The art of being Andy

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If you hadn't noticed, Andy Warhol is taking over London.

While Tate Modern gears up for the largest-ever retrospective of his work, Warhol's images are plastered across the capital on 50 billboards - Marilyn Monroe opposite the MI6 building, Chairman Mao at Clapham Junction, a Campbell's soup tin on Whitechapel Road and Jackie O on the North Circular: art as part of the city landscape. Warhol would certainly have approved. And he would have liked the fact that it's all taking place here, in one of his favourite cities.

Andy Warhol had a tourist's relationship with London. He'd fly in for a few days to attend an exhibition of his works and would spend his visit juggling the sights with a blur of galleries, restaurants and clubs. Parties were thrown in his honour whenever he was in town and he packed as many as he could into each night.

Tuesday, 20 June 1978 was typically eventful. Nicky Haslam gave a party for him at Pat Harmsworth's on Eaton Square where, according to The Andy Warhol Diaries, he remembers, 'talking dirty to Clarissa Baring' and declared, 'The English girls are so beautiful. I don't know how the English made so many aristocratic-looking people.' After that, Warhol and his entourage went to a party thrown for Bob Dylan at Glebe Place, where he met up with Bianca Jagger, and Dylan 'kept introducing me to the girls around him - really beautiful, dykey girls who were lying over the floor'.

Warhol enjoyed the Savoy Grill but hated the hotel ('so expensive') and vowed never to set foot there again after a visit in 1979. The Dorchester was more impressive and prompted Warhol to comment, 'If the whole world were British, it would run so great', but he spent most time at The Ritz, where his final hotel bill in 1986 was $10,000.

Warhol ate most often at Mr Chow, the London version of his favoured New York eaterie, although he also dined at La Famiglia and Morton's. He liked to wander along the King's Road during the day and spent an afternoon there in 1978 jokingly trying to sell his autograph to passers-by. He shopped at Seditionaries, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's punk emporium, and partied at Caf? Royal, Heaven, Tramp and the Embassy. In fact, he had so much fun in 1978 he decided that London was 'better than New York in the Sixties'. The ultimate compliment.

Now, 15 years after his death and 35 years after he notoriously said, 'In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,' Warhol is as relevant as ever. As an exponent of Pop Art, Warhol reacted against the Abstract Expressionists by deifying commercialism. Whereas Jackson Pollock created vast canvases that the young New York set dismissed as 'soup', Warhol made art from the most everyday objects he could find: billboard hoardings, cartoons and, brilliantly, tins of Campbell's finest. He also adored fame and beauty, placing value in the transient and ephemeral - so much so he declared himself to be 'deeply superficial'.

Warhol understood modern life down to the last fleeting infatuation. You can see his fingerprints on everything from Big Brother to artists such as Jeff Koons and every musician who's ever paid homage to the Velvet Underground and Warhol's pristine vision of cool.

Andy Warhol, by his friends
TATE MODERN: Handy Warhol comes to town
Andy Warhol: A Chronology
Win a fantastic Andy Warhol art book!
Gallery: Andy Warhol - in pictures