An immersive encounter with the hidden, haunted and half-noticed spaces of the city

London reveals itself most powerfully not in its postcard views, but in the overlooked spaces we pass through without really seeing: the thresholds, tunnels, edges and accidental theatres of the city.

In the heart of London’s oldest district, beside one of the City’s most iconic civic buildings, Guildhall Art Gallery remains oddly under-appreciated. The Guildhall itself is richly worth visiting, but the gallery beside it deserves far more attention than it often receives.

I have returned to it many times over the years, partly because I am often in a part of London I love, and partly because I make regular use of the excellent Guildhall Library. Its collection of London-related resources — books, pamphlets, artefacts and more — is, quite simply, fantastic.

The gallery itself is remarkable. In its basement lie the remains of London’s Roman amphitheatre, where, on my recent visit, there was a particularly interesting display. Above this subterranean survival, the gallery holds the Guildhall’s own strong collection of exceptional paintings of London by a wide range of artists. That alone makes it worth seeking out.

The particular draw that took me there a few weeks ago, however, was an extraordinary exhibition by the painter Jock McFadyen, presented alongside a soundscape by the multitalented musician and sound artist Jem Finer. Many will recognise Finer’s name as a founding member of The Pogues, one of the best bands ever to come out of London. Since then, he has pursued a series of fascinating sound-based projects, including Longplayer, a work designed to unfold over a thousand years.

McFadyen’s paintings are concerned with London’s liminal spaces: the places we overlook, the in-between zones we pass through, and the landscapes we rarely admit into our imaginative idea of the city. Some are recognisable; others hover at the edge of illusion, becoming almost imaginary without ever losing their urban specificity.

As soon as I walked into the gallery, I understood what McFadyen was doing. I knew these places. The paintings seemed to address me directly: We’ve been here, haven’t we? And the answer was yes — so many times. For all the times I have drifted around Soho, lounged around Tower Bridge, meandered along the South Bank and luxuriated in the piazza at Somerset House, I have also found myself, far more often, in these marginal, transitional, half-seen spaces.

Usually, these are places one passes through on the way somewhere else. In McFadyen’s paintings, however, they become places to enter, inhabit and remain in. Perhaps you cannot get out; perhaps you do not want to. Perhaps they are so deeply embedded in the psyche that they have been there all along.

As above, so below.

The paintings fall into two broad categories: those of the London Underground and those of the city above ground. Both registers are instantly recognisable to Londoners, and to anyone who visits the city with sufficient frequency to know that London is as much a system of passages, delays and thresholds as it is a collection of monuments.

The London Underground paintings depict stations and spaces I know very well. McFadyen captures the patina of age and the layers of time that accumulate in these places: the worn surfaces, the institutional colours, the slightly theatrical gloom. Again, they are places of transition. We pass through them, in and out and beyond, often without noticing very much at all. Yet if you travel through them often enough, the details begin to insist on themselves.

Looking at these paintings made me think about how much time I have spent underground. It depends on where I am living or staying: sometimes I am rarely near a Tube station; at other times, I find myself travelling every day. Either way, the Underground becomes part of my physical and imaginative life, a geography beneath the geography.

McFadyen’s sense of light, shade and colour creates an atmosphere of temperature and texture. We can feel the fall of day into evening, smell the marshes, and recognise the slightly gritty, unpleasant smell at the edges of the Underground, close to the tunnels, where something invisible (and possibly nasty) seems to lie just beyond the field of vision.

Without sounding too hyperbolic, I have to say that this is painting at its finest. I loved it. McFadyen is, I think, a master painter — probably one of the best in the UK today. I do not yet know as much about his work as I would like, but this exhibition has made me want to seek out much more of it, and to think more carefully about the urban spaces I usually treat as incidental.

I am delighted that Guildhall Art Gallery has mounted such a wonderful exhibition. It feels both rooted in London and expansive in its implications: a meditation on looking, movement, memory and the strange persistence of place. I will certainly be visiting again before it closes on 20 September 2026.

https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/events/underground-and-surface-exhibition