At 8am on July 27, 2012, the day the Olympic Games begin in London, Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed wants you, and everyone else in the country, to ring a bell. Any bell you like - a church bell (if you know how), a school bell, a hand-bell, a doorbell, a mobile phone, a bicycle bell; whatever you've got. And by ringing a bell, he says, not only will you announce the start of a special UK-wide celebration - as bells were rung at the end of the Second World War, or by the Romans, apparently, to signify the start of processions and festivals - you will also be taking part in a piece of art: Work No. 1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes, by Martin Creed.

This typical piece of Creedian japery is unveiled today as part of the Cultural Olympiad's ambitiously wide-ranging London 2012 Festival - 12 weeks of extraordinary cultural activity starting on midsummer's day next year and lasting until the final day of the Paralympics in September.



From a distinctly unpromising starting point two years ago, when the Cultural Olympiad seemed nebulous and open-ended and oddly scattergun (if you'd even heard of it), artistic director Ruth Mackenzie and chair of the Cultural Olympiad Board Tony Hall have now pulled together a festival of real inventiveness and excellence.



Hundreds of arts events featuring thousands of artists and dozens of distinct companies will take place up and down the country with more than 10 million chances, claim the organisers, to see something for free. But London is very much the focus. New David Hockney works will star at the Royal Academy while Tate Modern gives Damien Hirst a major retrospective; Mark Rylance will perform pop-up recitals of Shakespeare sonnets on the Underground; Stella McCartney, Sarah Burton and Dinos Chapman promise an intriguing collaboration.



Tony Hall - he was made a life peer last year but neither he nor anyone around him seems to use his title - claims that the London 2012 Festival will be "as significant and as memorable" as the 1951 Festival of Britain. It is also designed as a national morale boost: "God knows, in the current economic climate, we need something to celebrate, and let's celebrate what we're really good at," he says. "I truly believe that the arts and culture and heritage in the UK are the best in the world and the more I travel, the more convinced of that I am.

"This is where you want to be, and that's partly because of London's international position and partly because of the city's sheer excitement."



In person, Hall looks rather like a trustworthy high street bank manager, dressed in grey pinstripe and nondescript tie - which is probably what the arts most need right now. He is not a flamboyant sort of apparatchik, and in his day job as chief executive of the Royal Opera House he is currently grappling with a 15 per cent cut to his budget.



Before Covent Garden, Hall was chief executive of BBC News, responsible for launching Five Live and News 24. Nowadays he is London's cultural fixer, a diplomat and mandarin with whom Whitehall is perfectly happy to do business, and who happens to have a heartfelt passion for dance.

Hall's brief upon taking the chair of the Cultural Olympiad Board in 2009 was to "turbo-charge" the then-woolly project, and so he did the obvious-yet-clever thing of surrounding himself with the very senior people who actually run the arts in London - Nick Serota from the Tate, Nick Kenyon at the Barbican, the British Museum's Neil MacGregor, South Bank artistic director Jude Kelly and Vikki Heywood from the RSC.

Hall admits that he thought long and hard about taking on the role, aware of the blow to his reputation should the whole thing flop. These new board members then collectively decided to turn what was a four-year slow-burn project into the sharp relief of a three- month festival.

"That was a really important step," says Hall. "To be blunt, a gradual build-up to something is a difficult concept for people to get. Once we'd made the decision to focus on the festival we were then able to bring together the people with the money and the people with the ideas, and everyone got it." The people with the money, by the way, are mostly you and me, via the National Lottery, Legacy Trust UK and the Arts Council.

So far the Olympiad as a whole has cost £97 million, of which £50 million goes to the Festival next summer. The Mayor's office has been closely involved in the planning too: "Boris is full of ideas," says Hall, grinning. "He's been very keen on including poetry.



"The penumbra of what we're doing next summer is the tourism it will generate for many years to come, and obviously the Mayor is extremely

interested in that."

Perhaps its most ambitious element, however, is the World Shakespeare Festival, a festival within the Festival as it were, featuring more than 70 productions and exhibitions to which one million tickets will be sold. "A few weeks ago I was in Nigeria talking to a director who is coming to the Globe as part of the festival, and he was just radiant and incredibly excited about it. That is only happening because of 2012."

He won't confirm rumours that Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony will start at sunset and go on into the very late evening, but as a member of Locog he has now seen "detailed, really thought-through plans" and "was hugely impressed by them", natch.

So what's the cultural equivalent of the 100m Final, the show-stopper, the Big One? "I think it will be that opening weekend when London will just explode with cultural activity. That will be a peak and a high for the city.

"But this is a long race too, from Midsummer's Day to the end of the games, and what I hope most of all is that people will take something from it that they will remember for the rest of their lives. Perhaps they will see something that triggers a lifelong love of music, dance or theatre. That has to be part of the legacy too."

Cultural Olympiad highlights

1. BBC Radio 1's Hackney Weekend 2012

Leona Lewis, Plan B and countless others play to a 100,000-strong East London crowd. June 23-24, Hackney Marshes

2. BT River of Music

World music played at six iconic locations: Asian music in Battersea Park, African at Jubilee Gardens, American at the Tower of London and so on.

July 21-22

3 You Me Bum Bum Train/The Crash of Elysium

Evening Standard award-winners YMBBT will be at a London venue yet to be confirmed: fingers crossed Punchdrunk's "live Dr Who adventure", The Crash of Elysium, is also bound for the capital.

YMBBT July 1-31, venue tbc. Crash of Elysium Jun 21-Sep 9, venue tbc

4 Damien Hirst

Pickled sharks, bisected cows, spin paintings and some medicinal artwork from defunct Notting Hill restaurant Pharmacy will be on show.

Apr 4-Sep 9, Tate Modern

5 Dr Dee

Damon Albarn explores the mysterious career of Elizabethan mover and shaker John Dee in collaboration with ENO and director Rufus Norris.

Jun 25-Jul 7, Coliseum

6 David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

The Bradford artist and dedicated fag-choffer exhibits new, giant paintings inspired by his beloved Yorkshire landscape and painted in the past 18 months, alongside iPad drawings and multi-screen films.

7 Einstein on the Beach/ Desdemona/Wynton Marsalis - Swing Symphony

The UK premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's modern opera, a musical imagining of Desdemona's life from director Peter Sellars, poet Toni Morrison and Malian musician Rokia Traore; and jazz trumpeter Marsalis in concert with Simon Rattle and the LSO.

Einstein May 4-13; Desdemona July 19-20: Marsalis July 25 and 26. Barbican

8 Mark Rylance

Pop-up performances of Shakespeare's sonnets and speeches for the Bard's birthday - probably the only actor charming enough to do this without being assaulted.

Apr 26, around London.

9 Hitchcock's Silent Films brought to life

Three restored archive prints of silent films The Pleasure Garden, The Lodger and Blackmail, with new musical scores.

Jun 1-Aug 31, info via BFI Southbank.

10 Lucian Freud Portraits Retrospective including images of Bacon, Hockney and Auerbach.

Feb 9-May 27, National Portrait Gallery.

11 Macbeth: Leila and Ben - a Bloody History/Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad

An Arab Spring Macbeth from Tunisia, and the Iraqi Theatre of Baghdad's tale of star-crossed lovers. There's more intriguing international and British Shakespeare at the Roundhouse.

Macbeth, June 20-30, Romeo and Juliet, Apr 26-Jun 30, Riverside Studios

12 Metamorphosis: Titian 2012

Artists, choreographers, composers and poets as diverse as Carol Ann Duffy and Chris Ofili provide personal responses to Titian's paintings.

Exhibition, July 11-Sep 21, National Gallery: performances Jul 14, 16, 17 & 20, Royal Opera House

13 One Extraordinary Day: Streb Action

Radical US choreographer Elizabeth Streb turns the Victorian towers, galleries and bascules of Tower Bridge into a playground.

July 1-31, Tower Bridge

14 Rachel Whiteread - Frieze/Tino Sehgal - Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Whiteread provides a new façade for the Whitechapel Gallery, while Anglo-German Sehgal creates an interactive artwork for the Tate's Turbine Hall.

Whiteread, Jun 1- Dec 31, Whitechapel Gallery, Sehgal July 17-Oct 28,

Tate Modern

15 Rio Occupation London

In the 30 days leading up to the Games, 30 Brazilian artists will present their works in galleries, parks and the Brazilian Embassy banking hall.

July 6-Aug 4, Brazil Embassy, Cockspur St

16 A Room for London

The most exclusive bedroom in London, by artist Fiona Banner and David Kohn Architects, is in a boat stranded on the roof of the QEH: the programme includes the chance for Standard readers to come up with inspirational ideas for the capital.

Jan 1-Dec 31, Queen Elizabeth Hall

17 Shake the Dust

Youngsters work with "poet coaches" in a competition culminating in a verse slam at the Southbank Centre. See also the Summer 2012 Reading Challenge for action on child literacy.

July 6 and 7, Southbank Centre

18 Sydney Theatre Company - Gross und Klein

Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and the Sydney Theatre Co perform Botho Strauss's tale of a woman looking for human connection in Morocco.

Apr 13-Apr 29, Barbican

19 Thomas Heatherwick - Studio of Ideas

The first major solo exhibition for the versatile design studio.

May 31-Sept 30, Victoria and Albert Museum

20 West End Live

For the first time, the cast of every one of the West End's most popular musicals - including Mamma Mia!, Phantom and Billy Elliot - will take to a stage in Trafalgar Square.

Jun 21-Sep 9, Trafalgar Square