16 September 2025 - 27 October 2025 Merge Festival

MERGE is a new annual arts and music festival celebrating the rich heritage and contemporary culture of London’s Bankside. For two months, Bankside Mix, the river walkway near Tate Modern, a vacant office block, historic buildings, as well as Bankside’s open spaces, local offices, bars and cafes will come alive when major names from the UK and international art world stage installations and musical performances alongside emerging artistic talent.

Artists include Fiona Banner, Jamie Reid (The Sex Pistols), Arturo Vega (The Ramones), Ted Riederer, The Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, and Caravan Theatre.

As part of the festival, there will be a series of live performances brought to you by Land Securities:

BANKSIDE MIX - CARAVAN THEATRE

A More Glorious Hole by Ben Evans and Anna Frisch
Monday 19th September 12-4pm
North end of Canvey Street, Bankside Mix

  • Originally a 45 minute piece conceived and created by Ben Evans for video (titled ‘A Glorious Hole’), now reworked as a 30 minute piece for live performance.
  • A stream of consciousness opens the door and in walks the mundane, complex, peripheral, significant, bizarre, comical.
  • Simple thoughts, philosophical musings and memories enter the space before they vanish in a more glorious hole.
  • Re-created in collaboration with Anna Frisch.

BANKSIDE MIX - CARAVAN THEATRE

And the Birds Fell from the Sky by Silvia Mercuriali and Simon Wilkinson
Tuesday 11th & Wednesday 12th October 12-4pm
North end of Canvey Street, Bankside Mix

  • A collaboration by Theatre director Silvia Mercuriali and film director Simon Wilkinson creating an interactive experience, in which the audience participate in a film experienced through video goggles and headphones.
  • Drawing from Silvia’s research with her performance company Rotozaza, the audience find themselves removed from reality and plunged into the narrative as central character.
  • Sat in chairs and equipped with video goggles and headphones so that their sight, hearing and movement through space is high jacked and fully fused with the content of the film, the audience follow instructions that match camera movements to become part of the action itself; allowing them to experience the piece both as audience member and performer.
  • As the narrative unfolds, the fictional world becomes ever more immersive through live interactions.

MUSIC ON THE RIVER @ BANKSIDE MIX

Band to be announced!
Wednesday 28th September 12-2pm
North end of Canvey Street, Bankside Mix

  • An afternoon of live performances brought to you by Land Securities.

MUSIC ON THE RIVER @ BANKSIDE MIX

Act to be announced!
Wednesday 19th October 6-7.30pm
North end of Canvey Street, Bankside Mix

  • An afternoon of live performances brought to you by Land Securities.

MUSIC ON THE RIVER @ BANKSIDE MIX

John O’Sullivan
Thursday 27th October 6pm
North end of Canvey Street, Bankside Mix

  • Johnny O is a singer, songwriter, multi instrumentalist who has been absent mindedly chipping the paint off the outer edges of the music business since 1978.
  • He is currently a punk rock guitarist, a country rock bassist, a folk rock pedal steel player, but will always be a disciple of psychedelia at heart.
  • Songs include his homage to Syd Barrett, imaginatively titled “Syd”, (released on 7” single many years ago), Invasion of the Killer Lobsters (a struggle for supremacy between man and…yes, lobster) & The Last Days of Rock & Roll (a future No.1 hit single for whoever releases it first).
  • His music obsessed life has taken him from a ghost town in the Midlands to the bright lights of Hammersmith, via the Reeperbahn, passing through Abbey Road, the place where Bleeker meets the Bowery and all the way down Topanga Canyon.

MUSIC ON THE RIVER @ BANKSIDE MIX

Anna Page
Thursday 27th October 7pm
North end of Canvey Street, Bankside Mix

  • Anna Page is a singer and a song writer, whose only release so far achieved Single Of The Month in Record Collector Magazine. She is also an artist and part-time burlesque model, having appeared in The White Stripes and Mick Jagger pop videos, on BBC and Channel 4 as a dancer and actress, as well as performing her own songs live on TV.
  • Anna studied Art at Yeovil College and Philosophy and Literature at Warwick University, so she put on a one-woman exhibition on St Martins Lane entitled “How The Universe Works: The Answer To Everything”, for which she was dubbed both “The Shining Child Of the Revelation Revolution” (West End Extra) and a “glamorous art terrorist” (12 Bar Club).

For more information about all of the events including those at Bankside Mix, visit www.mergefestival.co.uk |

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