Jude Kelly: Southbank skateboarders must see the big picture

A theme of Richard Sennett’s Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation is that only co-operation between people with different interests allows us to interact as properly social beings.

As one of London’s great public spaces, there’s an irony in these words for the Southbank Centre as it launches its summer-long Festival of Neighbourhood, featuring Sennett. The centre is in an unappetising — and expensively legal — wrangle with skateboarders over plans to fund its Festival Wing refurbishment by relocating the skate park to the other side of the Royal Festival Hall.

A potent symbol of the counterculture, the skateboarders appear at first glance to be right in refusing to budge an inch. “We love this space and it is special and unique to us,” they say. Why put a coffee shop in place of skate history? And who would have thought such a thing of the Southbank Centre, with its roots in the people’s Festival of Britain?

There are two troubling facts. Rather than a grand project, the Southbank’s refurbishment will deliver a huge expansion of its education spaces in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country. Already, 1,000 people of all ages take part in learning and participation workshops each week, with two classes of schoolchildren daily during term time. The plans include a new children’s centre, community spaces and opportunities to enjoy art for the 25 million people who use the site annually.

In this context, are the skateboarders right to refuse to move 100 yards upriver, still within the Southbank Centre, to a riverside site of equal size and prominence, where passers-by can still gather to enjoy and admire them?

It won’t be the same, they say: an accusation common to the crustier sort of arts audience but surely not to street skateboarding.

Their second powerful argument for rejecting the new skate site and the funds to make it fit their purposes is that iconic skate spaces are found, indeed taken. Such places are not offered and certainly not designed.

And yet within the last decade, the Southbank Centre got planning permission on behalf of the skateboarders to improve the skateability of the existing space.

For years, the Centre has provided lighting and security, first aid for accidents and public liability insurance. Indeed, it is providing event management and electricity for the skate protest this weekend.

There is no doubt that funding the arts is an increasing challenge. Arts Council England has made a generous £20 million commitment to the £120 million scheme and a white knight solution for the remainder is unlikely. The Southbank Centre’s approach — well-managed collaboration with cafés and restaurants — has proved over the past six years to draw more people into a relationship with art, while paying for that art to be free.

We could see this as one of the first tests of the decline in public funding. Or we could see in this a great institution going about its difficult job: balancing the needs of different people in the heart of the city and enabling Londoners, including skateboarders, a chance to co-operate and respect each other. In that light, it is reasonable to ask the skaters to budge up, and to hope they will do so.

Jude Kelly OBE is artistic director of the Southbank Centre.