JUST WHEN you thought you couldn’t be surprised by what London’s Institute of Contemporary Art finds culturally significant, it has announced that it is to recreate the interior of the George and Dragon, a Shoreditch pub beloved of self-consciously slumming-it pop and art wastrels.

The exhibit will be an “abstract” of the real pub, says landlord Richard Battye. You will be able to order beer and tequila at the bar and drink it within the confines of the installation. The only art you will find will be in a Portaloo, itself a mirror of the public house’s real lavatories.

Some might say that the grotto-like interior of the Hackney Road pub is already artful, with its goat’s head, its coloured plate chandelier and Joan Collins cut-outs. And indeed some of these fixtures, as well as actual chairs and tables, will be going to the ICA.

Is it art? Well, Battye was a performance artist before he opened the pub, and he has brought a lot of imagination to its management, attracting a clientele of artists, writers, locals and pleasure-seeking tourists. Gregor Muir, the ICA curator responsible for the choice, speaks of it in very grand terms. “It’s like some kind of wunderkammer,” he muses, adding, as if Battye was painting oils rather than pulling pints, that they intend to “recreate the work practices” of the pub.

The George and Dragon installation is only one part of the idea for the ICA show, London in Six Easy Steps, which came out of the urban peregrinations of the exhibition’s creator, Jens Hoffman.

When he arrived in his post two years ago he set about familiarising himself with the city and discovering what fuelled its culture. Rather than present his own report, however, he turned over the job of describing London to a diverse team of curators who each have a week to sum up their vision of the place.

The art on show is likely to be various. There will be some traditional painting: the third week sees a show including work by the British Modernists Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth, a portrait bust by Eduardo Paolozzi, and drawings of an Elysian afterlife by the Pop artist Colin Self.

Other weeks see work by younger artists. Mark Leckey depicts Big Ben apparently being seized by an Ice Age in a work which stands halfway between sculpture and shop display; Daria Martin offers a script for a film about a man donning uniform during the Blitz; and David Thorp blends axe motifs in a design so arcanely Masonic that it might be an insignia for a City Guild.

One week even sees a solo exhibition by David Medella, the kinetic sculptor of the 1960s, creator of mud and bubble machines, and founder of the London biennale.

In the third week the artist John Fawcett will lead visitors on a walk around the local area to view an object in the sky which he describes as the Common Star, and which he says is moving in a path across London that will take 17 years to complete. (Don’t worry, the walk should end by dinner-time.)

Some might see the ICA show as just a hangover from Cool Britannia, London’s rather inward-looking cultural boosterism of the 1990s, and of course cities are always keen to put themselves forward as the brightest and best. But the ICA’s show isn’t about claiming the Zeitgeist for London.The best parts of it carry some intriguing historical echoes that remind one that while the city might be changing, it’s also staying the same.

For instance, in many respects Battye’s George and Dragon reminds one of the boisterous street life and commercial culture that flourished in the 18th century. If the capital’s coffee houses were the wellsprings of culture in that period, the bars may be their modern equivalent, and Battye’s pub an echo of the kind of Beer Street hostelry that Hogarth celebrated in his prints.

In the 19th century, artists were more attracted to the river than the commercial centre. Turner was born and died within sight of the Thames; Whistler sought out Turner’s boatmen to take him to the sites in Battersea that inspired his hero. Monet won acclaim for the river views that he painted while holed up at the newly built Savoy Hotel in 1900; years later Derain followed in his footsteps in the hope of trumping those scenes.