COMMENT “We call it Tate Modern, love,” the cabbie quipped after my New York pal requested Bankside Tate. It was June 2000 and a few short months since her last visit to London. Meanwhile, Tate Modern had thrown open its doors and, in doing so, rebranded not just a cultural flagship but a swathe of London.
It’s said the past is a foreign country and arriving at Tate Modern meant negotiating a very different place to the one we know today – past the unlovely St Christopher’s House, eventually Landsec’s Bankside 123, and Bankside Trading Estate, aka NeoBankside. Chelsfield was in the mix, and it was Chelsfield director Nick Roberts who later that year persuaded me to pull the boundary of one of our proposed pilot BIDs westwards. Thus Better Bankside was born; Nick its first chair.
It was enlightened self-interest that drove Chelsfield to back Better Bankside, and it was enlightened self-interest when Southwark Council backed the Tate in its revitalisation of Bankside Power Station. This crucial partnership was part of its wider approach to culture-led regeneration, including the Globe, designed to transform this dull district of London, enticing investment, business and tourism. Nobody predicted that it, and the wider South Bank, would become such a honey pot, attracting new and existing creative businesses away from their more traditional stomping grounds.
Why the history lesson? Partly since it’s not always easy to remember how much we have evolved, or how our cities and places are made so much richer, literally and spiritually, by the arts and creative and cultural industries, and our lives enhanced.
So I am also worried deeply about the current struggle for survival for the cultural sector, and I believe it needs our support, dear reader, in its efforts.
Existential issue
As Dan Anderson of Fourth Street emphasised, business lost at Easter, two bank holidays and spring half-term, initially meant a “bad” year. Add delayed opening and social distancing and “the issue became existential; 2020 is now just about survival, with 2021 about setting the table for a recovery in 2022”. Not all will survive. “To put that in perspective,” he said, “when people stayed away from central London during the London 2012 Olympics, it took about 18 months for some central London attractions to recover from that six-week hit.”
This is destabilising for property owners, too, potentially taking a chisel to the cracks of our city centres and high streets, exposing them to even further damage. Theatres, galleries, museums, music venues, all attract people, often making the intangible difference between a mere “space” and a “place”, sustaining a rich ecology that helps restaurants and retailers to thrive. This is reflected in the rise of cultural placemaking that, when done well, can be a boost to communities and businesses alike.
The richness of the UK’s cultural offer is a major part of our international reputation. It is behind inward investment decisions and inbound tourism, and is the life blood that keeps some younger people clinging on in an expensive capital city, increasingly important in the “war for talent”.
Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic, homed in on these points when giving his take. He cited his experience in Baltimore when its business leaders turned to the arts to counter the challenging image after the city’s riots. They invested to solve a problem, then reinvested in a bigger prize – the soul of the city.
Financial and economic contribution
The depth of the challenge and fallout is stark. Yet this is not special pleading. The financial and economic contribution of the sector is big, with the creative industries in London alone generating some £40bn of expenditure in 2017, about 50% of which landed outside the creative industries.
The breadth and depth – in the film, fashion, design and advertising industries – feeds in to and from the wider arts, education and our built world. The sector’s combined strength really surfaced when, together with growth in technology, it helped power London’s economy out of the financial downtown, considerably influencing the look and feel of real estate in its wake.
The property world has a lot in common with cultural leaders. Both are risk-takers, often seeing things others don’t, bringing them to life.
Back in 1993, the London International Festival of Theatre hired a relatively unknown French pyrotechnician, Christophe Berthonneau. His audacious show set Bankside Power Station’s chimney alight, illuminating this sleepy part of London that just seven years later would be transformed forever by culture.
Long may the show go on. It’s time to lend culture your voice and your support.
Patricia Brown is director of Central
