Correspondent Shai Akram will be sending us live updates of the London Design Festival 2010, which kicked off this past weekend. She describes the lay of the land in her introductory post below. Keep up with all London Design Festival posts here or check in at our growing photo gallery.

Prepping for a day of exploring the London Design Festival.

London is a city of many parts, any resident will tell you that independent, grimy East is a world away from its polished West-side sister. The festival embraces these differences and amplifies them further with the creation of distinct districts within each area.

Alongside the long standing amalgamated shows like Tent, the East is further broken down into stand-alone segments—the Shoreditch Triangle sees shows from emerging designers who have set up their studios and workshops in the surrounding areas, while just around the corner, Redchurch Street hosts the very first anarchist Anti-Design Festival (more on this later). The Brompton Quarter in West London is home to a series of conceptual exhibitions, work shown here includes combinations of designers and fine artists backed up by a comprehensive programme of events at the Victoria & Albert Museum—breakfast talks exploring the relationship between design and culture start the day and late night events keep the conversations going into the evenings.

Central London is no slouch either. Trafalgar Square is transformed with the enormous light paintings by Outrace and the Aram Gallery has a solo show of Dutch designer Ineke Hans. Incidentally, the curator of the Aram is also one of the driving forces behind the Anti-Design Festival back East.

London Town, place of many parts, has MASSES to show us this LDF! Enjoy!