Public Art on the Peninsula

First exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale,  this 60-foot bronze sculpture is part of Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable series and is one of six other of the artist’s sculptures available to view for free on the Peninsula. Salvaged from a mythical shipwreck, the monumental work is a copy of a smaller work excavated in the Tigris Valley in 1932. Or so they say…

Standing permanently on the foreshore of the Thames, this sculpture is a 1/8th slice of what was originally the Arco Trent, an ocean-going sand dredger. The vessel now serves as a “sound bite” of Greenwich’s proud maritime history and nods to the imagined line of the Meridian bisects the Peninsula.

“As I looked at the river, I was captured by Greenwich itself,” says Wilson of the sculpture. “The sweep of the river, Greenwich has this naval blaze of history, one understands Greenwich to be like the heart and centre of the teachings of navigation, because of all the schools and the shipyards that used to be there, but also because of the longitudinal division in our 24-hour clock. And I thought, My God! Here is a borough or a district that's been sliced or cut in half by time.”

Morag Myerscough’s patterned installation artwork 'Siblings' revitalises a pair of towering London Underground vent shafts that flank one end of The Tide. This captivating artwork elevates these mundane features of the built landscape into a polychromatic threshold to one of London’s largest collections of public art.

Turner Prize nominee Ian Davenport has reimagined the entrance stairwell of The Tide by creating an immersive river of colour. “You'll look at the work from 500m away," says Davenport, "and then as you get closer it should start to reveal different aspects of itself.” 

Marwan Kaabour’s installation draws inspiration from the Thames and the diverse communities of Greenwich Peninsula. Through multilingual text extracts exploring the fluidity of water, the artwork incorporates languages such as English, Greek, Polish, French, Farsi, Arabic, Yoruba, Mandarin and Turkish.

As the light bounces off the river, the piece responds. “It just jumps at you,” says Kaabour. “It really pops.”

A striking and imposing figure in an otherwise spartan corner of the Peninsula, Alex Chinneck’s upended pylon draws on the industrial history of the area, which used to be home to Europe’s largest gasworks and the city’s largest source of power generation.

“A lot of my work is about creating illusions using engineering and sculpture to – I guess perform magic tricks and shift perceptions of possibility,” says Chinneck. “It’s amazing how just taking familiarity, or something seemingly familiar, and inverting it or weaving this notion of surrealism into it, can bring it back to the forefront of our attention and make us look at it again.”

This monumental sculpture by British artist Antony Gormley is composed of a central group of 325 extended tetrahedral sections which are connected to over 3,500 of the same elements extending into space. Evoking the quantum age, and suggesting an unstable relation between energy and mass, it questions whether the body is produced by the field or the field by the body.

Abstractly referencing Edwardian, Victorian and Georgian architectural styles, 33 is a three-storey decorative folly focusing on the discourse of what home is and can be. The structure is a delicate timber studwork with floors finished in epoxy paint and stencilled with graphics that symbolise the flat room settings within the home.