A psychic medium meets the ghosts haunting London’s art galleries

It’s 7 pm on an early September evening and our photographer, Delphino, and I are standing on the corner of Cork Street and Burlington Gardens waiting for Kim Alexis, psychic spiritual medium and healer. Together, the three of us are going to do something that, as far as we know, has never been done before: a psychic reading of Cork Street, to find out what it looks like from the other side.

Maybe there’s something in the unseasonably cold air but we know before she introduces herself that the woman walking towards us in the cream double-breasted suit and wide felt fedora is Alexis. She’s got a resumé to match the look: she spent her youth as a traveller, tour guide and DJ before discovering her psychic gift. She’s trained in hypnotherapy and past life regression, and her private clients have included model Kate Moss and actress Sadie Frost. Back in 2012, she was one of six psychics who took part in Jon Fawcett’s art installation EIR in the Tate Modern Tanks. Add to that the fact she’s the niece of the British abstract painter, Sandra Blow RA (a work of Blow’s hangs in Alexis’s healing studio today) and you’ll see her credentials are impeccable.

Beyond episodes of Most Haunted I’m not exactly au fait with the work of psychics and mediums, so Alexis takes me through the basics. She explains that some people are psychic; they can read the auras of others and predict the future. A smaller number of them are spiritual mediums, able to make contact with those who have passed on. She’s kind of like a human radio receiver, she needs to tune into both the vibrations of your subject and the spirits beyond.

Alexis admits that a busy London street is an unusual setting for a reading. Usually she works from home – a quiet, calming environment – face to face with her clients, with the aim of contacting one specific spirit, often that of a close relative, and passing on a message. Here, amongst traffic, roadworks and chatter from pubs and restaurants, she can’t promise anything. She never researches her subjects ahead of readings. She prefers to maintain a blank canvas, “pun intended,” she laughs. Already, she says, she’s tuning into me more than the surroundings. So I shut up and let her work her magic.

We take a turn of the street, south to north, up to the junction of Clifford Street, and across the road to Sam Fogg. All the time, Delphino is circling around us, shooting on his night vision camera.

Occasionally, Alexis pauses to place her hands on windows and takes a good look at the interior of each gallery, getting a sense of the building and the people that may have passed through it. She points out a few details that, despite visiting the street many times, I’d never noticed. I ask her if it’s possible to make contact with individuals via artworks? It is, she says, but it’s difficult. I notice that whenever she does begin to make a connection, her eyes flutter, her hand waves and her head nods.

Right now, the connection is patchy. She’s only getting a general sense of the streets, no specific people have made themselves known. She stands, staring upwards at the buildings, and sets a scene, describing the busy, hurried movement of people through the streets. It might be some time in the late 18th, perhaps the early 19th century, she can’t be sure, but she sees women wearing long dresses, corsets and there are coaches and horses. Most of all, she says confidently, there’s a sense that the people here had something to prove.

We wheel around and begin to head down the other side of the street. It’s getting dark now and Alexis is getting into the flow. Pretty soon, she feels the presence of a young woman: wealthy, yet supportive of others, a person who started small but rose to greatness, and, specifically, someone with a history of mining and industry in their family. Mining? Alexis is certain about that, the woman was connected to mining, and she walked this street, exactly where we’re standing. I’ll be honest, I don’t get where she’s going with this. But I decide not to question it.

Soon, Alexis feels a buzz of strange activity in the street: “I’m thinking about being locked up… closed down, shut down… disrepair. I feel like no one came here for a very long time, because it was in need of refurbishing, because there was something very old here. Before we make it, we renew it… history repeats itself. We go over and over and over… things change and renew and rebuild and restart, and this is now in a new phase of growth here.” My thoughts turn to the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936. The show, held along and around Cork Street, caused a storm. Just a few years later, the street was almost abandoned when German bombs fell on London. We spot a spatter of repairs on an old stone facade, signs of bomb damage?

Outside Stephen Friedman Gallery, Alexis says that the name “sticks out” for her. “I feel… I don’t know, but I feel like this person’s mother was an art collector and he gained a lot of knowledge through her.” Later, I look up Friedman’s biography and find out that his mother was in fact an antiques dealer. A few doors down, at Frieze’s No. 9 Cork Street, an evil eye hangs above the lift doors, opposite the entrance – it has to be a coincidence.

We pass the entrance to the mews and Delphino asks if he could photograph Alexis in the alleyway – the narrow passageway and tiles would look amazing on his night vision camera. But Alexis is uneasy, the energy there isn’t good, and when you’re trying to contact spirits, you’re vulnerable.

“Normally you’re just kind of closed, grounded. What we’re doing now is I’m opening myself up to anything that comes along. I could be picking up people who’ve been murdered. I could be picking up people who died in traumatic experiences. I could be picking up on robbers. If I feel that, I can actually continue to take that energy home with me, and then I have to work through releasing, clearing that energy, which could take me all night.”

Something seems to catch her attention. She turns and makes a beeline back to the low, black painted Georgian building that occupies 19 and 20. This is a rare survivor of early Cork Street, dating back to 1816. A former office space, later a silk and wool merchants, now its upper floors are occupied by Redfern Gallery. Until recently, it was also the location of Mayor Gallery and Browse & Darby. For Alexis, the feeling is much stronger this time: “Argued, argued, people here argued… never saw eye to eye.” She repeats that phrase again and again, becoming more sure of it each time. “That’s why this building is the way it is, they never saw eye to eye. There’s been upheaval here. This gallery has been up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down…”

Alexis can’t pinpoint which of the galleries that occupied the building may be giving off these vibes. She’s interested in Mayor Gallery, which, until its recent move to nearby Bury Street, was the street’s oldest gallery, founded in 1925. But I wonder if it’s Redfern Gallery, which was set up in 1923 as an artist cooperative, and moved to 20 Cork Street in 1936. It was the first gallery to show the work of both Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and between 1941-45, housed Matisse’s Red Studio. That’s a story of movement and upheaval, and as any artist who’s worked in a cooperative knows, there can be a lot of disagreement.

Back at the corner of Burlington Gardens, Alexis feels a strong musical connection. The word ‘concert’ keeps coming to her. I suggest it’s the spirit of Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser: music and art came together in the glam, swinging sixties star dealer, who supported many British Pop artists such as Peter Blake, Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton and who partied with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In 1983, Fraser opened a gallery on Cork Street, but it was a brief spark in the history of the street. Just two years later, Fraser, then dying of AIDS, sold the space to Victoria Miro, telling her “you’ll never make contemporary art happen in this country.” There’s also a direct local link to the Beatles; they played their infamous final concert on the roof of their offices at 3 Savile Row, easily within earshot of Cork Street.

Alexis brings the reading to a close, but I still have a few questions for her. I can’t get that young woman she mentioned earlier out of my mind: her journey from small beginnings to great wealth and social status is a tale as old as time, but it seems strikingly similar to one of Cork Street’s most famous residents. I ask Alexis, could it be Peggy Guggenheim, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, the heir to a mining fortune who died in the sinking of the Titanic? In January 1938, Guggenheim opened her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, at 30 Cork Street. Its early exhibitions featured the work of Jean Cocteau (curated by Marcel Duchamp), Wassily Kandinsky and Yves Tanguy. It was a cultural, but not commercial, success; Guggenheim Jeune closed just 18 months later, but that brief foray into the art market marked the start of her life of collecting and supporting the arts.

Alexis, meanwhile, is still thinking about Sam Fogg gallery. I offer one explanation: it was a conversation at Plaster HQ about the gallery’s medieval art that first led to the idea of contacting Alexis. Perhaps she was picking up on the trace of that conversation? I can’t see why else it would have seemed so important to her.

Look, I’m a natural sceptic. When I hear one thing I think of the opposite. The books on my shelves are histories not poetry. I want to get to the bottom of something. But I’m not closed-minded. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that if you want to understand art, you have to learn to open your mind and be willing to see the world in a new way. History shows that – most people – can’t see the future. One day, the impossible may be possible: a diving suit poetry recital in London, contemporary art succeeding in this country, a psychic vision on Cork Street…