How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured, here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

From Virginia Woolf's 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure', 1927

Taking Virginia Woolf's text 'Street Haunting' about walking, observing and dissolving into the fabric of the city as a starting point, artists have been invited to exhibit in the garden of Mecklenburgh Square as part of the Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project. The location carries a quiet resonance, as Woolf herself lived in the square for a brief period during the Second World War.

Artists included can be seen to identify with the flaneur, attentive, wandering, alert to atmosphere and encounter – their works engage with psychogeography, the politics of public space and the shifting dynamics of communal life. Each artist responds to the urban condition, its rhythms, tensions and fleeting illuminations, in a distinct way.

Co-curated by Clair Joy and Clare Stent.