In Transit

Design, visual art, installations, performances and music will all be showcased at the event, now in its sixth year, which takes place in various venues across west London including  Chelsea, Portobello, Kensington – and all for free.

In a nod to the Olympics, many of the events will combine art with physical elements, including parkour running, cycling and walking.

One of the highlights looks set to be the Evolution installation by Edgar Mueller – a large-scale 3D illusion painting that will transform Portobello Square into an interactive artwork.

Over at Paddington Basin, artists Louise Ashcroft and Fritha Jenkins will re-activate the lost River Westbourne by staging a sculptural procession between Paddington Basin and the River Thames. Along the journey, participants will collect samples of water, adding them to a boat-like vessel traversing what would have once been the course of the river, reflecting the unseen Westbourne river which now runs deep underground in a subterranean pipe. At the journey’s end in Chelsea, the water will be ceremoniously poured over the beach into the Thames.

Game design studio Hide & Seek will be hosting games session featuring, we’re promised, ‘processions, performance, frantic bolting-about for the energetic, thinking games for the cerebral, and walking games for the more sedate.’

The aforementioned monkeys and lobsters form part of the surreal cast of marionette show Monkey Biz and a Portobello Road promenade event respectively; while our dragon arrives courtesy of street arts company Creature Encounter, which will be performing Epico the Dragon and Aurelious Jones at Powis Square.

Adding to the fantastical feel is the Mechanical Marvels event, which will see sculpture and street performance company Mechanical Menagerie showing off a specially designed caravan, housing, perhaps worryingly, ‘fire, smoke, bubbles, music’.

Those wishing to get creative themselves could do worse than to sign up for the free Drawabout event, whereby participants can travel Kings Road and invite willing, uninhibited strangers to pose for them as they draw the scenes in the area.

In Transit Festival of arts runs from 13 – 27 July at various west London venues. For more information visit www.rbkc.gov.uk/intransit