The artists' work Nanoq: flat out and bluesome is 'a survey of British taxidermic polar bears 2001-04'. The Horniman Museum website is rather reticent on the exhibit (apart for the forlorn appeal for details of its own stuffed polar bear, 'part of the original 1901 display (aquired at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington)... [and] sold in 1948 to a Mr T Allen, a dealer in New Cross.' That exhibition also spawned the Jaipur Gate, now restored in Hove). Nanoq culminated in this impressive exhibition on Spike Island, bringing ten of the bears together in one industrial space. It is a devastatingly sad installation, 'the title references the melancholy that these majestic creatures, taken from their natural habitats, evoke in the viewer'. One of the bears sits in a room belonging to Lord Puttnam (enlarge).

(Not related at all to Simon Patterson's The Great Bear (1992), arguably the first tube line 'mash-up', the kind of thing TFL now gets rather glumly legalistic about. Luckily there's a mirror site of the silly tube maps right here. We like the Motorway Map of England, Scotland and Wales. The same cartographer has also created the Monopoly Map, a 'geographically accurate map of the elements of standard London Monopoly').

Strike one for architect's rights; that tearing noise is the sound of contracts with expensive prima donna architects being ripped up across Germany / Purge/glut, a weblog / Ifelse, a weblog / Leisure and the City (Part 2) at Art & Architecture) / taxidermy on flickr / Dining habits around the globe, photographs.


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