The magic of mosaic: Beach huts and best friends in London.

“We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”

— Jimmy Carter

The plan had been the Tate Modern.

Jen and I, best friends since one fateful April day in the fourth grade, were on our way to the third instalment in our day of museum-hopping around London. Jen was in town for two nights, after a week in Rome and Florence with her mother and sister, and we had only one full day to take London by storm. No pressure, right?

Thankfully, she once spent a semester in Swansea, so it wasn’t her first time in London. One thing she hadn’t done yet, though, was to visit any of the city’s museums. With the weather in July feeling more like March, it seemed the perfect chance for Jen to fix that.

We’d already hit the British Museum and the National Gallery as we walked over the Golden Jubilee bridge to the Southbank. From the whirring and twirling of amusement park rides in the Udderbelly Festival, we could already tell our walk along the Southbank wouldn’t be a boring one, as the Center had been transformed for the summer to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain in 1951.

But we soon saw something else out of the ordinary: a long row of brightly colored beach huts more likely to be found in places like Brighton, Southwold, and Southend-on-Sea.

We then realized each of these huts along the Queen’s Walk had been designed by local artists and had a theme, whether it was “Postcards from the Sea,” “UK Coastal Hut,” or “Moonlit Serenade.” While I was paused in front of the “Literature of the Sea” display (big surprise, I know), I looked over at Jen at the hut next door. She motioned to me to come over–the look on her face was pure excitement.

“Check this out,” she said, pulling me around to the right side of the building.

The painted white hut had been decorated by Southbank Mosaics, a not-for-profit community enterprise whose motto is, “Transforming the public realm with colour, rhythm and artistic form”–an aim I can definitely get behind. While various mosaics had been hung on all of the hut’s exterior walls, what had most caught Jen’s attention was a piece of artwork recreating a map of central London. The Thames was the focal point, of course, but it also featured such landmarks as the London Eye, the OXO Tower, the Houses of Parliament, and even Elephant and Castle.

What I loved even more than the artwork itself was the story behind it–well, if not story, then the fact that in May of this year, artists and members of the community held a foreshore trip where they wandered down the beach and collected all of the bits of China pieces and other items that were to be used in the mosaic.

So not only was the Thames a central feature in the piece, but the mosaic itself had been crafted from items found along the river…a process too creatively organic for me not to love.

What goes around comes around, ay?