White Cube (Mason's Yard, St James's)

In the 1990s the contemporary art scene — previously lumped in with the Mayfair/Cork St-area establishment — shifted a few miles east to unfussy and olde-worlde Shoreditch/Hoxton. It was then, in 2000, that Jay Jopling redeveloped an old piano factory/publishing house at 48 Hoxton Square to expand his art empire showcasing major names in contemporary art, some of them notorious in the eyes of the tabloid-reading public, including Damien Hirst, Dinos & Jake Chapman and local Spitalfields residents Gilbert & George and Tracey Emin. Six years later Jopling opened this second (and equally impressive and similarly sterile-white) site at 25–26 Mason's Yard, off Duke Street in the posh and staid St James's area. Then in October 2011 Jopling went full-throttle with a massive, stylish and sexy third space in 144–52 Bermondsey St, in a former distribution warehouse for iconic listings magazine Radio Times. In October 2012 Jopling closed Hoxton Square, eclipsed by the two other locations. The Mason's Yard outlet — where in 2007 Hirst's £15 million diamond-encrusted human skull was on show — sits 30 seconds behind Fortnum & Mason, very near the Royal Academy of Art, not far from Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth, within easy reach of the Wolseley [see entries], and a less-than-ten-minute walk away from Soho. The flagship Bermondsey gallery is a ten-minute walk from London Bridge station in increasingly trendy Bermondsey St.