London isn't the largest city in the world, nor the most populous, nor the most wealthy...but the most inspiring? One thing's for sure, it is the only city that could have produced Le Gun.
London is an important place for Le Gun — it's where we all met, live and work and it is a big influence on us. In our collaborative drawings and installations we like to imagine a parallel London called Legundon with a mythology and geography formed from the many establishments we have frequented together over the years. Characters like the late Soho jazz pirate and trout tickler George Melly feature prominently in the narrative of Legundon, along with the philosophies of Chinese Alan, the monosodium glutamate vendor around the corner from our studio on Mare street. His mantra — "politeness is happiness" — has long struck a chord with us. Here are are five of our favourite places in London town...
Abney park cemetery:
It's mysterious and banal. Left almost wild, many of its ancient statues and headstones are wearing away, disappearing into the ivy or into the earth. It's a popular cruising ground, also frequented by loners, policemen, weirdos, B movie directors and tripping teenagers, while crows look on from the creaking trees. Like any wooded area it's thick with the fertile smell of rot and decay. A great place in any weather. (Currently threatened to be overshadowed by a massive new development.)
Photograph by John Donges
Maggs Counterculture:
At the back of Maggs Bros Bookshop on Berkley Square is Carl Williams’ counterculture section... a treasure trove of rarities of Beat, subversion, extremism, psychedelia, the carnivalesque, the occult, erotica, surrealism, punk and the absurd by the likes of Timothy Leary, Guy Debord, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Aleister Crowley, Sex Pistols, RD Laing and Artaud. You'll find things here you never knew existed.
Photograph by Jade Alicia Angus
The Wellcome Collection:
The home of a crazy collection of artefacts assembled from across the globe by the anthropologist Henry Wellcome (1853-1936). This wunderkammer of curiosities contains a vast array of strange objects, from chastity belts to voodoo dolls to Japanese dildos to Peruvian mummies. This stuff was a big influence on the shamanic ambulance we made for the exhibition Memory Palace at the V&A museum last year.
Photograph by Wellcome Library, London
Royal Mail post box (at the intersection of Dean street and Old Compton street):
This is a very special and mystical place. It is rumoured to be the centre of the universe and where Soho's most powerful lay lines converge. It is thirty two steps to the French House from the box and was thirty seven steps to the Colony Room club. It is also the starting location of the story about Geoge Melly in Le Gun issue five.
Photograph by Le Gun
The French House:
A last bastion of eccentricity in a homogenised “Starbucks” London. Once the drinking hole of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and George Melly, its still a favourite petrol station for Soho's village of misfits. Out of work actors rub shoulders with poets, piss artists, posers and priests. A lovely place to drink some Breton cider in the afternoon and swap innuendos with Duane the barman when you should be doing something more constructive. Photograph by
Peter ClarkLead illustration by Le Gun
legun.co.uk