London's Big Bang for 2011

Dulwich Picture Gallery leads the way for a masterful year ahead

The capital's major autumn art fairs may have been and gone, but there's no shortage of arty developments across London this month and looking ahead.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery, the first purpose-built public art gallery in England, has announced it will kick off the new year with The Big Bang, an open day on 9th January when entrance charges will be waived.

As well as a free viewing of what The Sunday Telegraph once labelled "the most beautiful small art gallery in the world", there will be numerous family activities, a falconry display, a concert given by local school children, and a culminating fireworks display.

But this day-long celebration isn't the only big bang making a noise at the much-loved south-east London gallery in 2011: every month a masterpiece from a major institution around the world will be on display to help mark the gallery's 200th anniversary.

That means you can get your fix of Velazquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt or Hockney flown in especially from revered collections such as the Prado in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Uffizi in Florence and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

It's a veritable coup for the DPG and a fitting way to celebrate its bicentenary. On top of all this, there are also exhibitions by the American Cy Twombly, Nicolas Poussin and Norman Rockwell scheduled for the New Year, while the Art Fund has also granted Dulwich its first permanent outdoor sculpture, Waking the Dog by Peter Randall-Page.

What's more, the 6,000 Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery will be invited to enter their own pieces of work in a spring exhibition along the lines of the annual summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, to be judged by art world experts.

Incidentally, the splendid neo-classical building which houses the Dulwich permanent collection was designed by the architect and art collector Sir John Soane - which leads me on nicely to the second part of this column.

Earlier this month, LondonTown was invited to take part on a whistle-stop tour of three major central London art galleries, including the delightfully eclectic collection of paintings, drawings and antiquities housed in Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Remarkably, it was my first trip to the deliciously overflowing museum - a place which could enthral and entertain for hours upon end. A return trip can't come too soon - preferably to one of the special candlelit openings that take place on the first Tuesday evening of each month.

The occasion for the Soane Museum summit was the release of the new London Painting Trail, in association with Moleskine, the renowned notebook maker.

The pocket-size notebook contains details, summaries and an illustrated picture guide for seven of London's finest art galleries: Apsley House, The Courtauld Gallery, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Collection, Wallace Collection and the Soane Museum.

As prized members of the press, we were given a succinct but highly informative guide around three of these museums, with a jaunt to the Courtauld and the National Portrait Gallery following our lunchtime rendez-vous at Sir John Soane's former house.

It has to be said that the little Moleskine notebooks are brilliant: the size of your palm, they contain Underground and street maps, tracing paper, ample room for notes, plus a four-page interactive guide for each of the museums, which includes advice on three great paintings (think Velazquez, Manet, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Hogarth…) to see at each gallery, plus factsheets and some tips for the immediate vicinity (such as where to grab a bite of a coffee).

Priced £12.50 (and available in bookshops or on the National Gallery's website), The Moleskine London Painting Trail notebooks make a great stocking filler - and one of my sisters will be very grateful come Christmas morning.

A towering preposition

The four chimneys of Battersea Power Station will be demolished and then rebuilt under the latest redevelopment plans approved by Wandsworth council. Put together by architect Rafael Vinoly, the £5.5 billion proposal will see the creation of 3,400 new homes and 330,000sq m of commercial space, including shops, offices, one of the largest ballrooms in London and a hotel. But the iconic chimneys are deemed beyond repair and so will have to be taken down and put back up in order to preserve the building's much-loved mark on the south London skyline. The work will take at least a decade according to early estimates.

Boris bigs up his new bus

The mayor of London has unveiled the latest mock-up of the New Bus for London - a red, slick double-decker with a rear open platform which harks back to the old, much-loved Routemaster buses of yesteryear. While critics have claimed the red bus and its £10m development costs are nothing but a vanity project, Boris Johnson is quick to praise its green credentials, stressing the new model would emit 40% less carbon dioxide than a regular double decker. Yet to be formally named, the bus is being developed for TfL by a company in Northern Ireland in partnership with the designer Thomas Heatherwick. The first working models should be on our streets by late 2011.

Protester in the firing line

An 18-year-old student has admitted throwing an empty fire extinguisher off the roof of Millbank tower during this months tuition fee riots at the Conservative Party headquarters in central London. The Southampton student admitted one charge of violent disorder, which carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison under the Public Order Act. Edward Woollard was one of more than 50 people arrested after protests got out of hand as dozens of people forced their way into the Thames-side complex of buildings in Pimlico.

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