Around Town

Do you agree? Tell us your Around Town hits and misses of 2006

January
The Thames whale
Thousands of people spent a couple of days obsessively whale-watching when a five-metre bottlenose whale swam up the Thames to Battersea and got stuck near Albert Bridge. Despite a £100,000 rescue operation, the story did not have a happy ending. The whale’s skeleton wound up at the Natural History Museum.

February
Unquiet Thames
Photographer Crispin Hughes’ 360-degree pictures of the hinterlands beneath London’s bustling bridges were exhibited at the Museum in Docklands. Strikingly beautiful, the unsettling images brought out all the menace of the temporary spaces that appear twice a day when the tide goes out, then yield once more to the water. Feature continues

March
The Davis Alpine House
The first new glasshouse at Kew for 20 years is technologically sophisticated and visually striking – but we thought it would be bigger.

April
Jenny Holzer light projections
For the Barbican’s Samuel Beckett Centenary Festival, artist Jenny Holzer – working in London for the first time – projected Beckett’ poetry on to the Barbican, City Hall, Somerset House, St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden and Senate House at UCL.

May
‘The Sultan’s Elephant’
This magnificent four-day promenade performance from French company Royal de Luxe saw a wooden elephant the height of a three-storey building and a giant girl walk the streets of central London. It was big, beautiful and technically breathtaking. And it redefined that much-maligned art form, street theatre. If you missed it, you missed the undisputed highlight of 2006.

June
Trooping the Colour
Most of us get cards on our birthdays; the Queen gets a spectacular military parade – every year. This year was a bit special, though, as she did turn 80 – along with Beryl Cook, Fidel Castro and Winnie the Pooh. Marilyn Monroe would have been 80 in 2006, and she got an exhibition: ‘Happy Birthday, Marilyn’ at the Atlas Gallery.