Kenyon Building Utopia: The Barbican Centre

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-84994-780-0
Verlag: Batsford
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

A beautifully designed celebration of the 40th birthday of the Barbican Arts Centre, in the heart of the City of London. It is the largest multi-arts centre in Europe, encompassing an art gallery, theatres, concert halls, cinemas and a much-loved conservatory, and regular collaborators include the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Compiled by Nicholas Kenyon, the Barbican Centre's Managing Director 2007-2021, this is an in-depth exploration of the centre, drawing on the vast array of material available in its archives, much of which has never been seen before. It includes plans and photographs from the centre's design and construction, original signage and branding, and brochures and programmes. All this is accompanied by a wealth of photographs of the huge range of performances and exhibitions that have taken place over the years, from early RSC performances to the popular Rain Room installation of 2012 to today's impressive programme of events put together in conjunction with schools and the local community. The book's authoritative and evocative text includes: - Foreword by Fiona Shaw - Introduction by Sir Nicholas Kenyon - Cultural historian Robert Hewison on how the centre came into being - Architectural historian Elain Harwood on its architecture - Music critic Fiona Maddocks on music - Writer and theatre critic Lyn Gardner on theatre - Editor and creative director Tony Chambers on visual art - Author and film critic Sukhdev Sandhu on filmWith listings of Barbican events from 1982 to the present day, and snippets of oral history from some of the many people associated with the centre over the years, this sumptuous book is an invaluable companion to one of the world's most important cultural spaces.

Nicholas Kenyon was Managing Director of the Barbican Centre from 2007 to 2021. He was previously a music critic for The New Yorker, Times and Observer, then Controller, BBC Radio 3, and Director of the BBC Proms 1996-2007. He is now Opera Critic of the Telegraph and a Visiting Scholar of the Music Faculty, University of Cambridge. He has written books on Bach, Mozart, and Simon Rattle; he edited The City of London: Architectural Traditionand Innovation in the Square Mile.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kenyon, Nicholas

Leseproben

‘Serious and fine entertainment’: Creating an arts centre for the City

Robert Hewison

On 12 June 1945, in that strange space between the end of the war in Europe and the end of the war in Japan, when a Conservative government had taken over from the wartime coalition to prepare for a general election, the economist John Maynard Keynes gave a talk on the BBC Home Service, announcing the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB). Keynes was the architect of the United Kingdom’s finances, but for the past three years he had also been chairman of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, CEMA, now given a permanent role in the post-war settlement as the Arts Council of Great Britain. As Keynes remarked: ‘I do not believe it is yet realised what an important thing has happened. Strange patronage of the arts has crept in. It has happened in a very English, informal way — half-baked, if you like.’ The published transcript ironically does say ‘strange’, but he meant ‘state’ patronage, signalling that, just as they had raised morale during the war, the arts had a public role to play in post-war reconstruction. Keynes declared: ‘Our wartime experience has led us already to one clear discovery: the unsatisfied demand and the enormous public for serious and fine entertainment.’

Keynes recognised that the destruction of wartime had only added to the cultural challenges the country faced: ‘We shall have to solve what will be our biggest problem, the shortage — in most parts of Britain the complete absence — of adequate and suitable buildings. There never were many theatres in this country or any concert-halls or galleries worth counting.’ He acknowledged the priority of housing, but, pointing to Russia, expressed the hope that in every blitzed town, ‘the local authority will make provision for a central group of buildings for drama and music and art.’ London, however, was a different case: ‘It is also our business to make London a great artistic metropolis, a place to wonder at. For this purpose London today is half a ruin.’

Nowhere more so than in the square mile where the Barbican Arts Centre would be built. Nicholas Kenyon describes (see here) the circumstances that led to the creation of this superb facility. Post-war reconstruction led the Corporation of the City of London to become one of the greatest patrons of the arts in the country. This chapter explores how the British concept of an ‘arts centre’ developed, and asks if the City foresaw its leading role in its development. Arts centres are not only a distinct kind of organisation, but a new building type. It is not clear that at first the City really did understand what it was doing, but the results are to be celebrated.

When Keynes spoke of a ‘central group of buildings’ as the basis of an arts centre, there were few precedents to go on. During the Depression, the American Federal Works Progress Administration had set up over a hundred ‘arts centers’, mainly in regional locations. In 1943 W E Williams, a future ACGB secretary-general, published an article in ‘Are We Building A New Culture?’, in which he proposed ‘a national grid of cultural centres’. These would be ‘civic centres where men and women may satisfy the whole range of educational and cultural interests, between keeping fit and popular argument.’ He may have been thinking of the Peckham Experiment, a health and social centre established in a fine modernist purpose-built building in South London in 1935. In 1945 CEMA sent out a touring exhibition, , ‘designed to show how the arts can be accommodated in a medium-sized town … where it is not economically possible to run a separate theatre, art gallery and hall for concerts.’ Despite Keynes’s broadcast appeal to let ‘every part of Merry England be merry in its own way’, did not have his elitist approval: ‘Who on earth foisted this rubbish on us?’ he asked.

At first ACGB supported some amateur-run arts clubs, and a single converted building as an arts centre in Bridgwater, Somerset, but as the Gulbenkian Foundation’s report, , warned in 1959: ‘The terms arts centres and arts clubs can be misleading because they are used without distinction.’ Only 1 per cent of ACGB’s budget went on this area, and when W E Williams became secretary-general in 1951 and instituted his own elitist policy of selectively nurturing ‘few, but roses’, this funding ceased altogether. No one appears to have theorised much about what an arts centre might be, but in 1947 a different model was launched, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which moved from the basement of London’s Academy Cinema into a club-house in Dover Street in 1950. In its original form it was more think-tank than arts centre, until it expanded to its present premises in The Mall in 1968, by which time the combination of theatre, gallery, cinema, seminar room, shop and café under one roof had become the standard model. The Barbican, however, would be of a different scale and order.

In 1947 there was a warning of cultural conflicts to come when the Edinburgh International Festival opened with an upmarket programme. Provoked by the dearth of Scottish culture in the official Festival, eight theatre companies, six of them Scottish, independently organised their own theatre spaces and performances. People began to talk of a ‘fringe’ of events. That Fringe Theatre was born out of opposition to official culture, with its emphasis on new work and the often improvised nature of the spaces that it used, had a long-term influence on how theatre, indeed all culture, was thought about.

After a brief Labour dawn, in the 1950s Conservative retrenchment — symbolised by tearing down all but the Royal Festival Hall on the Festival of Britain’s South Bank site — left ACGB to concentrate on ‘few, but roses’. The arts centre movement would have to wait until the return of Labour in 1964 and Jennie Lee’s appointment as the first minister for the arts. In 1956, however, the Conservative government set up an enquiry, serviced by ACGB, whose report would appear in 1959 as The London County Council (LCC), owner of the former Festival site, was quick to promote its plans for a National Theatre (mentioned in Keynes’s 1945 talk) and other facilities, including possibly an opera house. ACGB supported the City of London’s initiatives, and a notion of what the Barbican might be appeared in the 1959 report when it welcomed ‘a carefully planned enclave of buildings connected with the arts as distinct from the haphazard growth of theatres, halls, and galleries on the North Bank’.

proposed an almost Soviet hierarchy of provision on eight levels, rising from a town of 10,000 people, which would have amateur provision only, to a region of 10 million, with every facility, including a permanent professional opera company. But there was no money. The following year a more radical conception of what an arts centre might be began to develop when the Trades Union Congress passed Resolution 42 at its annual congress, committing it to encouraging the arts. The playwright Arnold Wesker gathered a group of leftist, CND-minded supporters, including Jennie Lee (then an opposition MP) with the aim of establishing a ‘cultural hub’, Centre 42. In 1964 this turned out to be an 1847 former engine-turning shed in Camden, the Roundhouse. Wesker was unable to raise enough money and the partially converted Roundhouse had to be run on semi-commercial lines, supported by the Greater London Council, successor in 1965 to the LCC. Raves and radical theatre continued, to the delight of an audience unlikely to attend classical concerts. Centre 42 wound up in 1970, but the Roundhouse survived, undergoing its own successful transformation under the Roundhouse Trust in 1998.

The Festival of Britain site on the South Bank in May 1951, of which only the Royal Festival Hall, designed by Leslie Martin and Peter Moro with the London County Council, was preserved for the future.

Another approach to the idea of an arts centre was launched in 1964, the year that a truly imaginative conception was proposed by the theatre director Joan Littlewood, of Stratford East fame, and the experimental architect Cedric Price — the Fun Palace. This would be: ‘a university of the streets. It will be a laboratory of pleasure, providing room for many kinds of action. But the essence of the place will be its informality; nothing is obligatory, anything goes.’

The roots of the Fun Palace idea may be found in 18th-century pleasure gardens, but this was the spirit of the 60s, and, like much of that spirit, it evaporated without becoming reality. It was not one that would appeal to the planners of the Barbican. Centre 42, however, did make an appearance when in 1965 Jennie Lee published a White Paper, the UK’s first ever The suggestion of a Centre 42 in every town echoes the Keynes broadcast of 1945, with a touch of Festival of Britain rhetoric on top: ‘It is partly a question of bridging the gap between what have come to be called the “higher” forms of entertainment and the traditional sources … and to challenge the fact that a gap exists.’

In this policy document the arts centre concept ran from...