Ceci n'est pas un chat d'art

The catch-22

To go to private views you had to know where they were. To know where they were you had to know people. And to know people you had to go to private views.

That was the problem Jenny Judova ran into when she moved to London in 2013 with a history of art degree and no invitations. She spent weeks looking for a website, a zine, anything that listed gallery openings, and found nothing. So she started one: a Facebook page in the autumn, a blog by November. Every listing was free. The promise was simple. If you were looking for art and a free drink, we would tell you where to find them.

It grew faster than one person with a laptop could manage. Galleries began sending their openings in. FAD Magazine ran Jenny's picks every week. In June 2014 a Kickstarter to rebuild the site was funded in days, and that September the new site launched and Adrian Raudaschl joined as co-founder, to build everything that came after. At its largest the team was eleven people, nearly all volunteers.

More than a list

For a couple of years Art Map London tried to be everything a new artist in London might need. Free Spaces mapped the places you could show work without paying for the privilege. The Art Talks ran for three seasons. There was the Art Yellow Pages, a guide to approaching a gallery, and a book of interviews with the people who ran them. The aim was always the same: to make the art world less of a closed room.

In 2017 we rebuilt the site a third time and went back to the thing people used most, which was the listings. Adrian wrote it from scratch, mostly late at night, learning as he went: the form galleries used to send events in, the map, the Sunday email, and a long war with the bots. Every event came with a map, the nearest tube, and how many minutes it took to walk there. That is the site recreated here, and how it was built is a story of its own.

1. Autumn 2013Jenny Judova, newly arrived from Glasgow, starts a Facebook page listing London private views.
2. November 2013It becomes a blog. The tagline: "No one should struggle to find an art opening."
3. February 2014FAD Magazine starts running Jenny’s weekly pick of art events.
4. June 2014A Kickstarter to rebuild the site asks for £1,500 and raises £2,034 from 44 backers.
5. September 2014The new site launches and Adrian Raudaschl joins to build what comes next.
6. January 2015Free Spaces launches: a directory of places artists can show work without paying for it.
7. 2015 to 2016Three seasons of The Art Talks, the Art Yellow Pages, and a guide called How to Approach a Gallery.
8. August 2015Adrian’s first prototype of an event submission form. The picture upload doesn’t work.
9. 2017Adrian rebuilds the site from scratch. The third website, at artmap.london, goes back to the original job: listing what’s on.
10. October 2018Every listing gets its nearest tube and train, and the minutes on foot.
11. 2020The galleries shut, the listings dry up, and the site goes quiet.
12. February 2022Adrian gets the old code running one last time.
13. 2026Back online, as an archive.

What people said

More from the time:

• FAD Magazine: the weekly picks
• FAD Magazine: Exhibit your art for free in London
• Inspiring City: the search for free artist spaces
• Garageland Reviews: The Art Crowd
• Doggerland: Art Map London, artist-led project
• The 2014 Kickstarter
• The old About page, on the Wayback Machine

How it came back

The listings stopped in 2020, when the galleries closed their doors. The site limped on with nothing to show, and then the server went, and the database with it. For a few years artmap.london was a blank page.

In November 2026 we went looking for a backup and didn't find one. What we found instead was a forgotten cache folder on an old laptop, and inside it copies of 4,201 listings the site had once served. The images were still sitting in the storage bucket where galleries had uploaded them, years after anyone last looked. We pulled out everything we could and rebuilt the site around it.

It is not complete. About a third of the listings from 2017 onwards are gone, and almost everything from before that survives only in the Wayback Machine. The private view tag was lost, so we have marked private views where the listing itself says so, and we will have missed some.

Why bother

Because almost none of this is written down anywhere else. Museums keep records. Big galleries publish catalogues. But most of London's art life happens in small rooms for one night: a degree show, a pop-up in an empty shop, an artist-run space above a pub that lasted eighteen months. Of the 1,260 venues in this archive, 779 appear exactly once.

When those spaces close their websites go with them, and the listing a gallery assistant typed out on a Tuesday afternoon may be the only public trace that a show ever happened. Many of the artists here were at the start of something. Some of these were their first exhibitions.

The archive also happens to stop at a hinge. It runs through the last three years before the pandemic and the first months of it, when openings moved online and then stopped. It is a record of what an ordinary Thursday night in London's galleries looked like, right up to the point where there weren't any.

If you ran a gallery, showed work, or just came for the wine, we hope you find a night you remember. If you have photographs, flyers or stories from any of it, we would love to hear from you: leave them in the guestbook, or on the listing for the night itself.

Take a listing down, or just say hello

The words and pictures on each listing belong to whoever submitted them. If one is yours and you would rather it wasn't here, tell us which one and we will remove it, no questions asked. The same form works for corrections, photographs and stories.

Messages go to the two of us and nowhere else. We keep them only as long as it takes to deal with them.