Londoners love getting naked

Jasmine Gardner
12 Apr 2010

Above the entrance to Old Street Tube station, model Yazzy Phillips is currently suspended midway through a nude leap across a billboard. She has been there since last week, and she's quite distracting.

But before you all abandon your route home and jump on the Northern line, she is (and other models, male and female, are) doing the same thing right across London. Posing naked in adverts for a TK Maxx, HomeSense and Cancer Research UK campaign and imploring us to join in and “Give up [our] clothes for good”. It seems her appeals are working because, right now, London is having a moment of nudity.

This week the musical Hair opens at the Gielgud Theatre and the whole cast is preparing to brandish their naughty bits at the end of the first act (repeatedly for 10 months) — just as Naked Boys Singing! (a musical celebrating male nudity) finishes displaying its “bits” at the Arts Theatre. Artist Lisa Yuskavage's provocative paintings of naked young girls go up for viewing at the Greengrassi Gallery in SE11 this month, moments after Rankin closes the doors to his Cheeky exhibition of erotic photography at the Annroy Gallery in NW5.

Londoners are even getting used to having nudes with our food. Last month Flash Sushi hosted a season of Nyotaimori dining (eating sushi off a naked woman's body), and on 28 May, arts and entertainment organisation The Last Tuesday Society hosts a Feast of Naked Boys and Girls.

Meanwhile, thousands of Londoners planning to head to the Big Chill festival in Herefordshire in August will contemplate stripping off their clothes to take part in one of Spencer Tunick's nude installations. Others are staying at home to get naked and join British Naturism in backing a campaign to increase the nudist sunbathing area on Hampstead Heath.

Since Yazzy and her comrades are up there on the billboards egging us all on, prudes may want to stop reading now and grab a blindfold.
“There does seem to be an interest in seeing people taking off their clothes at the moment,” says Cecilia Lundqvist, the founder of Kink Ink, just one of many Life Drawing organisations sprouting up and taking nakedness to trendy venues all over the city. As Lundqvist has noticed: “In the name of art you can get people to do a lot of things. You get a creative surge that makes people more willing.”

This is certainly what Katrina Larkin, founder of the Big Chill festival, is hoping for come 5 August. Last time US artist Spencer Tunick got Londoners involved in his artworks he had no trouble finding volunteers to remove all their garments, lie down on the floor of Selfridges and be photographed, so Larkin can't see a similar feat on the festival site being a problem. “The whole history of festivals matches a project like this,” she says. “In the Sixties, everyone would take their clothes off at festivals.” She is calling this project the “art version of sky diving”. “There is that same will you, won't you' moment when you have to take your clothes off. It's about shedding your inhibitions.”

For Andrew Welch, commercial manager of British Naturism, this growing interest in eschewing clothing is no surprise. “A lot more people are getting involved in the whole idea of not wearing clothes,” he says. “There is more non-sexual nudity shown on television and in the theatre, and taboos are being eroded.”

The Hampstead Heath campaign is thanks to an “increase in demand” for a nudist sunbathing space. British Naturism also hopes to open nude swimming sessions in London this year because, Welch says, “the impetus for Londoners is there”.

Of course, campaigns and nudity often go hand in hand. As Lundqvist points out: “It can become quite political to be naked — using it as a kind of protest.” The characters in Hair, set in late Sixties New York, go thread-free to protest against the Vietnam War. The 1,000-plus Londoners who will cycle bareback through the capital on 12 June for the London Naked Bike Ride will be campaigning for greater tolerance of bikes on London's roads.

But regardless of the campaigns, or the artistic environment, Suraya Sidhu Singh, editor of women's erotic magazine Filament, worries about an imbalance — even in unprudish London — that means we prefer women to get naked instead of men. “Most of the nudity, even in art circles, is female nudity,” she says. “Unless it's for the gay market, it is still women, on the whole, who are presented as the erotic subjects.” The Last Tuesday Society founder Suzette Field thinks she understands why. “We always find it very easy to find lots of obliging naked girls for our Naked Feasts but boys are more reluctant,” she says. “Men are more likely to associate nakedness with eroticism and find it more difficult to separate being naked from sex. Women, on the other hand, find it easier to interpret nudity as an aesthetic occasion. This is in part due to the large number of naked women we see in films, press and media in general — while exposed willies are much more prohibited.”

If you were thinking of shedding your threads, however, Andrew Welch is keen to emphasise that naturism is entirely non-erotic. “Naturism is just about a good feeling,” he says. “There is an assumption that everybody will be offended when they see a bit of flesh, but they actually won't be … It becomes commonplace and you stop noticing.

“When the weather gets warm, we have a whole wardrobe of clothes to choose from,” he says. “We choose to choose none.” Something in the London air suggests that, this summer, he won't be the only one.

Additional reporting, Lauren Cockbill