Frieze Sculptures in Regent's Park

On Sunday 20th October, four of us met for tea / coffee at Pret's near Great Portland Street Station ahead of the planned 11.00am start time.  Peter and Annick joined us in the park.  It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, it was pleasantly warm and the blue sky enhanced some of our photos.  

The Frieze Sculptures - an annual event that is London's largest free display of outdoor art - are dotted around The English Garden in Regent's Park; this year there are 15 works of art on display.  

As always, we visited every piece : an impressively tall black palm tree made from scrap steel and tyres discarded by the roadside, giant metallic claws forming an arch on the grass, angel wings surrounded by (and connected by hoses to) 4 pieces that looked like sci-fi toilets but were somehow linked to racing cars, a loincloth-wearing warrior figure with shells for nipples and a face on one side that looked like a child's drawing and a face on the other side engraved onto a piece of sheet metal, a blue door lying on the ground adjacent to a staircase going down into the soil, a beautiful oval honeycomb formed of cut-out metal pieces bolted together which apparently draws on cosmic geometry, hollow bronze arms (well, that's what they looked like to me) holding a lovely piece of white quartz, flat metal sheets carved with Indian figures and images which was beautiful - the more you looked at it, the more figures, heads and images you saw - an arched, weathered corrugated iron 'worm' emerging from and going back into the ground (which Trevor gamely managed to mimic) and three tall 3D printed columns of differing styles with one looking very Aztec and another having shiny stones glued on to it.  We also followed the instructions on the plinths, embedded in the ground, of three linked pieces and posed as 'Possibilities for a Sculpture', so all six of us can claim to be walking pieces of art now.  

We spent about an hour and a half looking at all the sculptures, critiquing and admiring the different pieces. Similar to last year, the descriptions were mostly intelligible, with no long, multi-syllable words requiring a Google search to understand, although I'm not convinced "humanity's yearning for wholeness and the power - and the fragility - of collective ideals" applies to us all.  

Continuing with a walk through the rose garden and around the boating lake, most of us went to the Wetherspoons pub by Baker Street Station for a leisurely lunch before heading to the tube station. 

Jill S, 20th September 2026