When Elaine Bedell became the first female chief executive of the Southbank Centre in 2017, she says she knew there would be “the most incredible staff here, highly creative, spinning gold from not very big budgets.”
That is still the case, she told me and my co-cost Leanne Tritton, chair of The London Society, in our latest edition of Talk About London, despite its Arts Council grant having “declined in real terms over the last 15 years” with the last Conservative government cutting its grant by 10 per cent in the name of “levelling up”.
During her time at the Southbank’s helm Bedell had to steer it through the “traumatic” pandemic and emerge with “a different operating model”, but the centre is still, for financial reasons, able to be fully open only six days a week instead of seven.
Meanwhile, the fabric of the buildings, which the government owns, has had no public money spent on it since 2005 and Arts Council funding cannot be used for that purpose. The Royal Festival Hall, the founding institution of what became the Southbank Centre, was officially opened on 3 May 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. Today it has a leaky roof.
And yet, for all these pressures and problems, the centre will, in earnest from April, celebrate its 75th anniversary this year, with a major Danny Boyle event beginning on anniversary day, 3 May, which Bedell describes as a narrative journey through the building and the history of youth culture – with lots more to come. It will also be 50 years since the advent of the skateboard park in the undercroft. That will be celebrated too.
Bedell also emphasised the Southbank Centre’s national importance. “Lots of regional arts organisations like to use us as their London home,” she says. THe RFI’s National Poetry library will going on tour in a bus to 11 coastal towns and cities to celebrate local poetry. “The denigration of the capital city or the stifling of its creative life is a real mistake,” she says. Enjoy the whole conversation below.
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