South Bank: Architecture & Design E-Book

Dominic Bradbury

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 158

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Architecture and design specialist Dominic Bradbury draws back the curtain on the iconic South Bank, providing an unrivalled insight into the buildings that populate one of London's epicentres of art and entertainment. Encompassing an art gallery, theatres, festival halls and a cinema, the South Bank is a cultural hub in the heart of London. South Bank: Architecture & Design is a beautifully crafted celebration of its sublime, community-focused architecture. The book opens with an origin story, unravelling the evolution of this riverside enclave since the 1951 Festival of Britain catapulted it onto the scene and exploring the renowned architects and designers that have shaped this space throughout the mid-century and beyond. Much of the book is devoted to the buildings themselves, all of which are accompanied by Bradbury's authoritative text and richly illustrated with photography by Rachael Smith. The buildings include: • Royal Festival Hall • Hayward Gallery • Queen Elizabeth Hall and The Purcell Room • National Film Theatre/BFI • National Theatre This sumptuous book is an invaluable purchase for anyone intrigued by our built heritage and cultural spaces.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CONTEXT

THE BUILDINGS

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL

NATIONAL FILM THEATRE

QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL & PURCELL ROOM

HAYWARD GALLERY

NATIONAL THEATRE

CHRONOLOGY

FOOTNOTES

DIRECTORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

London’s South Bank has a unique character all of its own. The setting, on the edge of the capital’s great winding waterway, encapsulates a powerful sense of national optimism, yet also serves as a focal point – in many respects – for creative experimentation, embracing the arts, architecture and the wider cultural life of the country. The South Bank plays host to a collection of our most important and influential post-war institutions, including the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre, while many of these buildings also provide key landmarks in the evolution of British architecture.

The riverside here was, famously, the chosen site for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Apart from London’s County Hall, which was largely completed by 1922, this stretch of the Thames was still dominated by wharves, factories and power stations during the Forties, when the site was first suggested as a suitable location for the Festival. The clear advantages offered by the South Bank included its proximity to central London and its major transport hubs, as well as offering the open space needed for such an ambitious national event.

The Festival itself marked the 100th anniversary of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 and, like its predecessor, was intended as a celebration of national identity, encompassing a range of carefully curated themes. But, perhaps more importantly, it was widely seen as a moment of renewal or renaissance after the traumas of World War II and continuing austerity, which saw rationing carrying all the way through to 1954. The Festival of Britain was a moment when the country gave thanks but also looked to the future, with technology and modernity providing important strands with the choice of exhibition pavilions.

The vast majority of these pavilions were designed to be temporary, yet there was one key exception. The Royal Festival Hall, which also opened in 1951, was not only the major venue and performance space for the Festival itself but was always intended to provide a lynchpin for a new cultural campus situated on the South Bank. The architecture and design of the building offered, arguably, the most complete and rounded expression of the International Style seen in London, and the country more widely, up to that point. It was a symbol of modernism and, in some respects, a statement of intent for the future direction of the South Bank and its architecture.

The river and its bridges help to define the South Bank site, with the Royal Festival Hall sitting between the Hungerford and Waterloo Bridges.

Yet the subsequent evolution of the former Festival site was, for many reasons, slow and convoluted. Under the guidance of the London County Council’s (LCC) architecture department, situated at nearby County Hall, progress was glacial. With the notable exception of the British Film Institute (BFI), which was slotted underneath Waterloo Bridge, very little happened on the site until the early Sixties. By this time, architecture itself had moved on and subsequent buildings such as the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall adopted a dynamic brutalist style.

Next door, Denys Lasdun was entrusted with the design of the National Theatre at around the same time. Here, again, Lasdun famously embraced concrete and expressed his devotion to layered, stratified structural solutions, creating a building of extraordinary complexity that provides a series of inspiring performance spaces, as well as other communal gathering points, all placed under a single roof. Given the scale and ambition of the National Theatre, it was not completed until 1976 but was also radical in its design philosophy and aesthetic approach. This was a love it or loathe it building, provoking both praise and criticism, becoming one of the most controversial landmarks of the ‘style wars’, which raged in Britain during the Eighties.

With the opening of the National Theatre, the dream of a cultural campus upon the South Bank was largely realized. The Thames-side site was now home to theatre, art, music and more, with all of these ingredients situated little more than a stone’s throw from one another. There was a catalytic quality to these national institutions, helping to draw incomers such as London Weekend Television (LWT), who built their own headquarters nearby during the Seventies, while just a short walk away IPC Magazines moved into Richard Seifert’s King’s Reach Tower. Denys Lasdun was also persuaded to return once more to design a new base for IBM, right next door to the National Theatre.

The South Bank offers both a cultural campus and a waterfront promenade, home to sculptures such as Frank Dobson’s London Pride (1951).

The South Bank site provides a microcosm of the evolution of British architecture, including experimental designs and sculptural elements, such as the spiral stairway alongside Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The idea of the South Bank as a microcosm of British architecture continued through the decades, with the journey taking in the International Style, brutalism and important exemplars of adaptive reuse, as seen in the transformation of the OXO Tower from a former factory to a mixed-use building, which included restaurants, galleries, shops and apartments. In the run-up to the millennium, the South Bank was chosen again to serve as a focal point for national celebration and became home to Marks Barfield’s Millennium Wheel, better known as the London Eye. Fusing advanced engineering and a fresh architectural approach, the arrival of the great wheel felt very much in keeping with the avant garde spirit of the South Bank. Since then, other important attractions have arrived on the South Bank, with the London Aquarium taking up residence in County Hall in 1997, while just along the Thames the Tate Modern opened its doors at the former Bankside Power Station during the year of the millennium.

Since 1951 and the Festival of Britain, the South Bank has become one of London’s best loved quarters. The combination of people’s palaces, tourist attractions, parks, gardens and a riverside setting – with its many advantages – means that the South Bank has an exceptional position within the cultural life of the capital. It remains as vibrant and engaging as ever.

CONTEXT

Beyond Waterloo Bridge sits the National Theatre and a collection of towers, including Richard Seifert’s King’s Reach, SimpsonHaugh’s One Blackfriars and – over to the right – Renzo Piano’s Shard.

SITE & SETTING

Today, the South Bank feels very much like an intrinsic part of central London. It is just a short walk from the Strand, over Waterloo Bridge, and has an easy sense of connection with many of the neighbouring quarters, including Covent Garden to the north as well as Southwark and Bankside further along the southern shore of the Thames. It is also well connected to a handful of key transport links, including the river clippers that constantly make their way up and down the river, with the eastern stops reaching as far as Canary Wharf and Greenwich.

It is the Thames itself, of course, which helps to make the South Bank so special. The generous scale of the riverside promenade here ensures enjoyment of the open vistas across the water towards the cityscape beyond, while the river frontage forms an urban parkland in itself, full of light, where the pedestrian takes priority while cars and buses are pushed to the periphery. All of this helps to lend the South Bank a welcoming character all of its own, with the landscaping of both the Queen’s Walk promenade and Jubilee Gardens enhancing appreciation of an extraordinary collection of cultural institutions and landmark attractions spread out along the riverside. There is still a sense here, as originally intended back in the Forties and Fifties, of a communal cultural campus that belongs to everyone rather than just a small elite.

The former offices at Sea Containers now serve as a luxury hotel, while the OXO Tower can be seen to the right. Seifert’s King’s Reach office tower has been converted into an apartment building.

In many respects, the gift of the riverside setting, combined with its central geographical position within the capital, helped to ensure the success of both the South Bank in general and the 1951 Festival of Britain in particular, which saw millions of visitors arrive here, mostly by public transport, and enjoy what was billed as ‘a tonic to the nation’.1 The restaurants and pavilions created for the Festival were decidedly new and modern, yet the outlook encompassed London’s historic cityscape and framed views of the capital’s familiar heartland.

Before the Festival, however, the South Bank was a little-loved space. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the area was home to wharves, warehouses, factories and breweries, all making use of the river frontage but also suffering from occasional flooding. During the late 18th century the Albert Embankment was built close by, helping to stabilize the southern banks between Vauxhall and Lambeth, yet the project stopped short of the South Bank.

The area was shaped further – or misshaped – by the arrival of the railways, with multiple lines carved through the streets of Georgian and Victorian terraces, as well as pushing their way across the Thames. The legacy of the railways is still ever present here, seen not just at nearby stations such as Waterloo, Charing Cross, Blackfriars and London Bridge, but also visible within the complex network of arterial viaducts and cuttings, as well as the river crossings. The South Bank itself is interrupted by the Hungerford Railway Bridge, which heads over the river to Charing Cross. The 1864 railway crossing, designed by John Hawkshaw, controversially replaced a former suspension footbridge here designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with the gesture of a walkway added alongside the railway crossing offering some small compensation to pedestrians.2

The transformation of the South Bank really began during the early 20th century with the arrival of the London County Council (LCC). The LCC was first established in 1889 and originally based at Spring Gardens, in St James’, within the home of the former Metropolitan Board of Works. But as the LCC began to grow and take on new responsibilities, as well as staff, it was clear that a new and purpose-built headquarters would be needed. After much debate, the LCC agreed to buy a large site on the south of the river, which had formerly been home to flour mills, workshops and factories.

Part of the intention of choosing a site on the ‘wrong side of the river’ was to stimulate growth in Lambeth, with recognition that the area was in need of regeneration. Situated right alongside Westminster Bridge, which had been rebuilt in the 1860s, the site was also close to the Palace of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament, with a tram line linking the two sides of the river all the way up to 1952.

Architect Ralph Knott won the commission to design the principal, six-storey block of County Hall in an ‘Edwardian baroque’ style, with the imposing design embracing the riverside setting. Construction began in 1911 with completion in 1922, when the building was officially opened by King George V. Barely a decade later, it was clear that more space was needed and two additional blocks were added, completed in 1939, while County Hall was designated a Grade II* listed building in 1951.

Much as intended, County Hall eventually became a catalyst for the revival of the South Bank. As the LCC itself evolved, the centre of gravity shifted southwards with not just politicians but planners, architects and urbanists all drawn to their County Hall offices and to the South Bank. Like so much of London, the area suffered significant damage from wartime bombing, but by the early Forties the South Bank had also been earmarked by the LCC itself as a potential site for the development of new cultural institutions for the capital.

Patrick Abercrombie and J.H. Forshaw’s County of London Plan, commissioned by the LCC and completed in 1943, suggested removing the ‘semi-derelict’ riverside wharves and warehouses along the South Bank and replacing them with ‘a great cultural centre’ that might include a new theatre, a concert hall and the ‘headquarters of various organizations’. That same year, the Royal Society of Arts first suggested the idea of a festival to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, an idea taken up and supported by newspaper editor Gerald Barry, who promoted the idea in the pages of his News Chronicle two years later in an open letter to the then president of the Board of Trade, Stafford Cripps; Barry would later become director general of the Festival of Britain.

Over the following years, these various ambitions overlapped and intertwined. The LCC held on to the idea, or ideal, of the South Bank as London’s new cultural campus, with the Royal Festival Hall forming the first and most important element of a bespoke collection of venues. But around this there was the wider idea of a truly national celebration, with the South Bank serving as the focal point for a dedicated assembly of pavilions celebrating Britain’s national identity, while symbolizing post-war recovery and also looking forward to the future, in a similar way to the Great Exhibition of 1851. In this way, this once neglected part of the Thames became a kind of dreamland, where the hopes and ambitions of a growing number of politicians, planners, architects, designers and artists began to coalesce and combine.

The OXO Tower is now home to a blend of apartments, restaurants and retail, all adding to the increasingly cosmopolitan mix on the South Bank.

Despite its many advantages, central location and riverside setting, the South Bank site still presented many challenges. One of the first and most important tasks was to stabilize the riverbank itself, with the creation of a new river wall along the southern shore of the Thames, which helped to reclaim an extra 1.8 hectares (4.5 acres) of land. ‘It has quite transformed the familiar patchwork of rubble and half-derelict buildings which had for so long monopolized the prospect from the South Bank,’ wrote Ian Cox in the official guide book to the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition: ‘One of the principal aims of the Festival is to bring to the British way of life some enrichment that will endure for long after the Festival is over. It is fitting, therefore, that the main national Exhibition should be the first occupant of a site which has been so long abandoned by human enterprise and so newly won from the river.’3

The public spaces and ‘outdoor rooms’ of the South Bank are a vital ingredient here, as seen in the plaza between the BFI Southbank and the National Theatre.

Beyond this, the 11-hectare (27-acre) Festival site was intersected by both the Hungerford Bridge and the Waterloo Bridge, which was rebuilt in 1945, while the outer edges of the South Bank could be said to be defined by Westminster Bridge to the south-west and Blackfriars Bridge to the east. Along the river frontage itself, as old photographs and models from the Forties suggest, there were the remnants of the old wharves and warehouses interspersed with open patches of ground. Of the few remaining buildings, the most prominent and elegant was the old Lion Brewery building, which had been damaged by a combination of fire and wartime bombing. The brewery building was demolished to make way for the Royal Festival Hall, along with any other remaining structures on the site. The one notable exception, however, was the Shot Tower, which originally formed part of a lead-making factory. While the buildings around its base were removed, the tower itself was retained for the duration of the Festival and was repurposed by Hugh Casson, the Festival’s director of architecture, as a lighthouse, or beacon, overlooking the pavilions of the South Bank Exhibition and marking the way to an event that still resonates down through the ages.

FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN

The Festival of Britain was a unique undertaking with a character all of its own. While there was talk, in the early days, of an international trade fair the Festival gradually transformed into something more specific and celebratory, aimed at the people of Britain itself rather than an international audience. In this respect and many others, the Festival was very different to the World Fairs and expositions that flourished during the mid-century period, including the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958.

The 1951 pavilions and exhibits were focused primarily on Britain rather than seeking participation from other countries. Given the growing importance of the post-war independence movement, the theme of the Commonwealth was also treated carefully, with the focus remaining on the home nations.4 The Festival marked the centenary of the Great Exhibition, with one dedicated pavilion devoted to ‘recalling’ the Crystal Palace. Yet the guiding idea was that the Festival, particularly the South Bank Exhibition, should convey a broader and more ambitious narrative.

‘What the visitor will see on the South Bank is an attempt at something new in exhibitions – a series of sequences of things to look at, arranged in a particular order so as to tell one continuous, interwoven story,’ wrote Ian Cox in the Exhibition guide book. ‘The order is important. For the South Bank Exhibition is neither a museum of British culture nor a trade show of British wares; it tells the story of British contributions to world civilizations in the arts of peace. That story has a beginning, a middle and an end – even if that end consists of nothing more final than fingerposts into the future.’5

The South Bank Exhibition formed the principal element within the Festival as a whole, gathering in over eight million visitors during the summer of 1951. The Festival of Britain was fully funded by Clement Attlee’s Labour government and championed by Herbert Morrison, who was Leader of the House of Commons, as well as Lord President of the Privy Council, deputy leader of the Labour Party and briefly held the post of Foreign Secretary in 1951. Morrison had also served as the leader of the LCC for six years during the Thirties and retained close links with the LCC, which supported the Festival and was closely involved with the South Bank site alongside County Hall. But Morrison was always careful to try and avoid an overt political dimension to the Festival, looking to focus instead on arts and culture, as well as science and progress.

An aerial view of the South Bank Exhibition site shows the circular Dome of Discovery, the Royal Festival Hall and the pavilions arranged around them.

The Royal Festival Hall was the only permanent, legacy building included in the South Bank Exhibition.