Olympicopolis and the London museums and cultural buildings getting a new look in 2015

Over the next two years many of London’s museums, theatres and galleries are being redesigned or extended — but a city whose culture is vital to its global status needs more than a makeover
Remodelled: design proposal for the Science Museum's mathematics gallery (Picture: Zaha Hadid Architects)
Robert Bevan16 December 2014

In 2015 London will see the first tasters of an architectural feast that’s being laid out for the city in the form of the expansion and upgrade of the capital’s great cultural buildings. Work has already started on the remodelling of the Science Museum’s galleries while the subtle make-over of the National Theatre is due to complete in February — as is the expansion of the Wellcome Collection’s galleries with its fine new staircase by Wilkinson Eyre.

In April, the Royal Academy finally begins its clever David Chipperfield-designed Burlington Project that will connect its buildings through from Piccadilly to Burlington Gardens. The refurbishment phases of the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery will begin in the autumn.

Amanda Levete’s Exhibition Road building has also broken ground and the refurbishment of the old Commonwealth Institute into the new Design Museum by architect John Pawson is proceeding nicely — its old Shad Thames building closes at the end of the year ahead of the move west. Herzog & de Meuron’s spiralling and burrowing extension to the Tate Modern is stuttering towards completion in 2016, while the next phase of Norman Foster’s Imperial War Museum’s reorganisation is on the horizon.

London's cultural buildings getting a new look in 2015

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Further back down the design production line are Niall McLaughlin and Kim Wilkie’s improvements to the Natural History Museum and the recently mooted move of the Museum of London to the temporarily reprieved former market buildings at Smithfield. As with most architectural projects on such a scale, their opening dates are moveable.

Over in east London, a glittering shortlist of the design consortiums bidding to build Olympicopolis was announced last Friday. The Boris Johnson-backed cultural precinct planned for the south end of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park should see a branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum and Sadler’s Wells theatre come to east London alongside new campuses for the University of the Arts and University College. There are no designs as yet but in his Autumn Statement this month, George Osborne pledged £141 million in government support for an idea that we’re told will deliver 1.5 million additional visitors to the Stratford area.

Of course, east London has never been devoid of culture but its big cultural institutions are few. Perhaps the largest being an existing branch of the V&A in the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green, the Hackney Empire up the road, and Whitechapel Gallery. So Olympicopolis is a welcome counterbalance to the cultural weight of Albertopolis in west London; the historic home of the great suite of Natural History, Science and V&A museums, its music and art schools and the Albert Hall.

The Olympicopolis proposal reflects a shift in the city that has for more than a century seen its sites of cultural production — its artists’ studios, its workshops, its creative nightlife move steadily eastward — from Chelsea and St John’s Wood to Soho and Bloomsbury then, in recent decades, galloping east to Shoreditch, Dalston and Hackney Wick, bringing new life to the legacy of the industrial east in the process.

Olympicopolis represents, then, the beginning of a reconfiguration of the cultural landscape for London — a commensurate shift to the east in cultural consumption to follow all that production; a timely spreading of the love. But it is a small piece of the cultural infrastructure cake since what is immediately noticeable about the other projects is that they mostly relate to existing buildings and locations. This makes a lot of sense — they are long-standing cultural depositories with a proven track record and the proposals are generally finely tuned. Far better this than the scattergun approach we saw around the Millennium where Lottery successes (Tate Modern, the British Museum Great Court) were matched by others of ill-judged, content-lite flamboyance, fur coat and no knickers architecture (the Millennium Dome, and The Public in West Bromwich, which failed utterly and is now being repurposed).

In reality, London’s cultural landscape is being exquisitely titivated rather than fundamentally replanted. The public funding for Olympicopolis and all points east south or north is minimal when you remember that Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge alone will swallow £60 million in public cash from Transport for London and the Treasury (while still lacking a cycle lane and with planned closures for private events). The Mayor’s cultural strategy makes great play of directing investment to the arts in the outer boroughs but, Stratford apart, this simply isn’t happening beyond the occasional face-painting festival.

This at a time when London is undergoing development on a scale not seen for more than a generation. Add up the acreage of just some of the bigger ventures: 40 acres of Convoys Wharf, (the former Deptford Dockyard); 77 acres of Earls Court; 482 acres around Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms; 383 acres at Old Oak Common. That’s almost 1,000 acres in these projects alone — some 666 football pitches or three Hyde Parks, with millions of square feet of new floorspace built on them. They are providing invaluable infrastructure, workplaces and housing (for those who can afford it) but for all the many billions being spent almost nothing is being spent on arts premises. There’s a “boutique” theatre proposed at Battersea. That’s about it. The King’s Cross development, for all its virtues, has only found space for the tiny House of Illustration in its eight million sq ft of new uses. Central Saint Martins, as a relocation of an existing facility, doesn’t entirely count; its old Soho home is being redeveloped as lofts. (The lovely Kings Place lies outside the boundary of this development.)

It has long been thus: billions more has been spent since the Eighties on mile upon mile of development north of the Thames, between Canary Wharf and Woolwich with, culturally, little to show for it other than the underperforming Museum of London Docklands.

Instead, the creative East has had to pull itself up by its bootstraps and now that it has succeeded, its studios and workshops and cheap offices are threatened by the arrival of investment condos.

David Chipperfield recently compared London unfavourably with Berlin — he works a good deal in both and is among those in the running for Olympicopolis. While admiring the energy of London’s museums, he says London has given up on its public realm, leaving it to the private sector. But the private sector’s recent record in creating public cultural spaces in London is lamentable. Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, set to open in Vauxhall next autumn is a rare exception, while the competition for a new Crystal Palace in south London is on hold as its Chinese developers liaise on the land deal with Bromley council. We are left with the same uneven cultural terrain as before.

Olympicopolis is a great start but more needs to be done if Londoners are to have more equitable access to the arts and its creatives a place to create them. Culture, a mainstay of London’s global status, must have a greater role in this wholesale reshaping of tracts of the city.

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