of a row of young trees, an Eva Rothschild, Living Spring (2017), which looks exactly like a lopped-off branch of her larger installation at Kings Cross, My World and Your World (2020); 38 paving slabs by Simon Faithful which illustrate his journey following the Greenwich Meridian south from London to Ghana.

I’m stopped in my tracks by Abigail Fallis’ DNA DL90 (2003), a double helix of shopping trolleys. It looks like they’ve been dredged from the river and stacked up. Actually, it was commissioned in the early 2000s by a supermarket chain. You wouldn’t expect it to age well, but the presence of an Amazon warehouse next to it has given it a new lease of life. Helen Cammock’s installation On WindTides (2024) doesn’t stop me, but it does set my mind going. The work is a single sentence, “we fold ourselves across the tides, from silt to land, sometimes we live as wind blown sand,” cut out of sheet metal and mounted on the sides of the 60-metre cable bridge crossing Bow Creek.

Here’s one problem I’ve found: there is a lot of “low-intervention” art on this stretch of The Line. Art that doesn’t stand out and shout, but settles into the landscape. Some of the works are so subtle that between checking the online map, working the GoPro and trying to keep up a good cadence, I run straight past them and have to double back. But it’s not entirely my fault. Low intervention works like these are a reaction to the extensive demolition and development going on all over the city, and especially here in East London, but is it the right reaction? Should art be secondary to architecture?

In a couple of hundred metres The Line peels away from the river and into the collection of low-roofed buildings called Cody Dock, formerly part of the gasworks, now a community space of gardens and studios. It’s a small oasis of calm on an otherwise busy industrial estate. I’m around half way through the run now. I take a brief stop to refill my water bottles, grab a can from the local cafe and check out the most impactful Madge Gill I’ve seen so far, an illustration covering the side of a cable bridge over the creek. Gill was an unusual artist. The art historian Roger Cardinal who named the term “outsider art”, wrote of the “hallucinatory quality” of her “frenetic improvisations”. She worked in a range of media: drawing, writing, knitting, crochet-work, weaving, piano-playing. Her best-known works were ink drawings made on metres of calico cloth. She said she was guided to make her works by a spirit she named Myrninerest.

At this point, the map recommends taking the DLR from Star Lane down to Royal Victoria station. Instead, I stay on the road, heading around two kilometres south along the narrow pavement of Silvertown Way. It’s a slog, part of me wishes I’d taken the train. I keep myself motivated by looking around for sights that could be artworks. I spot a lorry mounted on the roof of a skip rental warehouse. An innovative use of found materials and a comment on consumerism… a literal example of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s ‘decorated shed’ architecture… I love it. Down the road, at the junction with Newham Way, I pass roadworks clearly made in homage to Anselm Kiefer’s Finnegans Wake and Walter De Maria’s Earth Room.

I rejoin The Line at the Royal Victoria Docks, here it kind of loses its way.  Larry Achiampong’s flag, What I Hear I Keep, is nowhere to be seen. It turns out it’s “undergoing maintenance.” There’s yet another set of works by Madge Gill, this time they’re simply printed on boards. And while Yinka Ilori’s monumental chair sculptures brighten up the drab, gunmetal grey new builds and dual carriageways, I can’t work out which of the chairs is supposed to represent “happiness” and which is supposed to represent “pride”. Rather, they both seem to be mocking my sore feet. One work that really does work here is Laura Ford’s life-size sculpture of a boy-duck hybrid mounted on a pontoon in the dock. It gets a laugh from me, and I realise that’s something that’s been lacking so far: humour.

The Line now jumps over the river Thames via the bridge-to-nowhere that is the IFS Cloud Cable Car. I board, queue up Larry Achiampong’s accompanying audio work Sanko-time on my phone, and admire the views.

South of the river, the final 1.4km stretch follows the Thames Path walking and cycling route that circles around The O2. Here, the artists have taken a more-is-more approach to public art. It’s a marked difference to the works north of the river. Take Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud (2000). I’d seen this 30 metre-tall tangle of steel bars from the cable car. What I hadn’t noticed is that, when you see it from a certain angle, the apparently random mass of metal coalesces into a human figure. Or Gary Hume’s Liberty Grip (2008), another large, semi-figurative sculpture. Hume fitted together the arms of several shop mannequins, before supersizing the sculpture and casting it in bronze and adding a small dash of pink paint. It’s traditional stuff, with a twist.

Water, and objects reclaimed from it, are the basis of both Serge Attukwei Clottey’s Tribe and Tribulation (2022), a five-metre tall totemic column of reclaimed wood from Ghanaian fishing boats, and Richard Wilson’s A Slice of Reality (2000), a vertical cross-section of an old dredging ship, converted into a studio space, now abandoned.

Three hundred metres to go. I put all my remaining effort into it. After passing by Thomson & Craighead’s HERE (2013) – another artwork marking the Greenwich Meridian – I spot the finish line and behind it the unmistakable sight of Alex Chinneck’s upturned electricity pylon, A Bullet from a Shooting Star (2015).

The final few metres are the hardest. I drop down, I’m done. I’m exhausted. It’s all over. I take a moment to catch my breath and reflect on what I’ve learned.

1) I need to stop finding excuses and start training, while an average pace of 6:39/km over 9.39km isn’t bad, it isn’t going to win me any awards. 2) Using a GoPro while running is significantly harder than you expect. Especially when you’re trying to review artworks at the same time. 3) Maybe it was the time of day or maybe it was the overcast weather, but I was pretty much alone, it wasn’t the social art bonding experience I’d hoped for. 4) It was a good way of seeing a lot of art very quickly, however, even my average pace didn’t allow me much time to exercise my critical faculties. Essential for any kind of experience with art. I guess that’s why they tell you not to run in galleries… 5) I need some new running shoes, and blister plasters… my trainers are simply not up to scratch.

So, will I be organising art running clubs? Not personally, not yet. But never say never.

Strava stats

I promised, and I deliver.