The death of the Southbank Centre

The one thing everyone agrees is that the Southbank Centre is in deep trouble. In May, the institution made an unusually public plea for government help. Management predicted the best-case scenario was ending the financial year with a £5 million loss, having exhausted all reserves, used the £4 million received from the furlough scheme and having gobbled up the remainder of its Arts Council grant. All the while, with the exception of the Hayward Gallery, the 21-acre site on London’s Thameside, incorporating both the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, remains closed.

It was pitiful news, but there was worse to come. With no concerts, performances, talks or readings, drastic staff cuts are in the offing. Approximately 391 of the 577 employees face redundancy, with additional savings to be had from losing those working on a fixed-term or freelance basis. All of which has precipitated the greatest crisis for the centre since it opened its doors in 1951, a symbol of hope and post-war optimism.

While the government lockdown, and what CEO Elaine Bedell calls in an interview an ensuing ‘catastrophic loss of income’, is the cause of the institution’s immediate woes, the roots of the mess date from before the Covid-19 pandemic. Classed as a performing-arts outfit, the Southbank is funded via the Arts Council, not central government grants (unlike, for example, Tate). This means that the annual £18 million-plus grant the centre receives — the second-highest amount after the Royal Opera House — can only be spent on programming, and not on maintaining the sprawling concrete maze of concert halls, galleries, plazas and pathways.

Successive administrators have never hidden their disdain for the brutalist architecture, forever proposing apparently more ‘public-friendly’ master plans to soften the design. In 2013 the latest of these was unveiled, a £111 million make-over that would include a huge glass ‘floating pavilion’ — which, judging by preliminary sketches, had all the elegance of a Westfield shopping centre — plonked on top of the existing buildings.