The exterior of the Hayward Gallery, part of the Southbank Centre. The Brutalist-style building was designed by a group led by Norman Engleback in the late 1960s.
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LONDON — From Michelle Obama to Anise Kapoor and Tracey Emin to Nina Simone, London’s Southbank Center has presented them all and is one of The UK’s most popular attractions.
But to secure its future, the arts complex needs 165 million pounds ($217 million) to repair old buildings – which include performance spaces, galleries and public spaces on 11 acres on the south side of the River Thames – as it approaches its 75u anniversary in 2026.
In March, Southbank Centre’s chief executive Elaine Bedell appealed to the then Conservative government to contribute £27m to the “urgent” cost of repairing and upgrading the complex’s buildings, in an article in London’s Evening Standard newspaper.
And according to Mark Ball, the Southbank Centre’s artistic director, the money for those repairs will require a “big conversation” with the UK’s newly formed Labor government and other supporters. significant portion Funding for the center comes through a public grant, with the rest coming from donations, retail and partnerships. “We can’t allow the cultural infrastructure to literally fall apart on our hands, because … without investment, it won’t be here,” Ball told CNBC.
Ball is responsible for planning performances and exhibitions for the centre’s four main venues – concert halls Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, smaller live music venue Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery – as well as commissioning artwork for outdoor spaces across the area. (The neighboring National Theater and British Film Institute Southbank are not part of the Southbank Centre.)
Former US first lady Michelle Obama on stage at the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Center on December 3, 2018, as part of a tour to promote her book ‘Becoming’.
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Ball has been in the job since January 2022, from the role of creative director of the Manchester International Festival. During his first year at the Southbank Centre, he oversaw more than 5,400 events and performances. The center is the The fifth most visited attraction in the UKwith visitor numbers expected to grow by 8% to nearly 3.2 million in 2023, but — like other arts institutions — figures have yet to return to pre-Covid levels, which they surpassed 4 millionaccording to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions.
The Royal Festival Hall, the centre’s first venue, opened in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, a UK-wide government-sponsored event to deliver positivity after World War II. “This was a festival that set up a Labor government, that slipped in, after war, into an austerity-hit country. And there was a need for cohesion, there was a need to look really optimistically at the future.” said Ball.
“It transformed this … what was a derelict, bombed-out part of south London into this huge cultural space,” he says. Ball hopes the new government will view arts institutions in a similarly optimistic light and described is committed to supporting art classes in schools as “very exciting”.
But as a result of what Ball described as a “real terms discount” in public funding in recent years, the center has pursued commercial partnerships with Appleand the Royal Festival Hall began hosting the BAFTA Awards in 2023. The government grant totaled £19.95m in the financial year ending 31 March 2019 and then increased in 2020 and 2021 before falling to £19.67 million in 2023.
Mark Ball, Artistic Director of London’s Southbank Centre.
Southbank Centre
Ball attended the new Secretary of Culture Talk by Lisa Nandy at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester in July, where he spoke about the government’s aim to support culture and creativity against a backdrop of unrest in the UK
CNBC spoke to Ball as the UK was shivering from the violence of summer. “We look at what’s happening now, and it’s … very shocking, but it makes it more important, I think, to understand that culture has a real role in putting yourself in someone else’s shoes,” he said. “That’s what artists do all the time. They create stories about other people that allow you to empathize,” he said.
Ball shared a school experience in the 1980s during a “legendary” performance of “Richard III” by the Royal Shakespeare Company, starring Antony Sher. “As a young, closeted gay kid, seeing this performance of this outsider trying to find a way to be accepted, which is basically Antony’s characterization, just resonated with me,” he said.
“It literally changed my life… I became much more involved in the arts. I dropped some of my science courses and started doing drama. Twenty years later, I was working for the Royal Shakespeare Company,” he said.
The Southbank Center announced its next season on Thursday, including a large-scale retrospective by artists Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, better known as Gilbert and George.
Serbian artist Marina Abramovic (centre) poses with artists at the Queen Elizabeth Hall of the Southbank Center in London on October 4, 2023.
Daniel Leal | AFP | Getty Images
The program also includes the Multitudes classical music festival, which will feature collaborations between contemporary artists and the center’s orchestras and other performers. Conceptual artist Marina Abramovic will perform “Vexations,” a short piano piece played on repeat for approximately 16 hours, with pianist Igor Levit, and, in a separate event, “All of this Unreal Time,” a film featuring starring Cillian Murphy. along with a live musical performance.
“One of the things that struck me when I came here is that amazing artists came through the building and were brought through the building by individual art groups. But they never met,” Ball said. “One of the things I’ve tried to do… is get our art teams to work much more collaboratively. Artists instinctively now [are] less specific species,” he said.
Ball hopes such collaborations will encourage new audiences to see and hear classical music live. There has been a “massive rise” in the number of young people streaming classical music, he said, but that hasn’t translated into performances. A 2022 study of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra showed that people under 35 listened to classical music more often than people over 55.
“[Young] People who go to other contemporary music concerts don’t necessarily make the leap to go to live classical music events because maybe they don’t see it as something that’s right for them,” Ball said.
‘Thinking Fountains’, an installation by German artist Klaus Weber, outside the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre.
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Southbank Center is also working on an online platform game Robloxwhere people will be able to compose and share music — a “real experiment,” according to Ball. “We will get an audience for the Southbank Center that may never come [to the center in person]but [it] it’s a perfectly legitimate audience that engages with culture on its own terms,” Ball said.
Besides the issues of raising funds for building repairs and making sure groups work together, Ball said, one of his biggest challenges is making sure people see art and culture as a central part of life. “How do we make sure that people benefit from the value of arts and culture, whether it’s just in terms of taking them out of the everyday, or providing this moment with empathy where you can connect with other people or have a real life economic opportunities arising from it?’ he said.
“The two things I really want us to focus on are, how are we a space where artists feel like they can do their most adventurous work… and secondly, how do we become… a ‘people’s palace’ on the river where especially do the locals feel this is a space for them?’ Ball said.
And with that, he’s gearing up for the center’s 75th anniversary celebrations.