For Christmas last year I was given a book called Brutal London. It is a ubiquitous publication, seemingly present in all gift shops and museum bookstores. Its presence is illustrative of a vogue for the brutal, a fascination with the grey “carbuncles” located in towns and cities across Britain. At the back of the book are paper nets which the reader can use to reconstruct, in miniature form, recognisable concrete landmarks such as Southbank’s National Theatre and the Barbica

Vanessa Bell 1879–1961, Design for Omega Workshops Fabric, 1913, Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper, Image: 53.3 × 40.7 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. 3353 - B1992.14.2© The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett. Some artists risk being decontextualized and viewed as singular geniuses that created art in a social and cultural vacuum. Vanessa Bell is not one of those artists. In fact, Bell’s context is so continuously discussed that

Illustration by Ellen Charlesworth To pip One of the reasons of my moving to the UK five years ago was to explore the British side of my identity. Having inherited a British passport from my dad, born in London fifty years ago, I did not feel that my upbringing in Paris was particularly British. Nor that my dad was British, to be honest. As part of a family made of first generation and second generation immigrants, we both lived most of our lives in a Parisian social sphere w