Major new London ‘culture hubs’ planned for City and East End

Hark. Do you hear the creaking of timber, the thunder of steel, the grinding of gears, the ringing of a thousand Routemaster bells and an almighty racket as the teeth of enormous cogs engage? It’s the sound of London shifting on its axis. This world we call home, which for as long as any of us can remember has had Piccadilly as its HQ and Notting Hill and Chelsea as its Elysian Fields, is turning east – and not just for hipsters.

In the City of London, the Corporation has approved a wholesale reimagining of the Barbican , the Museum of London and the streetscape as a whole around St Paul’s , with the aim of creating a ‘cultural hub’ to rival Exhibition Road and the South Bank . And further east in Stratford, plans are afoot to open ambitious new theatre and exhibition spaces for Sadler’s Wells , the V&A and even MOMA , alongside a new campus for an expanded University College London . 

Thanks to the Olympics, Stratford station is now one of the best connected in London, while by 2018, Crossrail will bring 90,000 new visitors a day through Farringdon and Moorgate. Transport has been the spur to some genuinely exciting new thinking about how the City and points east should integrate arts and culture into the broader symbolic and architectural infrastructure of the public realm. 

The news that London can look forward to two new ambitious public spaces for arts, culture, and the dining, drinking, promenading and shopping that accompany them is – of course – thrilling and welcome. As the Barbican’s director Sir Nicholas Kenyon put it to CW, ‘Culture is becoming more important than ever to London’s proposition as a world-class city.' Indeed, this regeneration is being seen by many as one of the most exciting upcoming events in East London.

But the two very different schemes also speak volumes about the future of London culture as a whole – where the emphasis is increasingly placed on ‘the human visitor’ and the buzzwords are signage, accessibility and integration, allowing pedestrians to move freely and safely through their city. 

‘Once the City was totally focused on its working community,’ continues Kenyon. ‘Now it realises it needs a visitor strategy and should welcome people in.’ The area around the Museum of London and the Barbican is a typically heterogeneous London mix of the world-famous heritage of St Paul’s, churches like St Giles Cripplegate and St Bartholomew the Great, the Brutalist architecture of the museums themselves, the dual carriageway of London Wall and the frankly horrible Beech Street underpass. No wonder even intrepid visitors get lost and discouraged while exploring the culture of London.

‘Five million trips are made over the Millennium Bridge from the South Bank ever year,’ according to Kenyon, ‘but at present the wayfinding isn’t good enough.’ Additionally, the City ‘is committed to reducing the volume of cars on its streets. London Wall doesn’t need to be four lanes of traffic.’

Antony Robbins is director of communications at the Museum of London. ‘When people think of the city they think of griffins and heritage and traders,’ he says. ‘But it’s changing all around us. The City has a bold cultural strategy it is committed to delivering and we are part of that.’ 

Changing architectural styles speak volumes about a shift in attitudes. Powell & Moya, the team behind the Festival of Britain’s Skylon, designed the London Museum in the early Seventies as a bastion surrounded by a ‘moat’ in the form of a roundabout – an inward-looking and fiercely-defended cultural space that seemingly wanted no truck with the mercantile activity surrounding it. But the problem with fortresses is that they deter friend and foe alike – and besides, in 2014, London’s great cultural institutions work hand-in-hand with the corporates sponsors without which they couldn’t survive. 

The London Museum recently commissioned John McAslan + Partners to audit their existing space with a view to extensive remodelling. ‘There’s a whole world of possibility out there,’ says Robbins, ‘particularly if we’re to achieve our target of more than doubling visitor numbers over the next five years.’ The Museum is pretty set on being even more of a landmark of culture in London.

The Barbican museum and housing estate occupies land devastated by WWII bomb damage. Its Brutalist style is loved and hated in equal measure by the public, but even an architectural cognoscenti like Peter Murray, chairman of New London Architecture, agrees that, while ‘the design of the towers is great, at ground plane, it leaves something to be desired in a modern city.’ 

In the Sixties and Seventies, he explains, ‘Housing estates all over the country were created as ghettoes instead of being integrated into the existing street pattern. There are numerous times when you might go through the Barbican on your way somewhere else, but you don't, because you’re never quite sure if you’ll get out the other side.’ Essentially, he says, the Barbican is now ‘a barrier and it should be welcoming.’ And why can’t its raised walkways be more like New York’s High Line?

A contrasting opportunity awaits the lucky architect commissioned to design Stratford’s brand new arts hub on what amounts to virgin soil. Here, Boris Johnson is proposing ‘ambitious plans’ backed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘to build at least two world-class cultural institutions’, creating a new destination for visitors much like that built by Prince Albert after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Albert used the profits to develop the cluster of museums in South Kensington that were nicknamed ‘Albertopolis’ and continue to draw millions of visitors from London and the world. 

‘Olympicopolis’ will include a new university campus, courtesy of University College London, and the development of V&A East, ‘an exciting opportunity for the V&A,’ says its director Martin Roth, ‘to make more of its collections and expertise available to more people. Importantly, it will be based in an area of London with an already thriving network of creative industries.’

Sadler’s Wells, too, is on board to expand east, as an insider revealed exclusively to Culture Whisper. ‘London is now the dance capital of the world. We have more exciting home-grown choreographers than anywhere else, and contemporary dance is experiencing a transformation as radical as the Sixties was for popular music.’

Sadler’s Wells move east is a very far from a de haut en bas affair. The venue has an urgent need for a mid-sized theatre in addition to its three Rosebery Avenue and Portugal Street performance spaces. ‘We looked at King’s Cross, Earl’s Court, and Battersea, and the Stratford site was the most attractive geographically and physically. A lot of new dance talent has come from the street up and much of our audience is from the East End, so it feels right and proper to open a more intimate and flexible space there. We are of course still looking at other possible spaces because nothing has been signed and the money hasn’t been agreed, there is a way to go yet.'

'I think this development, if it does get off the ground,' our insider continues, 'will recalibrate London’s view of what constitutes culture, just as Tate Modern did 30 years ago and the National Theatre in the 60s. Buildings are fascinatingly important as agents of cultural change and reassessment. Oddly more so than the work within them.'

‘Londoners have an enormous cultural enthusiasm,’ says Kenyon. ‘Despite the economic downturn, last year was our best ever for ticket sales, which goes to show that even – or perhaps especially – in difficulty times people turn to something that’s worthwhile.’

As for whether dear old London can successfully, albeit creakily, turn itself to face the land of the rising sun, ‘you only have to look at Berlin’s old west and new east,’ points out Kenyon, ‘to see how cities can and do change their focus in quite radical ways.’

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