As Frieze London and Frieze Masters fill Regent's Park with ticketed fairs and invitation-only previews, a parallel gesture is playing out across the city. Hypha Studios, the charity that turns vacant buildings into studios and exhibition spaces, is handing artists, curators and collectives an estimated £50,000 worth of free exhibition space in a seven-show programme timed to coincide with London's busiest art week.

The exhibitors were chosen from 150 applications through an open call, and the venues span sites in Euston and the City of London alongside five separate spaces inside Hypha's new building on Southwark Bridge Road, a short walk from Tate Modern. That building alone contains around 800 square metres of gallery space. Every show is free to visit, and private views are open to all rather than guest-listed.

Hypha, founded in 2021, belongs to a small but growing group of organisations that match creative practitioners with empty properties in London. Its founder and chief executive Camilla Cole told Ocula that the grass roots of the ecosystem receive little support, saying that securing sites and opportunities is difficult for artists working without commercial backing.

The seven selected projects cover broad ground. One exhibition is described as "fermented and alive", aiming to collapse the distance between laboratory, studio, building site and ecosystem; another gathers 35 members of the 120-year-old Royal Society of Sculptors. All share one condition: they were produced without the prohibitive cost of hiring exhibition space in London, and therefore without commercial pressure.

Curator Salomé Jacques, whose show To the Wonder examines how ancient ideas act on contemporary artists, said she was free to experiment in any way she wanted, and doubted the show could have happened in another space. For a week in which the art world's attention is fixed on the market, the initiative is a reminder of how much of London's art life happens far from the fairgrounds.