Zandra Rhodes has said she hopes to bring an area of central London “back to life” with colourful installations of her art.
The fashion and textiles designer has used bright colours and psychedelic designs, alongside pop-art drawings of flowers, arrows, swirls and thunderbolts, to decorate the streets of Seven Dials, the location of her first studio with Sylvia Ayton in 1965.
She told the PA news agency: “We were asked, ‘would you like to put some pattern and colour into Seven Dials?’ since when everything reopened you were faced with lots of beautiful little shops in a gorgeous area that had sadly been forced to close.
“We have put pattern flowers on different shops and they are going to put tables outside and there are lovely rainbow banners across the streets, so it’s going to look really lovely.
“You don’t want to see empty shops so they brighten up the day, so with luck if the designs are chirpy enough, you will get people saying, ‘hey, you should really go and see that because it’s a nice experience’.
“I think that we are in a very strange situation in the world of today, to make sure we try to keep some of life’s values going and areas ticking over, and with luck areas don’t then close down or disappear.”
She added: “Art has played such important roles really over the centuries, whether it’s building up morale, whether it’s putting joy into lives.
“I think that we don’t really know the full effects of Covid, we have been shut down and this is an area of really quaint small shops that one hopes will come to life again, and so I think we have got to think in terms of can we bring life back in some tiny way before it’s lost.
“We are trying to get back to normal but not quite, we know that we have got to be masked and we have got to be careful and I think we have got to do what we can to keep our spirits up because, whatever we say, we don’t really know what’s going to happen.
“Whatever we can do to make sure areas survive and we keep things going in some manner or other, I think that is how we have to look at everything.”
The artwork will be unveiled across the seven streets that make up Seven Dials.
There will also be live music performances every Saturday for seven weeks as part of Seven Dials Unplugged, which will support UK performers who have been heavily affected by Covid-19.
The area recently implemented timed road closures until the end of the year between 10am-6pm, seven days a week, to ensure safe social distancing, while Neal’s Yard is operating a one-way system.
