Simon Jenkins: For London’s visual heart let’s clear the site and start again

Under Jude Kelly’s leadership the South Bank is buzzing. Now is the time for a design that reflects that
P16 The South Bank redesign Pic:FCBS
FCBS
12 March 2013
WEST END FINAL

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The South Bank has long been the armpit of London. As the Thames takes a sudden right angle in the heart of the capital, its shoreline has become a wilderness of lumpy buildings and streets where no one wants to walk. Of its prominent sites, County Hall was cursed by Margaret Thatcher. The old venue of the Festival of Britain was blighted for half a century with car parks. Shell Oil erected a monster of megalomania. Down at Coin Street, Ken Livingstone built an estate of people’s cottages. The area is a memorial to the unknown planner and his concrete mixer.

The only signs of life have been the three ugly sisters of the Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery and the National Theatre. A fourth, an IMAX cinema, has become an advertising hoarding. The place looks like a cultural gulag, a place where art goes to die.

Yet the Southbank Centre has been a success in spite of its location. The National Theatre and the Film Institute are humming every night. The Festival Hall and its adjuncts surely constitute Europe’s premier arts venue. Most remarkable of all, the brutalist decks and urine-sodden alleys created by the old LCC architects’ department around the Hayward have at last been humanised.

Under Jude Kelly’s leadership the Southbank board has grabbed the entire site between Hungerford and Waterloo bridges and thrown it open to “market forces”, properly so-called. Ugly Belvedere Road has erupted into a “world street food” zone, a cross between Bermondsey and Portobello markets. Catering has spread up onto the Hayward decks and colonised the most hideous corners.

Roof gardens have draped themselves over the concrete. Stairways are painted yellow. Roofs sprout silly structures. On a pleasant evening, every available space is occupied by someone with something to play, display or sell. Street London has come alive in the most improbable of environs. At night the lighting of the Embankment façades makes the view from the terraces truly spectacular.

So what next? The South Bank is to become a footstool to Boris Johnson’s new “Lambeth wall”, an array of towers along the south bank of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster Bridge. London is to get a totally new skyline, never published as a plan, let alone presented to the London electorate.

Right behind the National Theatre is arising a 140m tower, almost as high as the new Vauxhall tower. Further towers are to replace the downstream block of the Shell Centre behind the Festival Hall. A 120m block is to overshadow the entrance to Waterloo station. Goodness knows what is to follow behind The Cut and down to Elephant and Castle.

The reaction from the Southbank Centre was revealed last week. The National Theatre and Festival Hall remain unchanged. The big question is what to do with the mess of the Hayward, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room.

They have long been the sword in the stone of London architecture. Architects Terry Farrell, Richard Rogers, Allies and Morrison, Rick Mather have all tried their hand. Most have shrugged and proposed to glass in the entire site. If you cannot beat the glass boxes, join them. None has happened.

The new plan, from architect FCBS, is in principle exciting. The grim space beside the Festival Hall becomes a proper piazza with wide steps leading into a new Hayward atrium. The acres of wasted space around the site are brought under cover and converted into what amounts to a sprawling arts township. Music, film, speech, visual arts, museums and books will spin off from the central space.

The decks above will take on the character of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A modern riverside building will, for once, have a good view of the Thames and see how Wordsworth’s “river glideth at his own sweet will”.

I have two reservations. The first is a caution. Wherever modern development seeks to reorder and corral an existing informal public space, it tends to kill it. Half the fun of the South Bank is popular vitality fighting sheer awfulness. Will that vitality survive amid gleaming glass façades, decorous trees and tasteful canopies?

We need only drift downstream to Lord Foster’s glass-bound wilderness at More London, or gaze at Regent’s Place’s bleak piazzas on Euston Road, or wander out onto the Barbican’s levels to see what happens when the angel of architectural death passes over a London neighbourhood. This at least is a challenge that can be met.

More serious is what is proposed to sit on top of all this. It is, you guessed it, another glass box, indeed an entire concert hall sitting in space.

This place has to be the visual crux of central London. With Johnson’s crushing towers rising on every side, the site is sensationally important. Can the collective talents of British architecture come up with nothing better than a glass box?

Here should be a work of the first rank. If British architects are not up to the job, then bring in Santiago Calatrava, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind. There should be sweeping roofs, flowing wings, spirals and slopes, something to catch the eye and delight the soul.

The Hayward is a terrible building. If it is now to be merely encased in glass, why leave it at all? This is crazy conservation. Clear the site and start again. But not with another airport departure lounge in the sky. This is an exciting opportunity, surely one too good to waste.

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