Cultural Cities at the Barbican - report part one

Above: the opening panel at Future Cities Forum's 'Cultural Cities' event at the Barbican Centre, with from left - Rosanna Lawes of Rosanna Lawes Consulting, Kirsten Lees of Grimshaw, Sharon Ament of the London Museum, Dr Pip Simpson of the Barbican Centre, Heather Fearfield of Future Cities Forum, Susan Johnston of the Southbank Centre, Katie Stewart of the City of London Corporation and Emily McDonald of Buro Happold

Future Cities Forum's Cultural Cities discussion event at the Barbican Centre looked at the themes of retrofitting heritage buildings with net zero in mind, the development of the City of London Culture Mile, funding for the arts and much needed UK government investment.

Central to our discussions was the description of the Barbican renewal programme, where significant upgrades to the energy systems and public areas are due to take place. Our host Dr Pip Simpson, Director of Buildings and Renewal Programme, described the history of the site and the first five years of plans for the retrofitting of the Barbican. She said:

'The Barbican started as a housing regeneration project as the district of Cripplegate was cleared. There were only about forty-five houses on the site but soon 2,500 flats were created. The arts centre was interestingly always a part of the plans from the beginning. A lot of the build is underground with layers stacked on top of each other, so it makes it a tricky building project to work on. So we are now picking up on the genesis of the centre as a civic space and agitator and I think the friction between us and the City is a good thing.

The first five years of renewal will cover both public facing and hidden work. Pip explained:

'Our energy plant is forty five years old and we need to fix it by pulling it out and starting again. It has been well maintained but it is a third the size of Wembley stadium and as an engine room contains a very complex system. It is a challenge getting in there and doing the work. But then we have a fabric first approach to our envelope that surrounds the building and we need - for sustainability terms - to 'seal ourselves'.

'We are still raising forty million on top of the one hundred and ninety one million pounds already achieved in terms of funding. We need to work on our foyers, restaurants, conservatory and lakeside. How do we open the doors to all these spaces? There is the appetite from people to meet in our open spaces to run dance events or just meet as community groups and we also want to bring back some of our de-commissioned spaces. We do not have a front door, just a back one and we need to learn how to create a hub that is alive to the street.'

Buro Happold is working with the Barbican on the engineering side of the project and Managing Director, Emily McDonald, said she hopes it will become a blueprint for further development in the City of London:

'You only get a few projects like this in your career and sustainability is at the centre as this chapter for the next forty-five years of the Barbican begins. There has been minimal replacement since the Barbican opened but that's an opportunity. We can make this building net zero carbon in line with the City of London's goals and push it as hard as we can.

Emily was asked how she would be able to communicate the 'behind the scenes' story of retrofit to the public:

'I think we need to be frank about The Barbican and if we upgraded and provided more toilets, we would make everyone happy. It would be universally loved, if they were better! The impact therefore will be felt by the public and not so invisible.'

Buro Happold has deep expertise in how to retrofit historic buildings, which Emily highlighted:

'There are many learnings from our work at Buro Happold in the area of retrofit, for example with Battersea Power Station, which as a project we are very proud of. It has parallels with the Barbican. Just the confidence of it is off the scale. Yes, the Barbican renewal is complicated but Pip has pulled together an integrated team with all viewpoints and creative thinking, with the alchemy from Buro Happold.'

Above: CGI view of the General Market Building and Poultry Market at Smithfield - transformed for the London Museum

The new London Museum under the direction of senior museum leader, Sharon Ament, is also a major heritage retrofit project. The museum is aiming for one hundred thousand voices in its consultation, guiding the museum on what Londoners want the museum to be. It has managed to draw ninety-one thousand of those already. Sharon commented:

'We didn't set out to create a new model of a museum but it has happened within the response to it. The shape of it has been influenced by the different buildings of the site, the original Smithfield Market. We had to adjust ourselves to it and exploit the physical nature of those buildings. It has nine entrances with big public spaces that are not overwhelming, enabling the public to come in and engage and buy something. This is in our ground floor gallery called 'Our time', which covers one hundred years and this is where Londoners can come together. Time is our intellectual organising principle. There is a basement cold store, open trading floors, slopes for horse and cart deliveries and our gallery names like deep time, past time, future imagined time etc will correspond to these physical layers. In terms of presentation, it is something that goes beyond co-curation and diminishes the barriers in a museum. It does away with the previous ideas of owning intellectual content with a new democratisation of it. That's different from the kind of communication you might find on social media. It is about facilitating deep insight and expertise from people and will help London think about itself. You do not need to be a curator to do that.

'In terms of being inclusive, the place itself and the location serves that. It is sited on a transport hub and therefore very accessible. It was built for market staff to come and go really quickly, designed like that by the Victorians originally on sustainability terms. We now need to think how we heat and cool it. There are passive heating systems put in by the Victorians, but we are going to be more demanding of our visitors than that. We are going to let people know if it is a jumper or t-shirt day, asking them to be more active, including their comfort levels.'

Above: Walbrook Square in the City of London, with - from right - Bloomberg HQ building (which includes the London Mithraeum, the cultural hub and former Roman temple), Sir Christopher Wren's St Stephen Walbrook, the Mansion House, and Rothschild & Co's New Court London HQ. behind designed by OMA

The Corporation of London's Executive Director for Environment, Katie Stewart, took the discussion on inclusive buildings and climate awareness further by talking about the Corporation's Sustainability Plan 2040:

'Our plan is going through examination at the moment and it is something that is broadest as can be in terms of sustainability. It is not just concerned with environmental but also social and the economy. (This must be) something that is sustainable in post Covid years. It includes discussion of the arts. We have the talent to push the standards of sustainability, while remembering that construction costs in London are some of the highest in the world. In these terms, we must not set too much of a barrier to industry. Retrofit needs to be practical and viable. Connecting to the City is important. Most attractions are within a five minute walk. Six million people live within an hour of the City. We are working very hard to further connect up the City within that and provide inclusivity. We want to bring more people into the City. Yes it is a business centre, but it has so much heritage, we want to celebrate that. It must be sustainable in terms of footfall, as a 'Destination City' and bring in families.

'Our developing Culture Mile is also important. The City is small, just one point one square miles and we do need to connect ourselves to the wider offer of London. Yes, we do smile inwardly when we get a business re-locating to the City away from Canary Wharf, but we are trying to be more collaborative now with other parts of London. We want to draw a line under the past competitiveness and look forward. We need to continue to be accountable with discussion around the Culture Mile and I think in the last couple of years, there has been a shift in that space.'

Above:: view of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the East Bank and Stratford, Newham, London - courtesy Jason Hawkes

Creating sustainability has always been about embedding a developing economy commented Rosanna Lawes, Rosanna Lawes Consulting (formerly Director of Development at the London Legacy Development Corporation):

'The legacy of the Olympic Park and London Docklands has been that it has remained an inclusive place. Outstanding design also helped us achieve an outstanding place, a place that high level institutions want to engage with today. The London Docklands and Stratford East has taken a huge amount of effort from the people in this forum to make it successful.

'We always wanted a shift eastwards in London and you can see that as a capital city it is always re-investing in its neighbourhoods. The London docklands has had tens of years of industrial decline and still has some of the most deprived communities.'

Rosanna was asked whether it had been difficult to make these district developments relevant to local people? She said:

'We had a dedicated team who had a complete focus on that. We also had political leaders on both national and local levels to help us. The team went into schools and those pupils took back home messages of opportunities in education and the arts, inspiring future generations and in families that did not speak English.

'I think what we delivered in the Olympic Games really inspired people. On the longer term, if you deliver well, the market and the people will invest. Yes it was difficult and lots of hard work went into it. Skills in the diplomacy space were fine-tuned. There is still pent up demand out there and I want to see where current investment is going. I think I could add some value in the new towns projects, converting the what into the how, on collaboration and partnership and bringing the communities in.'

Image: Sadberk Hanim Museum in Istanbul, courtesy of Grimshaw

From the docklands of London, the conversation moved to arts development in the docks of Istanbul. Kirsten Lees, Partner at Grimshaw, described her work to create a new cultural district around the Sadberk Hanim Museum in the historic area of the Golden Horn:

'It has a very different context' she said, 'because there is no public investment in the arts in Turkey. It is all private investment. I have been involved in building a new museum for a private art collection in the historic dock with a creative district masterplan. The collection is incredible as is also the ambition for creating a centre of excellence for conservation.

' I have been working with the existing building, which is not an amazing building, but it has been important to retain it in the dockland area. There are long bays and three dividing walls all covered in cement render. It is a building that has been messed about with and my task has been to reveal the historical layers. The walls were unable to support themselves and we have had to create a new enclosure above. There is a tension between the new and the old and embed a museum street that connects some major places within the creative masterplan. We have needed to create places to eat and a bookstore for example. How the district connects to the city is also important and ways to reduce some of the barriers within a conservative culture.'

Kirsten is also Head of Grimshaw's Paris Studio and compared London to Paris in terms of the fifteen-minute city:

'We talk about the fifteen-minute city in terms of walkability and the ease of making everything accessible. Paris is the densest city in the whole of Europe but very civilised. The Mayor in Paris has tried to make everything sustainable with a whole series of measures. This is evidenced in the extent of cycling provision and introducing numbers of trees to improve the air quality. It is impressive to see how some of the public areas have been addressed to create shade with climate change in mind.'

Above: the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre Christmas Day, December 2024

Sir Nicholas Serota has been writing in the Guardian recently about how some cultural centres in the UK are on the verge of closure or restricted operations and the need for more UK government investment. Susan Johnston, Chief Operating Officer at the Southbank Centre, who joined our Barbican discussions, described the recent measures she has taken for the Centre to remain economically sustainable while trying to retrofit and update its buildings:

'The Festival Hall has come out of the 1951 Festival of Britain and we are mindful of our heritage with our 75th anniversary next year. We have eleven acres of civic space and we are aware that as the Peoples' Palace we need to make sure people feel welcome. We are open six days a week and closed on Mondays to save money, while preserving our artistic programme and free programme of events.

'We have twenty million people visiting us every year but funding is still our major problem. We need the UK government first level of funding. We have a lot of glass which needs to be retrofitted for net zero purposes. We have so much glass that in the summer it is unbearably hot, so we are working with Lambeth Council on a heating plan and also a biodiversity one. It is a phased process which we are currently supporting with nine million of debt financing. We are concentrating on what most matters to our public, which means upgrading the toilets and lifts. In addition to this and with our anniversary in mind, we have created a new bar on the level five. It is now with the views along the Thames one of the best balconies in London. We have worked with heritage to open it up.

Above: the Bar 75 at the Royal Festival Hall (courtesy Southbank Centre)

'Our cultural masterplan is very important to us. We are closely engaged with Network Rail and Lambeth Council on this, which share our values. We are concentrating on accessibility and spaces that are easy to navigate. Waterloo Station is a global arrival and should work better. We have our local communities in historic streets around the Southbank Centre that we need to provide improve navigation for and we still need to hold on to and make sure that we have a programme continuing that serves everyone's needs.'

From the audience, Emma Markiewicz, Director of the London Metropolitan Archives owned by the City of London Corporation (which is the largest civic archive in the UK), spoke more about the Corporation's need for its own cultural strategy. She said it was important to have within it an idea of the sorts of cultural institutions that are required and where they should be, with how these can be mapped. Connectivity she insisted was vital and something that could feed back into smaller cultural institutions:

Above: Director of the Tower of London, Andrew Jackson at Future Cities Forum 'cultural cities' discussion

'We need to decide who we are for and how we can become more open, encouraging more visitors. I have run the London Archives and we have all these hidden gems such as the Guildhall Art Gallery, so how do we open up, raise the profile and given them a more strategic profile?'

Andrew Jackson, Director of the Tower of London, noted that the Historic Royal Palaces has a very ambitious strategy, but it is very difficult to retrofit modern technology into a thousand year old fortress:

'We are not in competition with other cultural institutions in the City of London and I sit on the Destination City board because the City tends to exclude the Tower of London. So how can we work better together and especially on connectivity?''

Above: West elevation of Barbican Centre with the residential Defoe House to the right

Dr Simpson responded:

'Yes we should complement each other better and provide that connectivity between cultural organisations in the City and Stratford. How do we create more fluidity between spaces and studio spaces? We have to challenge how we sit in broader relationships. Where is the framework for that and how do we enable it?'

Sharon Ament joined in:

'We need long term planning and to ask the politicians to stop changing their minds. London has benefitted from the various Mayors for culture, but the politicians do need to stop chopping and changing.'

'The Olympic Park is an open classroom' remarked Rosanna Lawes, 'we need to replicate that in the City, while throwing out ideas to the cultural and commercial sectors because there can be such richness and value in those collaborations.'

Kirsten Lees mused that it is very much about the public realm in Turkey that makes the difference and that investment in areas for the communities:

'Connecting up all the creative industries can make a real difference, including local businesses, the bids and community groups to think holistically. The benefits are to all the institutions and also private investors.'

A long term vision was something that Emily McDonald argued for:

'Put in place the stepping stones of a long term plan. You won't have all the money to start with but if you haven't planned the whole, you won't get there.'

Susan Johnston agreed with the other panellists that smaller cultural organisations should be encouraged to collaborate with the whole sector:

'We should be leading them and helping them lobby. Most problems in the UK come through not attending to public spaces.'

In conclusion, Katie Stewart said that the City should be broadening its boundaries, Visitors do not recognise those boundaries she said, and we have often been driven into creating artificial boundaries by the Government and funding.'

Image: view proposed of King Edward Square, City of London, courtesy of LDA Design