Summer’s come early this year (well, for the moment anyway) and Londoners who can’t get away to the coast yet, are heading for the South Bank beach by The Thames to catch some rays.

As part of the Festival of Britain 60th anniversary celebrations, a ‘pop-up’ beach along with 14 beach huts, each customised by artists, have been installed to create 70 metres of urban seaside outside the Southbank Centre.

Fittingly, one of the artists involved, Heidi Wigmore, is also exhibiting her ‘Happy Holidays’ series of collages in one of the huts. The collages combine original images from 1960s’ Ladybird ‘Peter and Jane’ books of happiness and idyll by the seaside with those from a late 1880s Victorian Childrens Album more concerned with the overly-sentimental romance of poverty and suffering, where babies were little angels and died young.

As Wigmore explains: “The Victorian illustrations intrude darkly into the hermetically sealed world of Sixties’ idealism, but no-one notices, everybody is oblivious, caught up as they are in their ‘Happy Holidays.’”

To purchase Heidi’s book, ‘Happy Holidays’ click here

Click here for more stories about Life

Click here to follow Sabotage Times on Twitter

Click here to follow Sabotage Times on Facebook