Early next month the mayor of London will announce the winner of the competition to find the designers of the Illuminated River, a £20m project to create a permanent “world-class lighting scheme” over 17 bridges in central London. The Kinks’ “dirty old river”, TS Eliot’s “sweet Thames”, the waterway rhapsodised by Wordsworth and given a Venetian sparkle by Canaletto, old Father Thames himself will, depending on the choice of winner, be arrayed with patterns like a Hawaiian shirt, or disco hues of orange and purple, or lights that switch on and off in response to its tidal pulse, as if he were wearing the world’s biggest Fitbit. Described as a “public realm commission on an unprecedented scale”, the Illuminated River aims to fix a problem you might not have known existed, which is that the Thames is “a ribbon of darkness… at odds with the ambition to make London a 24-hour city”. It is promised that the cost will be almost entirely borne by private benefactors, with £5m pledged from the Rothschild Foundation and £5m from the Arcadia Fund, which was set up by the philanthropist Lisbet Rausing. A quite dazzling array of creative and eminent people are involved –… Read full this story
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