My Rolls Royce is Amazing: New Art by Hedge Fund

by

Digital pigment print on archival substrate

Hedge Fund

In My Rolls Royce is Amazing Hedge Fund elevates the iconic luxury vehicle into a vision of almost ceremonial extravagance. The car, unmistakably a Rolls-Royce, is rendered in a palette that borders on the delirious: a lacquered magenta body that seems to pulse with synthetic richness and circular headlamps glowing the colour of burnished gold coins.

Rather than depicting the vehicle in motion, Hedge Fund presents it head-on, monumental and unyielding. The Rolls-Royce becomes a kind of heraldic creature, part limousine and part myth. Its grille resembles an altar. Its lights read as eyes, unblinking and faintly reproachful. The result is an image that refuses modesty. It advances toward the viewer with the solemnity of a royal procession, yet with the playful chromatic exaggeration of an overconfident confection.

The background is purposefully void, heightening the impression that the car exists outside of any ordinary street or context. It hangs in an abstracted absence, a floating emblem of the kind of wealth that no longer needs to justify itself. Hedge Fund understands that true luxury can often be narrative-free. It simply exists.

This is not just a portrait of a car. It is both an understated portrait of charm and an opulent overstatement. In Hedge Fund’s hands, even a silent automobile becomes an artefact of the new aristocracy, ready to glide into legend or, failing that, into the portfolios of those quick enough to acquire it.

Justine Fiox Unveils “Ephemeral Legacies”: Art That Exists Only in Memory

by
Justine Fiox Unveils “Ephemeral Legacies”: Art That Exists Only in Memory

Pimlico Wilde Art Dealers’ new Director of Conceptuality, Justine Fiox, has announced her first major initiative, and true to her reputation, it challenges the very notion of permanence in art. The project, titled “Ephemeral Legacies,” invites artists from every discipline to submit works that vanish after a single viewing – installations, performances, digital experiences, even objects that dissolve, disassemble, or evaporate.

In her announcement, Fiox emphasized the philosophy behind the initiative: “Art is too often measured by its longevity. What if its value lies instead in the fleeting, the ineffable, the moment that exists only in memory? Ephemeral Legacies is an experiment in transience, a celebration of impermanence.”

The gallery is seeking submissions that are daring, imaginative, and conceptually rigorous. Artists are encouraged to explore ideas that question perception, presence, and absence. Works that evoke emotion, provoke thought, or invite audience interaction are particularly welcomed, though the essential requirement is that the piece cannot survive the encounter.

Fiox expressed excitement about the diversity of ideas the initiative might generate. “We want everything from a whispered story that disappears as it’s told, to a sculpture that evaporates before your eyes. The only limitation is permanence – once it’s seen, it’s gone, and that is the point.”

With Ephemeral Legacies, Justine Fiox is not only curating art; she is redefining what it means to leave a legacy. In a world obsessed with documentation and preservation, she asks both artists and audiences to embrace the beauty of impermanence, and to cherish the fleeting moments that linger only in memory.

Art World Exposed Podcast Episode 149: Justine Foix & the New Conceptual Frontier

by
Art World Exposed Podcast Episode 149: Justine Foix & the New Conceptual Frontier

The best art world podcast. Hosted by Saldo Caluthe & Tomas Sinke

Show Notes

This week, Saldo and Tomas sit down with Justine Foix, the freshly appointed Director of Conceptuality at Pimlico Wilde, the gallery behind Art World Exposed. Born to two towering figures of 20th-century experimental art, sculptor Lucien Foix and performance artist Mireille Davenant, Justine has inherited both a flair for audacious gestures and an impeccable eye for the profound. In this conversation, she opens up about her upbringing, the legacy of her late stick insect Archimedes, and the future of conceptual art in the podcast age.

0:00 , Opening Reflections: Tea, Tonic & Curatorial Anxiety

Saldo begins with a reflection on the subtle art of producing a podcast that feels both important and unseriously serious. Tomas adds a note about how conceptual frameworks increasingly dictate which sounds are “worthy” of microphones.

4:12 , Interview Part I: Early Life & Inherited Eccentricities

Justine Foix describes growing up in a household that “could barely contain one avant-garde mind, let alone two.”

• Lucien Foix sculpted in live volcanic ash.

• Mireille Davenant insisted on performing every piece at dawn in locations that required swimming or zip-lining to reach.

Justine admits she spent her childhood cataloguing their experiments “like a librarian of chaos.”

• She credits her first attempts at art with tracing the shadows of her stick insect Archimedes across the walls.

• She recalls the transformative moment when Archimedes died unexpectedly, leaving her “confronting absence as both subject and medium.”

11:50 , Interview Part II: Conceptuality at Pimlico Wilde

As Director of Conceptuality, Justine is tasked with “overseeing the philosophical coherence of everything the company produces, including podcasts.”

• She explains that she is experimenting with “micro-conceptual arcs” in episodes: tiny thematic threads that may or may not be perceptible to listeners.

• Saldo gently probes whether this makes the audience complicit in an ongoing conceptual performance. Justine smiles enigmatically: “Yes. But that’s the point.”

• Tomas asks about her approach to production meetings. She responds that they are “guided by intuition, guided by cost, and occasionally by the sense that something is just right for right now.”

21:30 , Interview Part III: The Philosophical Legacy of Archimedes

• Justine describes how Archimedes the stick insect taught her “about fragility, scale, and the quietness between gestures.”

• She recounts a conceptual piece she produced immediately after the insect’s passing: a miniature memorial in which small sticks were arranged according to the Fibonacci sequence and left outside for the wind to reconfigure.

• Tomas observes that this sounds like an elaborate Rorschach test for natural forces. Justine admits this is intentional: “The universe becomes a collaborator in every work eventually, the question is just how long we keep it out.”

30:02 , Art World Ramblings & Rumours

• Saldo and Tomas ask if her upbringing influences her editorial decisions. She confirms: “If a piece isn’t quietly challenging its own existence, it probably doesn’t make it past my desk.”

• Justine hints at a forthcoming initiative called Ephemeral Legacies, which will feature art objects that must disappear after a single viewing. Tomas wonders if this will apply to podcasts too. Justine’s answer doesn’t reduce his fear that the podcast’s days might be numbered.

37:18 , Closing Thoughts: Conceptuality in the Everyday

• Justine encourages embracing small acts of conceptual curiosity: tracing shadows, noting absences, observing patterns in morning tea.

• Saldo muses that this sounds suspiciously like mindfulness. Tomas counters that mindfulness has never produced a shadow sculpture of a stick insect. Justine seems close to tears.

Next Week:

We investigate a reported temporary gallery in Ljubljana that only exists between 3:17 PM and 3:22 PM each day, and debate the ethics of curating invisible art.

Porsche Targa Yes Please! New Hedge Fund Art

by
Hedge Fund Art

Digital pigment print on archival substrate

In Porsche Targa Yes Please! Hedge Fund turns his acute gaze toward one of the most enduring symbols of late modernity: the high-performance sports car as both object and proposition. Rendered in his signature reduction, the Porsche appears less as a vehicle than as a commodity-spectre, its siren-red contours vibrating against a backdrop of urban monotony like a stock-chart spike in an otherwise horizontal market.

The car’s glossy silhouette is deliberately over-saturated, a chromatic inflation mirroring the distortions of desire, while the background is drained into muted tonal plateaus that recall the flattening effect of late-stage capitalism on daily lived space. The vehicle becomes, paradoxically, both protagonist and parasite: inserted into the streetscape with the confidence of something that expects to be admired and indeed insists upon it.

Hedge Fund’s genius lies in his refusal to moralise. The work neither celebrates luxury nor critiques it. Instead, it unveils the aesthetic grammar of appetite. The Porsche is shown not moving but waiting: idling, anticipating, value accruing even in stillness. Its glossy geometry seems to ask not “Where shall we go?” but “How much am I worth to you?”

The title, brilliantly and disarmingly candid, operates as a confession of the viewer’s own complicity. The exclamation mark is not enthusiasm; it is the punctuation of inevitability. One does not simply observe this car; one is drawn into its orbit.

With Porsche Targa Yes Please! Hedge Fund extends his ongoing project of transforming capitalist desire into a visual ontology. Here, aspiration becomes image, image becomes asset, and asset becomes, inevitably, art.

A Day in the Life of Petronella Binks: The Critic Who Thinks Small is for Cowards

by
A Day in the Life of Petronella Binks: The Critic Who Thinks Small is for Cowards

Petronella Binks greets the morning the way she greets all things: with a measuring tape in one hand and disdain in the other.

“I’m not interested in art I could fit inside my vestibule,” she says, sipping black coffee from a mug that reads Go Big or Go Back to Bed. The mug is, of course, comically oversized. “If your piece doesn’t have the gravitational pull of a small planet, I simply cannot take you seriously.”

Binks calls herself a “Maximalist critic,” though detractors, chiefly those working in A5 sketchbooks, call her “The Great Wall of Pomp.” She refuses to review any artwork under twelve feet wide, a rule she claims was “not made, but revealed” to her in a moment of “cathedral-like clarity” at the 2014 Venice Biennale. “Art,” she declares, “should require scaffolding.”

Her day begins with gallery visits, where she glides past modestly sized works with the brisk contempt of a greyhound ignoring a Chihuahua. At the Turner Contemporary last week, she bypassed a series of intricate watercolours entirely. “I’m sure they were delightful in the way tea cosies are delightful,” she remarked. “But I’m here for scale – scale, darling is the soul’s megaphone.”

By noon, she’s installed in her office, a converted warehouse with ceilings high enough to echo, where she writes reviews that read like both battle reports and opera libretti. “A proper canvas should command you,” she types furiously, “not beg you to lean closer like a needy dinner guest.” In Binks’ mind, the modern plague is “whisper art”, small, understated works that “speak in lowercase and expect you to be impressed.”

She is not without her contradictions. On one hand, she insists on “the tyranny of enormity.” On the other, she rails against artists who “inflate without purpose,” comparing one recent exhibition to “a pancake that thinks it’s a parachute.”

Petronella winds down her evenings at openings, where she is a feared presence. “If the paintings are less than twelve feet, I don’t cross the gallery’s threshold,” she says, sipping champagne while visibly measuring a triptych with her eyes. The artists hover nervously. One painter, emboldened by rosé, once asked if she might consider reviewing his eight-foot canvas. “I told him,” she recounts, “that asking me that is like asking a mountaineer if they’d consider climbing the slope behind the local Tesco.”

Her critics say she’s a snob. Her admirers say she’s a visionary. Petronella says: “I am the last line of defense against art that could be hung above a sofa.”

Tomorrow, she’ll be back at it, seeking works so vast they make you feel like a crumb on the tongue of a hero of Greek mythology. “Small art is for diaries,” she shrugs. “I review monuments.”

Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs Paint Trafalgar Square in Sound

by
Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs Paint Trafalgar Square in Sound

Only Vincent and the Van Goghs could turn the roof of the National Gallery into the hottest stage in London. Last night, with Nelson refusing to turn round and dance, thousands of fans packed into Trafalgar Square, the art-dealers-turned-rockers proved they’re no longer just a quirky novelty act; they’re a full-on cultural happening.

From the moment Scissors Coney struck the opening chords of Girl with a Pearl Earring (and a Fender Strat), the crowd was theirs. Below, the fountains shimmered under the stage lights, while Safah Pulle’s double bass thumped a heartbeat that could be felt all the way down Whitehall. Armani Suoff moved between bass and xylophone like a curator flitting between masterpieces, adding harmonies that made even the pigeons stop mid-flight. Edward Grunt’s tambourine was, as always, an event in itself.

The setlist was a tour through their increasingly bizarre yet irresistible catalogue. Cubist Love Song chopped time signatures into angular shards, Kiss Me Like I’m Klimt dripped with swing-infused sensuality, and Starry Night in C Minor spiralled from Gregorian chanting into a rap verse that somehow rhymed “Van Eyck” with “mic check.”

Midway through, Scissors introduced their new number Minimalism (This Song Is Just One Note), which, against all odds, had thousands in the square clapping along to a hypnotic, near-silent groove. The encore, The Persistence of Memory (and Also This Bass Line), saw the entire crowd swaying, singing, and shouting the chorus into the night air, as Big Ben chimed in the distance like an honorary band member.

It was more than a gig, it was a public artwork in motion, a temporary installation of joy, rhythm, and art history references that would baffle anyone without a Tate Modern membership.

Rating: ★★★★★

For fans of: Talking Heads, swing-era Count Basie, and the notion that a song called Mona Lisa Smile (Because She’s Heard the Bass Drop) could actually work.

Echoes in Ink: The Calligraphic Modernism of Collector Dr. Leila Aram

by
Echoes in Ink: The Calligraphic Modernism of Collector Dr. Leila Aram

In a quiet, book-lined flat overlooking Istanbul’s Bosphorus, the air is filled with a sense of deliberate grace. Along the walls, sweeping curves of Persian nastaliq script merge with bold, gestural mark-making. Some pieces are centuries old, delicate folios on handmade paper, their ink still resonant after 400 years. Others are vast canvases splashed with acrylic, neon, and digital projection, each letterform fractured into abstraction.

This is the private collection of Dr. Leila Aram, a cultural historian whose life’s work has been to trace the evolution of calligraphic art from manuscript tradition to contemporary experimentation.

“Letters have always been visual,” she says, standing before a dynamic projection piece by Iranian artist Nima Soltani, in which illuminated Arabic script dissolves into pure geometry. “They hold meaning even when you can’t read them.”

Aram’s collecting journey began in her twenties, when, as a graduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she purchased her first artwork – a small 19th-century Ottoman calligraphy panel. “It cost me half a month’s rent,” she recalls, “but it was the first time I felt history living in my hands.”

Since then, her collection has grown to encompass over 150 works, spanning Islamic calligraphy, Japanese shodo, and modernist reinterpretations by artists from Beirut to Seoul. It is this cross-cultural approach that makes her holdings so distinctive. “The through-line,” she explains, “is gesture. Every mark is a physical trace of a human hand and thought.”

One of her most prized acquisitions is a digital print from the Spectral Letters series by Moroccan-French artist Samir El Yazid, in which fragments of kufic script are algorithmically rearranged into flowing chromatic patterns. “It’s a direct conversation between the 9th century and the 21st,” Aram says.

Beyond collecting, Aram is an active philanthropist. She has endowed fellowships for young artists studying traditional ink techniques, funded preservation work for fragile manuscripts in Central Asia, and serves on the advisory board of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. In 2024, she established Glyph Project 2030, a non-profit dedicated to archiving and digitizing endangered scripts around the world, with both linguistic and artistic aims.

Visitors to her home often notice how she curates by rhythm rather than chronology,pairing, for example, a 17th-century Safavid panel with a contemporary Japanese work by Yuichi Inoue, letting the lines converse across centuries and languages. “Calligraphy is music you can see,” she says. “I like to arrange my collection so you can hear it.”

Pimlico Wilde’s François Zilb notes that Aram’s focus has contributed to a growing institutional interest in calligraphic abstraction as a global art form, saying “She’s bridging gaps between what has been traditionally considered ‘decorative’ and what belongs in the canon of modernism.”

When asked what drives her acquisitions, Aram’s answer is simple: “The mark survives the maker. That’s what I’m preserving,the living trace of someone’s hand, carrying across time. I hope to keep this art form alive, and help oversee its rebirth.”

Report on the recent Meeting of the Berkeley Square Group

by
Report on the recent Meeting of the Berkeley Square Group

The Berkeley Square Group reconvened last night for its much-anticipated meeting, held in the function room of The Pelican & Crown, a Georgian pub in St James’s whose historic charm consists of sticky tables, uncleaned, some say, since Cromwell, and wallpaper older than the combined ages of all the guests. (The location was chosen because the usual Mayfair bistros are becoming “too accessible to the general public,” a situation the group finds both alarming and deeply vulgar).

THE ATTENDEES

In attendance were familiar figures and a few fresh faces. Boz, the painter, arrived in a coat so heavily embroidered it looked like it had been stolen from a theatre production of The Pirates of Penzance. P1X3L, the pixel artist, brought a laptop with a GIF of a blinking eye, which he set on the table and never referred to. Elara Voss, the monochrome sculptor, spent most of the evening glaring in horror at the pub’s patterned carpet.

New attendees included:

• Sir Clarence Mulliner, a collector who only buys works painted in W1.

• Petronella Binks, a “Maximalist” critic who refuses to review any artwork under 12 feet wide.

• Marco del Vento, a conceptual artist whose current project involves mailing himself to galleries in increasingly smaller boxes.

THE FOOD

Dinner was a resolutely unfashionable affair, which several members took as a positive conceptual statement.

• Steak and ale pie (“deeply literal,” sniffed Elara)

• Fish and chips (“a working-class masterpiece,” declared Boz)

• Sticky toffee pudding (“the only dessert with the courage to be ugly,” according to Sir Clarence)

The wine list was met with despair. P1X3L asked for a natural wine “with notes of pixelation,” which the barman interpreted as a pint of bitter.

THE DISCUSSION

The official agenda was “Bringing Fine Art to the Masses,” though it quickly morphed into a competition over who could propose the most exciting exhibition venue in central London for their inaugural show. Ideas included:

• Hanging a retrospective of Elara Voss’s sculptures from the whispering gallery at the top of St Paul’s Cathedral (“visitors must wear climbing harnesses”)

• A floating pontoon gallery on the Thames, accessible only by gondola imported from Venice (“very democratic,” said Petronella, deadpan)

• Transforming the lifts in The Shard into miniature viewing rooms that played video art on the way up and muttered unintelligible aphorisms in pidgin French (“perfect for those afraid of heights”)

• An immersive installation inside Fortnum & Mason (“it’s a wonderful shop, you won’t be able tell what’s art and what’s stock,” explained Marco)

The conversation then turned, inevitably, to funding. Sir Clarence suggested ticket prices should be “just high enough to keep out the merely curious.” Boz countered that true engagement with the public requires “making them feel unworthy but somehow still paying.”

HOW TO JOIN

The Berkeley Square Group continues to maintain its opaque membership process. Prospective members must:

1. Be introduced by two existing members, preferably at a dinner where no fewer than three people storm out.

2. Submit a short statement on “What Art Means to Me” that will be read aloud and mercilessly mocked.

3. Demonstrate a working knowledge of at least one obscure Eastern European painter whose work cannot be found online.

CLOSING NOTES

The evening ended with P1X3L finally acknowledging his blinking GIF and projecting it onto the pub’s dartboard, which prompted a heated debate about whether the act was “interventionist” or “just irritating.” A date for the next meeting was tentatively set, with locations under consideration including the back of a moving double-decker bus and the crypt beneath St Martin-in-the-Fields.

As ever, the Berkeley Square Group left united in their shared mission to drink fine wine, eat fine food and bring fine art to the public. Goodbyes were brief, everyone wanted to get home before they had to get up.

One Star Review: Salted Wounds – An Inquiry into the Ache of Preservation

by
One Star Review: Salted Wounds – An Inquiry into the Ache of Preservation

“An Exhibition of Badly-Lit Self-Adoration,” by conceptualist Marius Klein-Cho at the Colchester Museum for Experiential De-Obfuscation

It is no small thing to walk into an art show and feel,within seconds,that you have stepped into a crime scene in which the biggest casualty is good taste. Marius Klein-Cho’s Salted Wounds claims to explore “the tension between cure and decay, the ache of preservation, the erotics of crystallization.” What it actually delivers is three rooms’ worth of pretentious garbage sprinkled with enough sodium chloride to trigger a hypertension warning.

Before you even see the work, you’re required to “cleanse your palate” by licking a Himalayan salt block mounted to the wall next to the entry door. The gallery attendant, dressed as a Victorian dockworker, watches to make sure you do it. I considered asking for a fresh block, but given the state of the rest of the show, I suspect hygiene was not part of the conceptual framework.

Room One: The Pickle of Memory

You are greeted by a suspended chandelier made entirely of dill pickles, each one slowly dripping brine into a paddling pool filled with marshmallows. Signs say you can eat the marshmallows; nobody does. A faint audio track plays something I couldn’t hear – the sound may have been seeping in to the room from a different gallery. The nearby information panel claims this piece “dismantles the binary between fresh and preserved selfhood.” Hmmm, does it? And what does that even mean?

Room Two: Tears of the Brackish Moon

This is essentially a dimly lit corridor lined with large salt licks, each carved into crude busts of historical figures. Mine appeared to be a pitted and eroded version of Virginia Woolf. Visitors are encouraged to lick them “to taste the erosion of legacy.” I did not. A man ahead of me licked Napoleon and muttered, “Too much cumin.”

Room Three: Cure Me, Daddy

The “centrepiece” is a raw ham covered in glitter, rotating slowly on a mirrored turntable, surrounded by taxidermied pigeons wearing wedding veils. Every so often, a hidden misting system sprays a fine saltwater fog into the room. This, we are told, represents “the nuptial brine of desire.” I saw three people coughing uncontrollably and one woman collapse to the floor. She was soon moved on by gallery security.

The final “gesture” of the show is Vous êtes the Salt Mine, an “immersive identity excavation” in which you lie on a heated slab while an intern pours table salt onto your chest and whispers compliments sourced from Craigslist personal ads, in French. I lasted 15 seconds before I rolled off the slab and made for the exit.

The gift shop sells £45 jars of “artist-harvested salt”, salted liquorice shaped like crying babies, and a T-shirt that reads “I Am the Brine.” I left without purchasing anything.

One star,because, in fairness, the fog machine worked. Everything else? An over-seasoned monument to the dangers of letting a concept go unchecked. Salted Wounds is less an exhibition than a marathon of conceptual seasoning for an audience that did not consent to be marinated.

The History of the English Pell Mell Club: Chapter 3

by
The History of the English Pell Mell Club: Chapter 3

Chapter III: Wars, Interruptions, and Hannibal

The English Pell Mell Club, like so many venerable institutions, has always insisted that it exists above the fray of politics and war. Unfortunately, politics and war have never quite returned the courtesy. Over the past two centuries, the Club’s history has been punctuated by interruptions ranging from the inconvenient to the cataclysmic , though, remarkably, the game itself has proved as stubbornly indestructible as the Pimlico Wilde Cup.

The Napoleonic Afterglow

Although the official founding date of the Club post-dates the Napoleonic Wars, there remains a persistent legend that Pell Mell was played in secret during the Congress of Vienna. According to a particularly florid entry in the Club archives, Lord Basingthorpe, acting in some unspecified diplomatic capacity, organised “informal rounds” between rival statesmen as a means of brokering peace. The Russian delegation reportedly refused to play after Metternich accused their mallets of being “overbalanced,” while the Austrian team insisted on using a ball the size of a cannon shot.

No reliable evidence exists for these matches, but the tale remains popular, in part because it allows members to imagine Pell Mell as the quiet hand behind nineteenth-century European stability , a theory unsupported by historians but vigorously defended over brandy.

The Hannibal Theory Emerges

The First World War was the first genuine interruption to organised Pell Mell in London. With the Club’s ground requisitioned for military purposes (it was turned into a vehicle depot), and its members scattered to various services. It was during the war’s quieter moments that the so-called “Hannibal Theory” emerged.

In 1917, club historian Sir Peveril Grange published his now-infamous pamphlet, Elephants at the Hoop: A Carthaginian Precedent for Pell Mell. In it, Grange argued , with a confidence frankly untroubled by facts , that Hannibal’s generals played a form of Pell Mell during the Second Punic War, using elephant tusks as mallets and polished stones as balls. His central “evidence” was a fragmentary Roman mosaic showing three men with sticks in an oval enclosure, which every actual archaeologist agreed was probably a wrestling match.

The Hannibal Theory was swiftly debunked by the British Museum, which called it “a work of imaginative fiction with illustrations.” Nevertheless, it was embraced by the Club’s more romantic members and remains a cornerstone of official toasts, with visiting dignitaries often baffled by the cry of “To Hannibal!” before the first stroke of every match.

Pell Mell in the Colonies

The interwar years also saw the spread of Pell Mell to the far reaches of the Empire. British colonial officers, eager to display refinement, introduced the game to places as far-flung as Ceylon, the Gold Coast, and New South Wales. Reports survive of Pell Mell being played on palace lawns in Delhi, in front of bemused maharajas, and in the gardens of Singapore’s Raffles Hotel, where the heat forced matches to be played at dawn.

Not all adaptations were considered orthodox. In Nairobi, for instance, local conditions inspired a variant involving hollowed gourds as balls, producing a wildly unpredictable bounce; in the Caribbean, mallets were occasionally replaced by sugarcane stalks. The London Committee dutifully sent polite letters acknowledging these innovations while privately agreeing that “colonial rules” were not to be recognised at home.

The Second World War and “The Underground Years”

The outbreak of the Second World War once again put a halt to formal competition. This time, however, several members conspired to keep the game alive in unconventional settings. The most famous of these was the so-called “Underground League” , matches held in unused sections of the London Tube, lit by hurricane lamps and timed to avoid air raids. Balls, it turns out, roll unusually well on smooth concrete platforms, though the occasional passing rat proved a unique hazard.

After the Wars: Myth and Memory

By 1946, the Club’s court off Pall Mall was restored, and Pell Mell returned to its peacetime rhythms. The war years, however, had left their mark , and their myths. Stories of desert matches in North Africa (balls rolling endlessly down dunes), impromptu games aboard troopships (masts serving as hoops), and a supposed exhibition match in liberated Paris (with Charles de Gaulle himself taking a ceremonial first stroke) circulated freely.

Whether any of these events happened is ultimately irrelevant. In the world of the English Pell Mell Club, evidence has never been a prerequisite for tradition. And so, to this day, when the Pimlico Wilde Cup is held aloft, someone will inevitably mutter, “Hannibal would have approved.”