Southbank Poster

Here is the new artwork to promote the Southbank. I like the Southbank. It has the Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall for concerts, it has the National Theatre and The Old Vic for theatrical productions, it has the Hayward Gallery for art, it has the British Film Institute and the giant iMax cinema and it has eateries and shops. It has the Big Wheel (aka The London Eye). It also has the River Thames and a stunning walk along the south bank of the river, majestic bridges and the beaches at low tide. It has the best railway station in the world in Blackfriars, built in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge that presents amazing views of Tower Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral when you get off the train. It has buskers and living statues and a magic roundabout and Udderbelly every summer and Jubilee Gardens where I took part in the Rain of Poems.

I served as a London Ambassador on the Southbank during the 2012 Olympics when London was pretty and its denizens all wore smiles. We had the sun and summer heat back then. And every winter it has an ice-rink, a Christmas market and lights in the trees and, when we're lucky, snow.

At the moment the views from the Southbank are rather splendid with the nights drawing in, walking east and seeing the lights of the skyscrapers in the City on the other side of the river. Even better to be in the middle of Waterloo Bridge and to look at the lights on both sides of the river. A magical sight.

As Ray Davies sings, 'Waterloo sunset's fine...'. And rather beautiful too, I would add.

Rain of Poems Video - Drop Poems Not Bombs

A couple of weeks ago I had the joyous experience of taking part in the Rain of Poems over the Southbank in London. I blogged about it here and said it was marvellous. I've just re-lived that experience watching this great, short video of the event. The excitement, the laughter, the competition is all in there, along with the simple joy of the event. I loved it.

The message is simple: drop poems, not bombs.

Rain Of Poems, London 2012

The Southbank in London is hosting the Poetry Parnassus, a celebration of poetry from around the world, as part of the London2012 Festival. The opening ceremony was as spectacular as it was fun - the Rain Of Poems over Jubilee Gardens.

The Rain of Poems was created by Chilean arts collective Casagrande and it pours poems over cities that have been bombed in previous military conflict. Poems are printed onto cardboard bookmarks in two languages (in this case English and Spanish) and thrown out of a helicopter at twilight. The event has previously been held in Berlin, Warsaw, Guernica, Dubrovnik and Santiago. According to the leaflet I was given, "This performance creates an alternative image of the past and is a gesture of remembrance as well as being a metaphor for the survival of cities and people." I thought it was marvellous.

It sounds quite serious but the whole event shrieked joy, followed by a fit of giggles. Jubilee Gardens was full of people of all ages at nine o'clock when the event was due to start and then at ten past nine a cheer rose as people spotted a helicopter approaching the Southbank and the cameras emerged, taking photos of the helicopter as it came closer and then the poems were thrown out into open air to float and flitter away in the breeze. It seemed to take an age for the poems to get close enough to see and then we could see individual bookmarks lit by the spotlights and people started getting really excited.

People were running here, there and everywhere to try to catch poems, big grins and laughter everywhere. Competitions started as to who could collect the most poems. People read their poems out to friends and strangers alike. People swapped poems and offered spare poems to others who didn't have any. It was a lovely atmosphere, there was daftness and happiness in the air, infectious smiles all over and everyone wanted a poem. Before the event started I'd wondered who would clean up all the paper afterwards. I needn't have worried, there was no chance of any stray poem being left behind.

Out of the 100,000 poems dropped from that helicopter I managed to secure four. One was mine by right (as in I reached it first), two were mine but were grabbed by others before my fingers could reach them but were then given to me as a mark of generosity, and one was from a security guard who collected so many he just handed them out. My poems are:

'Author's Prayer' by Ilya Kaminsky
'Cityscape' by Andrew McMillan
'In Search Of The Other' by Ashjan Al Hendi
'The History Of That Tree' by Dhabiya Khamis

If Shakespeare, Yeats, Byron or Marlowe had been there, I bet they'd have been running round grinning and trying to catch a poem or two. My abiding memory of the Rain of Poems will be joy and exhilaration.Well done Southbank and well done to Casagrande for a first class experience. I shall treasure my poems from the sky.