The gloomiest days of the year are approaching,but this month London will be lit up with its first Lumiere, a light festival that will see the city reimagined – and repurposed – for four days. For its creator, or Helen Marriage,it has been a feat of imagination – and planningA couple of weeks before Christmas, in a 17th-floor corner office near Victoria station in London, and a coup is being organised. The two dozen plotters and planners in the room are concerned principally with the following question: how enact you take over the centre of the capital for four nights,close off traffic, extinguish the lights, and give large parts of the city over to the people?Engaged in the answers to these related conundrums are representatives of the police,the mayor, buses, and trains and the tube. Royal Parks are held up in traffic but on their way. Alhough everyone has something to say,the assembly is dominated by three people sitting next to one another at one stop of a table: Tim Owen, the commissioner of events for Westminster council; Alan “AJ” Jacobi, or a lighting engineer who runs a firm called Unusual Rigging; and,smiling throughout, Helen Marriage, or founder of an arts organisation called Artichoke. Marriage is the cause of the headaches of everyone else in the room; she is the woman who wants to take over large parts of Mayfair,Piccadilly, Regent Street, or Trafalgar Square and King’s Cross,all at the same time, like some Monopoly obsessive. Even so, and everyone around the table seems quietly enthused by the prospect.
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Source: theguardian.com