Spotting members of the Royal Family on an ordinary London street may be unlikely, but this August visitors to King’s Cross can encounter the King and Queen there every day.
London-based visual artist Olga Regina is exhibiting her work An Unscheduled Royal Visit, 2026 at King’s Cross, as part of My Escape, an outdoor exhibition presented through a new partnership between Camden Council’s Culture team and King’s Cross.
Running from 10–30 August across Granary Square and King’s Boulevard, My Escape brings works by 35 members of the Camden Artist Network into one of London’s busiest public spaces, turning the area’s art benches into an open-air gallery.
Regina’s work is particularly at home there. An Unscheduled Royal Visit takes an ordinary London streetscape and quietly disrupts it: pink balloons drift through the city while the King and Queen stroll through the street among everyone else, apparently unnoticed.
An Unscheduled Royal Visit begins with Regina’s own photography of London. Rather than constructing an entirely fictional city, she works with places that already exist, using digital painting and image manipulation to introduce elements that belong to imagination rather than documentary reality.
In this work, a recognisable London street becomes the setting for a scene that is impossible and yet strangely plausible. Bright pink balloons float between the buildings, while the King and Queen appear at street level, walking side by side without security, ceremony or public commotion. They are not presented as distant figures of state, but almost as neighbours — absorbed into the ordinary rhythm of the city.
The contrast is deliberate. Regina retains the photographic texture of the real street while introducing hand-worked digital elements whose visual language is intentionally more playful and illustrative. Rather than disguising the intervention, she allows the real and imagined layers to remain visibly different.
“I took the original photograph myself, and almost as soon as I looked through the lens, I could see another story inside it. I imagined these pink balloons floating through the street and, somehow, it felt completely natural that the King and Queen should be walking there too. Not arriving for an official engagement, not surrounded by security – simply walking through London like everybody else,” says Olga Regina.
“That moment is very close to how I experience the city. I photograph something real, but my imagination immediately begins to interfere with it. I don’t want to replace London with fantasy; I want the two realities to exist together. The city remains recognisable, but suddenly something impossible belongs there.”
The imagined story behind the work goes further. Regina pictures an entirely casual encounter: on the way home from Waitrose, the narrator meets the royal couple, compliments the Queen on her dress, chats with her about Bulgakov, tells the King the time, and learns that they must hurry because William is coming to the Palace for lunch. Then everyone simply continues with their day.
There is an added twist in the work’s new setting. A scene originally imagining the King and Queen casually sharing the streets with Londoners is now doing exactly that: displayed in the middle of King’s Cross, surrounded every day by commuters, residents and visitors.
That collision between the everyday and the improbable sits at the heart of Regina’s practice.
An Unscheduled Royal Visit forms part of Regina’s ongoing Memory of a New City series, which explores London through photography, digital painting and image manipulation, transforming familiar urban landscapes into playful and sometimes surreal narratives.
The work has already had a London life of its own. Earlier this year it was exhibited as part of Regina’s solo exhibition, Memory of a New City, at Brady Arts Centre in Whitechapel in April 2026. The exhibition and Regina’s practice received coverage from London cultural and local media including Wharf Life, East End Review, Londonist, Love London Love Culture and London TV.
Its new setting, however, changes the relationship between the work and its audience. Instead of encountering the imaginary royal walk inside a gallery, thousands of commuters, residents and visitors can now come across it in the middle of their own journey through London.
For Regina, that is precisely the point.
“There is something wonderful about seeing the work outside a gallery. People are meeting friends, crossing the square, having coffee, going home – and suddenly the King and Queen are there too. The artwork becomes part of the same everyday London that inspired it in the first place,” says artist Olga Regina.
My Escape runs from 10–30 August 2026 at Granary Square and King’s Boulevard, King’s Cross, London N1C and is free to visit.
