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The granting of Grade II-listed building status to the brutalist concrete Southbank Centre, comprising the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery and Purcell Room, is a bold embrace by the government of this London landmark. It is also timely. Seventy-five years ago, the 1951 Festival of Britain transformed the South Bank. Of its buildings, only the Royal Festival Hall remains.
From its postwar beginnings, the South Bank has grown into a cultural landmark recognised far beyond London. The section of the Thames Path taking in the Southbank Centre, BFI cinemas, Royal National Theatre, Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe is the flourishing successor to the Victorian precinct of the Kensington museums and the Royal Albert Hall. The festival was designed to help the nation to recover from the traumatic years of the second world war, and to look forward to a better future. This month’s decision to protect the 1960s component of the Southbank Centre is a vindication of that vision of hope.
In architectural terms, the listing closes a decades-long argument about postwar Britain and what it chose to build. Previous recommendations to list the centre, which was completed in 1968, were rejected. Sir Denys Lasdun’s Royal National Theatre, built from similar concrete nearby, was listed more than 30 years ago. Unlike Lasdun’s theatre, the Southbank Centre – conceived by a London county council team led by Norman Engleback – divided opinion from the beginning. In 1967, the Daily Mail carried a headline asking “Is this Britain’s ugliest building?”
While millions of people have been entertained by an extraordinary range of exhibitions and performances in its venues, it is fair to say that the centre’s grey, blocky appearance, maze of walkways and undercroft do not please everyone. For some, it is bleak and oppressive; for others, monumental and public. Brutalism’s uncompromising nature means that it is never likely to be universally liked. But the period in which its grandest edifices were regarded as blots to be erased is thankfully over. Catherine O’Flynn wrote a novel that was partially inspired by regret over the demolition of John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library. Adrien Brody won an Oscar last year for his performance as a brutalist architect. Public housing projects such as Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in London and Park Hill in Sheffield now appear on tea towels and mugs.
But while the Southbank Centre belongs to the same family, architecturally speaking, its purpose is different. And having taken the decision to conserve the buildings, ministers must ensure that they can work. Recent decades have seen several redevelopment schemes aimed at increasing commercial space, in order to improve the Southbank Centre’s finances and reduce its dependence on grants. Each has failed, with plans to move the riverside skatepark proving a particular sticking-point.
This decision draws a line under all this. Altering the site in future will be far more difficult. With conservation now a paramount concern, ministers must also back the artists and curators who keep the place alive. Its origins lie in a moment when Britain believed the state should build boldly for the public good. The Southbank Centre has requested £30m from the government. Having ruled against redevelopment, ministers must show their support for the innovators of the present.
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