From Hugh Pearman: London’s cultural quadrille. Published in The Sunday Times, 18.3.01.
In Britain, we like to reorganise our cultural patrimony on the principle of musical chairs. It all started in 1974 with plans to build an independent British Library in St. Pancras. The process begun then will finally conclude in 2007, by which time the Royal Academy in Piccadilly will have doubled in size with new galleries, education centre and art schools. In the meantime, we can enjoy the British Museum’s excellent new Sainsbury African Galleries in Bloomsbury. Each of these cultural leaps forward - past, present and future - is directly dependent on the others.
Here’s how it works. The departure of the British Library from its long-time home at the heart of the British Museum freed up space in that venerable institution - space for the celebrated Great Court project by Norman Foster, which includes the African Galleries beneath its northern end. This in turn marks the start of another process: the return of the Museum’s ethnographic section to base camp from its previously isolated home, the firmly shut erstwhile Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. That high Victorian edifice, by architect James Pennethorne, backs onto the Royal Academy, which recently bought it.
It’s thought that the BM won’t finally quit Burlington Gardens until 2004, by which time it will have carved itself still more space in Bloomsbury as its 250th birthday present to itself. Upon which, the RA will finally get its hands on the empty building and use it for what is in effect its own version of a Great Court: a big new gallery and lecture theatre building, by Sir Michael Hopkins, will sit in the large, hidden gap between the two existing, much modified - and finally united - buildings. The schools get new skyhigh studios on top of the Pennethorne building, with a side entrance to avoid the embarrassment of RA visitors bumping into wild-eyed, paint-spattered students - though they will, for the first time, be able to see their work permanently. After all, how many visitors to the RA know that it is anything other than a venue for a fast-changing series of blockbuster exhibitions?
It’s thought the whole RA revamp and extension will cost around £40m. Sounds suspiciously cheap to me. I’m prepared to bet it will end up being more, perhaps a lot more. But the net result is that, come 2007, we should have a totally transformed Royal Academy: the final winner in a game that will have taken 33 years. Assuming they keep to the timetable, which rather depends on the fundraising success of the Academy.
It’s not that the end results aren’t worth the wait, but boy, do we have to wait. In truth it is only the most recent phase of the game that began in 1974. Earlier plans for a separate British Library date back to 1962. Come to that, the Royal Academy wanted to buy the Italianate Burlington Gardens building - originally built as the University of London Senate House - a century ago, but were fobbed off by the government. That incident in turn happened only 46 years after the RA decamped to Piccadilly from its original home in Somerset House, where you now find the Courtauld Gallery and much else besides. So I think we can safely say that the British game of cultural musical chairs is fully institutionalised.
