HOWZAT

Then, as now, development characterised the city: London was home to a million people in 1800, making it the premier city in the Western world. Later, Walter Bagehot, for one, found it dizzying: “London is like a newspaper,” he said, “everything is there and everything is disconnected.”

It’s this impression of development and disconnection that is addressed in the second week of the show in an exhibition curated by the duo B+B entitled Real Estate, which brings together a series of artists’ projects that mourn what we have lost and attack the notion that art can spearhead regeneration. One project remembers the bustling 18th-century pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, a place for orchestras, fireworks, art and dancing. Once, in 1749, its music attracted an audience of 12,000, causing gridlock. Now, though, all the area seems to have is gridlock, and Real Estate has resurrected an event which first took place 10 years ago and involved 50 singers performing the songs of the composer-in-residence of the Gardens, Thomas Arne, to passing drivers.

In another project the artist Shezad Dawood will be restaging the assassination of Native American chief Crazy Horse at the Diorama Arts Centre — a site soon to be demolished to make way for offices.

London has always had its immigrants: the French Huguenots of the 17th century, the Jews of the 18th, the Chinese of the late 19th, but then they were outnumbered — today they are representative. That appears to be the message of the show’s penultimate week, entitled The Real Me. The title derives from a conference about identity politics that the ICA held in 1986, and through the art of figures such as Mona Hatoum, Sonia Boyce and Rasheed Araeen it remembers sights and experiences within the living memory of a new generation.

This isn’t about foreign influx, it’s about strange sights becoming ordinary — like the two sprucely dressed black men carrying exotic plants through the streets in Steve McQueen’s film Exodus. It is sights such as these that are some of the greatest rewards of life in the capital city.

• London in Six Easy Steps, ICA, SW1 (020-7930 3647), Aug 16 to Sept 25

  A BRUSH WITH THE PUB

  Colony Rooms, London
  And the French House, and the Coach and Horses, and Wheelers . . . Francis Bacon’s 1950s Soho set couldn’t stick to merely one venue

  Folies-Bergère, Paris
  To judge by Manet’s famous painting of 1882 it had (has?) some pretty miserable staff behind the bar, but the famous music hall is still in business

  Cedar Tavern, New York
  The haunt of Abstract Expressionists and many more. Jackson Pollock was barred for trashing the lavatory door

  Fitzroy Tavern, London
  Gave its name to the area of Fitzrovia, north of Soho, when it was a regular for Augustus John and Jacob Epstein in the 1930s

  The Sloop, St. Ives
  Barbara Hepworth and the St Ives group used this 14th-century harbour-front pub as their local
  

  LONDON’S PRIDE, HANDED DOWN

  Wenceslaus Holler
  The Prague-born draughtsman made his name in 17th-century London with his maps and panoramas. It is his views of the City before and after the Great Fire that tell us what old St Paul’s Cathedral looked like before Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt it

  Nigel Henderson
  A decade before David Bailey and Terence Donovan photographed fashionable life in the West End in the 1960s, Henderson, a collagist and photographer, was capturing the grittier realities of Bethnal Green, in the East

  London
  Although released in 1992, Patrick Keiller’s film is the best and most unlikely meditation on how the capital changed in the 1980s. Expect long pauses on bridges, discourses in shopping malls and trails after French poets in the capital

  Pissarro in Penge
  While the other Impressionists took to the Thames, Pissarro fled the Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s and moved his family to Norwood, in the southeast of the city. Situated on the cusp of city and country when Pissarro painted it, Penge railway station never looked so good

  Cries of London
  Poems and chants sung out by the pedlars who roamed the city’s streets for centuries, the cries began to be commemorated in cheap prints and woodcuts in the 17th century. Look out for them in junk shops — they still show up