West London roars back

The style set is returning to the very neighbourhoods it once made a habit of spurning, finds Will Hosie

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LAST month saw Yinka Ilori unveil his latest public artwork: a collection of discarded relics excavated from the banks of the Thames. You won't find 100 Found Objects in London's Soho or St James's, the W1 neighbourhoods that have long had a chokehold on contemporary art, nor in one of the sleek, cutting-edge galleries near Old Street, EC2. No: Ilori’s work is at the heart of a new riverside development in a London postcode that’s long been synonymous with the red-trouser brigade. It is in Fulham, SW6, that the man behind the Colour Palace at Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21—who’s staged installations at Piccadilly Circus, designed bespoke exteriors for McLaren supercars and whose work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain—is beginning his next chapter.

The site of 100 Found Objects is Fulham Pier, a commercial development adjoining Fulham Football Club and a stone's throw from The River Café, W6, for a long time the only restaurant in the area deemed smart enough to warrant a visit by the style set. The next-door launch last June of its younger sister, The River Cafe Café, was a harbinger of things to come. A year on, fancy street vendors are down the road selling pizza and tacos, as restaurateur Adam Byatt, the man behind Clapham's only Michelin-starred establishment (Upstairs at Trinity, SW4), opens a riverside restaurant to rival Ruthie Rogers's institution.