Matthew Slotover

So we're like, oh, yeah, okay.

So, of course, when the international galleries had all committed, the London ones were like, oh, okay, we're definitely going to do this.

So we started off with 120 galleries.

It's in the same spot it's in now in Regent's Park.

So it's about two-thirds the size of what it is.

So it's quite big to start with.

There's a company that puts on fairs and events that we hire.

That was the logistical part, was something we didn't know.

We didn't know about the art market.

Doing a magazine, you don't really have a connection to collectors or the sales part of the galleries.

But you know the galleries from selling advertising to them, and you know the readers from...

the visitors to the fair who are the readers of the magazine so we sort of had the relationships and the knowledge and i think people trusted us to do something decent you know the walls weren't totally finished by the time the galleries came in i heard that i heard you actually had to go around and check every single wall in the in the first ever edition of the art fair because at 8 a.m of the like day everyone was installing the walls still weren't finished

yeah the galleries generally have two days to install and a third of the galleries weren't finished the day they were supposed to come in you know i remember leslie waddington rest in peace you know he's called us complete amateurs told us we didn't know what we're doing stormed out you know but the next day the walls were finished and the cleaning wasn't quite right like the floors were a bit dirty there was smoking at the time so smoking was allowed in the fair

And then what we really had on the opening night, we'd invited sort of, you know, everyone we knew from Outworld and from outside London.

And we only had like, it was a long corridor like it is now, but there were only four people checking the tickets.

And there were about 3,000 people trying to get in.

And it just created a huge queue outside.

And then our security were more like kind of nightclub security than event security.

So they were like, hold on, stop pushing.

You're not getting in.