Who has the Serpentine chosen to design their 2025 Pavilion, why are Rolls-Royce making nesting boxes for hazel dormice and how is the RHS Chelsea Flower Show honouring the Chelsea Pensioners at this year’s event? We answer all these burning questions in today’s Dawn Chorus.
Serpentine Pavilion designer unveiled
The Serpentine has named their summer 2025 Pavilion designer: Marina Tabassum, founder of her eponymous Dhaka-based architectural firm.
Tabassum’s proposal for the temporary structure, titled A Capsule in Time, features four wooden archways in an overall capsule shape (imagine your standard painkiller), on a north to south axis.
In an interview with Wallpaper*, the Bangladeshi architect described the commission as ‘interesting’ because ‘it is short lived and it is light-hearted, but, at the same time, you can bring up all different kinds of agendas that concern our time.’ The request from the Serpentine coincided with last year’s Students-People uprising, or July Revolution — a pro-democracy mass uprising in Bangladesh in which more than 200 people died. Wrapped in a light, semi-transparent material, designed to diffuse natural sunlight, the capsule will provide shelter, accommodate summer receptions of several hundred people and be a leading visitor attraction in its own right. In October, it will disappear.
Tabassum’s Pavilion is the 24th commission meted out by the London gallery. She follows in the footsteps of Frank Gehry (2008), Oscar Niemeyer (2003) and Zaha Hadid (2000).
Chelsea Pensioners in bloom
A RHS Chelsea garden, specially designed for the Pensioners whose home plays host to the whole event, is to be unveiled at the 2025 show.
RHS Gold Medal winner Dave Green is the green-fingered mastermind tasked with producing The London Square Chelsea Pensioners Garden. He has been working in close collaboration with the Pensioners themselves — drawing on their own stories and experiences, and the Hospital’s 330-year history as ‘a home for soldiers broken by age and war.’
The design will include a woodland space, designed for quiet contemplation, and a more colourful area, full of vibrant planting, to reflect the public life of the Pensioners and their trademark scarlet coats.
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is open May 20-24. This year promises to be extra special because Country Life will have a dedicated stand, offering you a chance to meet members of the team, chat all things garden and, of course, Country Life. Watch this space for more details…
Quiz of the day
1) Anosmia is the loss of which sense?
2) In which year was the Battle of Stamford Bridge?
3) A mansard roof has how many sides?
4) Marble is formed from which sedimentary rock?
5) Who wrote the play The Mousetrap?
Resistance!
A photography exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, Kent, explores how a century of political activism, from the Suffragettes to anti-Iraq War protests, has shaped life in the UK today.
Images, from a range of collections, include a scene from the Battle of Cable Street clashes (main image) and this tender image of two activists kissing whilst protesting Clause 28 — legislative designation for a series of British laws that prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities, including a ban on schools teaching the ‘acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’ The 1988 march was one of the largest LGBT demonstrations ever held in the UK.
‘Resistance’ runs from February 22 to June 1.
Of mice and men
Rolls-Royce apprentices have designed and handmade nest boxes for hazel dormice on the Goodwood estate, West Sussex, as part of the marque’s long-term environmental partnership. AEW
That’s all for today — we’ll be back tomorrow
Quiz answers
1) Smell
2) 1066
3) Four
4) Limestone
5) Agatha Christie
