Following her recent national recognition as Landscape Winner in the Visual Artists Association, Artist of the Year Awards 2025 for her painting The Dungenesser, London artist, curator, and historian Jane Palm-Gold announces a major exhibition and an illustrated historical talk as part of the Bloomsbury Festival 2025.
Palm-Gold, a long-term resident of St Giles, London, continues to explore the hidden histories and cultural undercurrents of the city through her art. Her award-winning work The Dungenesser formed part of her acclaimed 2024 exhibition Derek Jarman: From Soho to the Fifth Continent (Farsight Gallery, London and Rye Arts Festival), a five-year research and painting project inspired by the artist and filmmaker’s life between London and Dungeness.
“I’m beyond thrilled that The Dungenesser has won Best Landscape,” says Palm-Gold. “That exhibition was a real labour of love — five years of research and a collection of new paintings that presented Jarman’s life in London and Dungeness, gave me so much personal enrichment. To now share new paintings at the Bloomsbury Festival is further public acknowledgement of my work – it’s been quite a year!”
Bloomsbury Festival 2025 Programme
London’s Underworld Unearthed: The Secret Life of the Rookery
16 October – 18 December 2025 Free Entry
Camden Archives & Local Studies Centre, Holborn Library, 2nd Floor, Theobald Road, WC1X 8NW
bloomsburyfestival.org.uk/events/londons-underworld-unearthed
This immersive exhibition combines art, archaeology, and historical storytelling to uncover the lost world of St Giles — once home to London’s most infamous slum and the setting for William Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1751). Artist Jane Palm-Gold draws striking parallels between the social unrest of the 18th century and the urban challenges of today, creating a layered psychogeography that is both captivating and unsettling.
Building on Palm-Gold’s acclaimed 2011 exhibition, London’s Underworld Unearthed revisits Hogarth’s squalid and riotous St Giles — a pit of poverty, vice, and degradation that shocked Georgian society. Yet Palm-Gold finds uncanny echoes between that historic parish and the modern West End, which is still shadowed by addiction and antisocial behaviour.
Featuring artefacts from Jane Palm-Gold’s personal collection presented alongside six years of research and paintings, the exhibition offers a vivid portrait of life in the old Rookery. Through her works, Palm-Gold juxtaposes the 18th-century gin craze with today’s drug epidemic, weaving a complex and evocative exploration of social decay, resilience, and renewal.
The Song of St Giles – Illustrated Talk & Performance
14 October 2025, 7:00–8:15pm
Bloomsbury Festival / Holborn Library
Free event
bloomsburyfestival.org.uk/events/the-song-of-st-giles
In this illustrated talk, Palm-Gold brings to life the history of St Giles’ notorious Rookery and Seven Dials — 18th- and 19th-century hotbeds of poverty, creativity, and social change. She is joined by singer Vivien Ellis, who performs original broadside ballads once sold on the streets of Seven Dials the “social media” of their time — giving voice to the lives and loves of London’s working poor.
The exhibition, the talk and performance are supported by the Lottery Heritage Fund.
London’s Underworld Unearthed: The Secret Life of the Rookery is a featured exhibition of the VAA’s Open Spaces 2025 Global Art Trail in Everyday Spaces programme, launched October 11th 2025.
Palm-Gold’s previous exhibition, Derek Jarman: From Soho to the Fifth Continent, paired her paintings, drawings and historical research with unseen portraits of Jarman by photographer Derek Ridgers — capturing his creative spirit in London and Dungeness in the late 1980s.
